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THE
HOPES OF THE HUMAN RACE,
HEREAFTER AND HERE.








THE
HOPES OF THE HUMAN RACE,
HEREAFTER A ND HERE.
BY
FRANCES POWER COBBE.
NEW YORK:
JAMES MILLER, PUBLISHER,
779 BROADWAY.








CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE (HAVING SPECIAL REFERENCE TO MR.
MILL'S ESSAY ON RELIGION)...          9
THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. PART I..... 73
THE LIFE AFTER DEATH. PART II.... 127
DOOMED TO BE SAVED. AN ADDRESS... 183
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL SENTIMENT. 209








PREFACE.








PREFACE.
THE principal essay in this book addresses itself
to a small class of readers. For those who believe
that a life after death has been guaranteed to mankind by a supernatural revelation, it is superfluous;
and for those who believe that the experiences of
the bodily senses, and the inductions thence derived,
mark the limits of human knowledge, it is useless.
There yet remain some minds to whom I hope the
speculations and observations which it contains may
not be uninteresting or unserviceable; who, having
lost faith in the apocalyptic side of Christianity, find
no basis therein for their immortal hopes, but who
are yet able to trust the spiritual instincts of their
own and other men's hearts, provided they can recognize the direction in which they harmoniously
point. I indulge no dream of discovering new
ground for faith in immortality, still less of proving
that we are immortal by logical demonstration.
But something will be gained, if I succeed in warning off a few inquirers from false paths which lead
only to disappointment, and point out to them, if
9




10                 Preface.
not the true argument, yet the true method of argument, whereby such satisfaction as lies within our
reach may be obtained. Perhaps I may have the
greater advantage in speaking of the belief in a
future life, because for many years of my own earlier
life, while slowly regaining faith in God after the
collapse of supernaturalism, I failed to discover any
sufficient reason for such trust, and, in the desire to
be loyal to truth, deliberately thrust it away even
under the pressure of a great sorrow. It is possible,
therefore, that I may understand better than most
believers in the doctrine why many honest, and not
irreligious, minds are at this moment mournfully
shutting out that gleam of a brighter world which
should cheer and glorify the present; and perhaps I
may also have learned from experience how some of
their difficulties may be met.
It is needless to discuss the importance of the
belief of mankind in a life beyond the grave.
Whether, with'a recent distinguished writer, we
look on the threatened loss of it as the most perilous
of our " rocks ahead," on which the whole order
of society may make shipwreck; or whether (as I
am more disposed to think) the danger lies in the
gradual carnalization of our nature which would
follow the extinction of those ennobling hopes which
have lifted men above mere animalism, and given to
duty and to love an infinite extension, - in either
case, it is hard to speak too gravely of the imperilment of that which has been, since the beginning of




Preface.                11
history, perhaps the most precious of the mental
heirlooms of our race. To conjure up a picture of
the desolation which such a loss must bring to the
hearts of the bereaved, and the dreary hopelessness
of the dying and the aged, would be to give ourselves superfluous pain. Nor must it be forgotten
that it does not ask a great deal, if not to kill such
a faith (which is perhaps impossible), yet to maim
and paralyze it, so that it shall become practically
powerless to comfort or to elevate.  The great
majority of mankind rather catch belief and disbelief
from those around them than originate them on their
own account; and the disbelief of even a few of
their neighbors is often sufficient to take away all
confidence in the affirmative verdict even of the
wisest and best. Dr. Johnson said he was " injured
by knowing there was one man who did not believe
in Christianity:" the knowledge was just so far a
deduction from the universality of consent in which
even that intellectual giant found repose. It would
probably need only that five per cent of the population should publish their conviction that there is no
future state, to make the greater part of the remainder so far lose reliance upon it as to become
quite insensible to its moral influences.
But while thoughtful persons are generally agreed
on the great importance of the doctrine in question,
it has, perhaps, scarcely been noticed how it is inevitably destined to form the turning-point of the future
religious history of our race. The dogma of a fu



12                Preface.
ture life differs from other articles of faith notably
in being indissoluble in the alembic of interpretation
wherein so many of our more solid beliefs have of
recent years been rarefied into thin air.'" To be,
or not to be," is very literally the question of questions, to which must needs be given a categorical
response. Either we ourselves, in innermost identity, shall exist after the mortal hour, or we shall
not so exist: there is no third contingency. With
respect to our faith in God, there are immeasurable
shades between the definite and fervent conviction
of the existence of a true Father in heaven, and the
admission that there lies behind Nature some'" unknown and unknowable" Mind, Will, or perchance
blind and unintelligent Force, which we choose to
call by the same sacred name. Owing to the voluntary and involuntary obscurities of human language,
and the dimness of human thought, there will always
exist a misty territory between the confines of
theism and atheism; and it may be only too easy to
slip down imperceptibly, range after range, from
one to the other, only discovering at last how far we
have descended, when the sunlight which shone on
the mountain-tops has faded away utterly among
the dark shadows of the abyss. But there is scarcely
any such danger of thus playing fast and loose with
our beliefs as regards immortality. It is true, that
among those alchemists of creeds of whom I have
already spoken, many of whom can find the pure
gold of moral truth in every base and heavy super



Preface.                13
stition, while others concoct an elixir of life out of
the hellebore and the nightshade of denial and
despair, there have not failed to be some who have
taught that man, if mortal in the concrete, and
doomed individually to perish in the dust, may yet
call himself an immortal being; immortal, that
is, in his abstract humanity, in the grand-etre of
which he forms a part, and which will survive the
falling-off of such a mere fraction of it as himself;
or (if this consolation be not amply sufficient) that
he will yet live in his posterity, in his works of beneficence, in the books wherewith he may have instructed mankind. But even to very sanguine souls
it must (I should suppose) be nearly hopeless thus
to attempt to give the change to our personal hopes
and desires concerning a life after death, by reminding us of hopes for other people, which, far from
being a novel equivalent for our own, have always
hitherto been taken as concurrent therewith and
additional thereto; and which actually bring with
them, when the doctrine of individual immortality
is denied, only the mournful question of how far it
may remain an object of hope at all that a race
should prolong its existence when every soul which
composes it is destined to perish incomplete, unfinished, a failure, like the ill-turned vase which the
potter casts aside on the heap to be broken up as
worthless.  There can be truly, then, only the
response of Ay or No to the question, " When a
man dieth, shall he live again? "  And on the decis2




14                Preface.
ion, whether most men say  Ay," or say "No,"
will depend, in yet undreamed-of measure, the
moral condition of coming generations.
In the following essay I have stated to the best
of my ability the grounds on which I think an affirmative answer to the great enigma may be given by
all those who believe in a righteous as well as an intelligent Ruler of the world. I have no desire to
blink the fact that it is on the moral attributes of
God that the whole question appears to me to
hinge; and that, without the help of religion (of a
real religion, which takes for its corner-stone that
God is good and just, not a philosophy which merely
admits the hypothesis of an intelligent force behind
Nature), the reasons for denial seem to me to preponderate altogether over those in favor of affirmation.
But here is the great, the tremendous difficulty.
How is that belief in the righteousness and benevolence of God to be established so as that we may
build thereon securely our hopes of a life to come?
Nay, how is it, in these days of earthquake, to be
kept firm enough for the purpose —higher even
than of affording us immortal hope-of giving us
now a Father in heaven to adore, and in allegiance
to whose holy will we may be content to live and
die? It is impossible to hide from ourselves, that
the obstacles in the way of a clear faith in the absolute goodness of God have grievously multiplied
upon us in our generation. Perhaps genuine fidelity




Preface.                 15
should call on us to rejoice that they have also, at
last, found a most lucid and coherent expression in
the mournful legacy left us by the great philosopher
lately departed, wherein the yet formless questionings, the " ghastliest doubts," of thousands of
souls have taken shape, and will stand revealed to
themselves like the Afrit out of the smoke. Of this
book I must speak presently. Let it be remarked,
in passing, that Mr. Mill has, not unnaturally, read
all the religious history of mankind in the peculiar
light of his own exceptional mental experience, and
has taken it for granted that men have, in all ages,
constructed a God by the method of the inductive
philosophy. I venture to think that an entirely
opposite rationale of religious development is the
true one, and that, by recognizing it, we may exactly
perceive how it happens that we have arrived at our
present pass.
Mankind, I believe, from the hour when humanity
arose out of its purely animal origin, has felt some
vague stirrings of aspiration and awe; some infantlike liftings-up of the hands for help and pity to
something greater, stronger, wiser, than itself;
some dim consciousness (enough, at least, to guide
its funeral-rites) that it is not all of a man which
perishes in the grave. Long ages and millenniums,
doubtless, passed away, during which these vague
sentiments fastened on some fetich, or on the orbs
of heaven, at first without ascribing any definite individuality or personality to the object, and then,




16                 Preface.
again, without attributing to it any moral character.
In the " ages before morality," the gods were necessarily unmoral; for man could no more invent
morality to give his god than he could invent for
him a bodily sense which he did not himself possess.
But with the dawnings of the ethical sentiment
in man came simultaneously the conviction, nay,
rather, the consciousness, that the Unseen Power
was also just (so far as the man yet apprehended
justice). Thenceforward the moral ideal of God
continued to rise, century after century, in exact
proportion to the moral development of mankind;
and the " Lord" was a pillar of cloud and fire,
moving before the moving nations, guiding them
towards the Holy Land. It mattered little that it
was, for the masses, in the shape of the intuitions
of dead prophets and apostles, which were called
divine inspirations (and were so in truth, albeit
mixed with endless fables), that Jews and Zoroastrians, Christians and Moslems, accepted this inward idea of God, and only a few of the " strongest
souls" received (as the old Chaldsean oracle has it)' light through themselves."  Practically, mankind
at large held, more or less imperfectly, the notion
of Deity reflected from the highest consciousness
yet developed at each stage; and, poor as it often
was, it was the brightest which could filter through
the dim windows of their souls. The work of correcting this ideal by reference to the phenomena
of Nature, instead of being the normal process,




Preface.                17
hardly seems to have occurred to any one save
Lucretius. When these phenomena were beneficent
and beautiful, men sung psalms, and proclaimed
that the heavens declared the glory of God, and the
earth was full of his goodness. When plague and
earthquake, flood and famine, ravaged the world,
they attributed the evil to the wrath of the higher
powers, brought down by the offences of mankind,
of which there never was an insufficient store to
serve for such explanation. It is even surprising, in
our day, to note how very remote it was from the
spirit of old philosophers or theologians to put
aside a priori doctrines about the gods, and learn
from Nature herself concerning Nature's Authorship.
Even down to the days of Paley and the Bridgewater
Treatises, it is clear that, when they applied to Nature
at all, it was as a French judge sometimes interrogates a prisoner, to compel her to corroborate their
foregone conclusions respecting a series of " attributes," either apprehended by the religious sentiment, or logically deduced by the a priori arguments
of the schoolmen. There were, doubtless, abundant
reasons for this state of things. The poets, the
artists, the sages of old, cared comparatively little
about Nature, and centred all their interest in man.
As it has been wittily said, " Nature was only discovered in our generation." It followed obviously,
then, that the theologians of former times should
concern themselves almost exclusively with the
human aspects of religion and the notions of dead
2*




18                Preface.
thinkers, and that only now and then some great
teacher arose to rebuke the servile repetition of
what was " said by them of old time," and to point
to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as
evidence of the Father's love.
But our age witnesses a new tendency of thought
altogether, -the genuine application of the inductive philosophy to theology. With the vast and
sudden influx of knowledge concerning the outer
world, has come a greatly enhanced sense of the
importance of the inferences to be drawn therefrom
regarding the character of its Author, and the purpose of his work. Some of us are now at the stage
of seeking in Nature the corroboration of our intuitive faith; others, of painfully balancing the two
revelations; and others, yet again, have gone so far
as to look exclusively to astronomy and geology, and
chemistry and physiology, to afford them indications
of who or what the Originator of the universe may
be; and have come to regard with mistrust, as
wholly unreliable bases of argument, those moral
and religious phenomena of their own and other
men's souls, which may, after all, they hold, be
only the results of the " set of the brain," determined by the accidents of their ancestors' condition,
psychical habits " conveyed by hereditary
transmission, but having no validity whatever as
indicators of any external reality.
Now, even in the first of these stages, where we
only interrogate Nature to confirm the yet undimmed




Preface.                19
faith of our hearts, there comes undoubtedly to us
a chill when she returns her stammering reply,
instead of the loud and glad response which we had
been taught by the shallow old natural theology
to expect with confidence. Instead of the " one
chorus " which " all being" should, as we trusted,
raise to the Maker of all, we hear an inarticulate
mingling of psalms of joy with funeral dirges, the
morning song of the bird with the death-cry of the
hunted brute, the merry hum of the bee in the rose
with the shrivelling of the moth in its " fruitless
fire."  Nature's incense rises one hour in balm and
perfume to the skies, and the next steals along the
ground, foul with the smell of blood and corruption.
We cannot shut out these things from our thought
by any effort. We climb the mountains, where the
" empty sky, the world of heather," seem all full of
God; and we find beside the warbling brook a harmless sheep dying in misery, and its little lamb plaining and starving beside it. We wander through the
holy cloisters of the woods till we have forgotten
the world's sin and toil, and the scattered feathers
and mangled breast of some sweet bird lie in our
path, desecrating all the forest. We turn to the
books which in former years used to expound to us
the marvellous and beneficent mechanism of the
Almighty Anatomist, and we grow sick as we read
of the worse than devilish cruelties whereby Science
has purchased her evermore unholy secrets. Further




20                 Preface.
on, when we seek to reconcile the responses of the
religious sentiment with those of the nature'" red
in tooth and claw," who shrieks against our creed,
that love is " creation's final law," and treat them
as two equally valid sources of knowledge, the riddle
grows yet more terrible, till at last, when we discard
the inward testimony to the Maker's character as
unreliable, and look to the external world alone to
tell us what he may be, we obtain the heart-chilling
reply which Mr. Mill has left us as his last sad
word, "A   Mind whose power over the materials
was not absolute, whose love for his creatures was
not his sole actuating inducement, but who, nevertheless, desired their good."  " The scheme of
Nature, regarded in its whole extent, cannot have
had for its sole or even principal object the good of
human or other sentient beings."2 What is most
disheartening is the reflection, that, to all appearance, this contradiction (real or apparent) between
the inward voice of the soul and the voice of nature
must not only continue, but become continually
more clearly pronounced. There seems no chance
at all that we shall ever find a better solution of any
one of the " riddles of the painful earth" than we
possessed before science set them in array; and, on
the other hand, there is every reason to believe,
that year by year, as the human conscience grows
more enlightened, and sympathy with every form
of suffering becomes stronger and more universal,
1 Essays on Religion, p. 243.  2 Ibid., p. 66.




Preface.                21
the pain conveyed to us by the sight of pain will
become more acute, and our revolt at the seeming
injustices of Providence consequently more agonizing.
In the second essay in this little book, I have
endeavored to show, that, historically, we may trace
an enormous and hitherto little suspected development in the social sentiment of man; and that, to
judge from irresistible analogy, every future generation will have a livelier sympathy with the joys
and sorrows of all sentient beings, such as, scarcely
in their tenderest hours, the most loving souls of
former ages experienced. This is, I conceive, the
great hope for the future of humanity on earth,
as the immortal life of love is, I believe, that of
each human soul after passing through the portals
of the grave. But with this fresh growth of sympathy has already come upon us quite a new sense
of the vast extent, and the terrible depth, of the
sufferings and wrongs existing around us; and the
easy complacency wherewith our fathers regarded
many of them, and the thanksgivings they returned
for being "' given more " than others, while conscious
they did not deserve it, are well-nigh disgusting to
us. Especially the sufferings of animals torture us,
seen in the light of our new knowledge of their kindred sensibilities; and we stand aghast before the
long panorama of misery unrolled before us by the
theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest at the expense of the unfit.




22                Preface.
Much of the scepticism of the present day - so
grave, so regretful, combined so often with the
noblest philanthropy - is, beyond a doubt, the result
of nothing else than the rapid growth of tenderer
sentiments of compassion for unmerited suffering,
and livelier indignation at suspected injustice. And,
if this be so, future generations, as they become
more just and more merciful, will also become more
sceptical, - nay, more atheistic, - unless some different method be found for treating the dread difficulty than any of those which have been tried, and
have broken down. Even for us now there is nothing
more futile and disastrous than the attempt, either
to treat doubt as " devil-born," instead of springing from that which is most divine in us, or to
silence it, like the dog of hell, with a few handfuls
of dry dust of commonplace. The man to whom
the fact of the evil of the world first comes home
in the hour of trial, and to whom are presented as
explanations the platitudes in ordinary use by
divines, is like one of those hapless persons of
whom we heard not long ago, who stood waiting at
the upper window of a burning house for means of
escape: and, when the ladder was lifted, the brittle
toy collapsed, and shivered in fragments on the
pavement; and, with a never-to-be-forgotten cry of
despair, the victims fell back into the fiery gulf
behind them, and were seen no more.
How, then, ought the dread mystery of the existence of evil in creation to be treated? Historically,




Preface.                23
since men were far enough advanced to find that it
is a problem, and to feel the incongruity in the
alternate beneficence and severity of the unseen
powers, which they had before contentedly supposed
to be wayward and passionate as themselves, it has
been explained in many different ways: 1st, By
the Judaic, Greek, and Christian doctrine of a fall,
succeeding to a golden, or Saturnian age of innocence and happiness; 2d, By the Zoroastrian, Egyptian, and Manichaean hypotheses of an Ahriman,
or Typhon (evil principles, the rival of Ormuzd and
Osiris), and the Hebrew doctrine of a Satan subordinate to Jehovah, but permitted to work mischief
in his creation; 3d, By the Gnostic hypothesis of
the intractable properties of Hyle (matter), wherewith the demiurge often contends ineffectually; 4th,
By the orthodox Catholic doctrine, which, in addition
to the fall and Satan, refers evil to the necessity
for the presence of pain in a world intended to be
one of trial; 5th, By the doctrine of Leibnitz (and
substantially, also, that of Archbishop King), that
the world is as good as it was possible to make
it, every contingency other than those which it
actually presents involving either greater evils or
insuperable contradictions; 6th, By the doctrine
of Theodore Parker, which is simply the vehement
affirmation, on a priori grounds, that, in the creation
of a God all-good and omnipotent, evil must be
illusory, and a mere needful step to the highest good
for every creature; lastly, By the doctrine, often




24                Preface.
timidly approached by previous thinkers, but for
the first time, I believe, frankly stated by Mr.
Mill, that, supposing God to be in any sense good,
his character and dealings are explicable only on
the hypothesis that he is possessed of very limited
power and wisdom.
Such are the largest waves of human thought,
which for countless ages have dashed themselves
against this cloud-clapped rock. For us, in our
day, few of them bear much significance: none can
be said to be wholly satisfactory.
To explain natural evil and injustice by postulating the enormous injustice of punishing the whole
human and animal creation for the sin of Adam
would be held absurd, even had not geology superabundantly demonstrated the existence  of the
greatest natural evils before man, or even before
the order of mammalia, came into being.
The hypothesis of a great bad God, whose opposition mars perpetually the work of the good
Creator, though even yet accepted by a few minds
of high philosophic cast, seems to the majority of
us only to darken the dark mystery. The God who
could create a Satan would be himself a Satan; and
an uncreated Ahrimanes issuing out of " time
without bounds" would be in morals what a circular triangle would be in mathematics- a selfcontradiction. When we have postulated eternal
existence, wisdom, and power, we have, by our




Preface.                  25
definition, excluded malevolence, cruelty, and injustice.'
The " intractable properties of matter " may possibly indicate a class of causes which may stand for
much in the solution of the riddle of evil; but till we
have arrived at some conception of how the law of
evolution is worked by the Lawgiver, and find the
equivalent in modern scientific terminology for the
earlier " creation " and the later " contrivance," it
is little better than cheating ourselves with words,
to speak of matter as either "intractable " or otherwise in the hands of God. When all is said, we
are not far yet beyond the philosophy which taught,
that
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;"
and till we have learned something of the relation
of our own bodies to our souls, of the " flesh" to
the " spirit" against which it so often wars, it is
hopeless to speculate on that of the material universe
to its directing Mind. Certainly there is nothing in
the visible world corroborating the notion of yet
incomplete conquests of the demiurge over matter.
No discoverer has found an outlying tract of chaos,
any more than the "print of Satan's hoof in the
1 The notion of an absolutely evil principle is an express
contradiction; for, as the principle resists the Good One, it
also must be independent and infinite. But the notion of a
Being infinitely evil is of one infinitely imperfect. Its
knowledge and power, therefore, must be absolute ignorance
and impotence." - LAW'S Notes to King's Origin of Evil
8




26                 Preface.
old red sandstone," the marks of the handiwork of
any second or opposing intelligence.  If Nature
explains herself to us,
"'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garb thou seest him by,"
that " garb" we behold is neither unfinished in the
minutest hem, nor yet torn or spotted anywhere as
by an enemy's hand. The red threads which run
through it are woven into its very texture; nor is it
possible to guess how some of them can ever be
eliminated. Only the poet looks for the day when
the "lion shall eat straw like the ox."  The zoologist knows, that, by the law of his being, the lion
must prey on the lamb while the lamb and he inhabit together the earth. The " Holy Mountain,"
whereon they shall not " kill nor destroy," and
where man and brute, and bird and insect, may live
in peace and love, is, like heaven itself, unmarked in
the chart of any geographer.
Again: the orthodox Catholic doctrine - that evil
is necessary to afford scope for the moral freedom
of man — is, I believe, valid as the explanation of a
very large class of phenomena wherein man is principally concerned; but it is obvious that it leaves
untouched the still harder problem of the misery
of the brutes, since morals and geology have alike
advanced too far to accept the theory which formerly
supplemented it, that the " whole creation groaneth
and travaileth in pain " for Adam's offence.




Preface.                   27
Again: the doctrine of Leibnitz -that it is the
best of all worlds which could have been createdthough, perhaps, nearer the truth than any other,
must rather be deemed a statement of the problem
than its solution, since he offers no suggestion as to
the nature of that necessity for not making it better,
which he is everywhere forced to assume as paramount to the divine benevolent Will.'
The unhesitating faith of Theodore Parker is one
which few of us can regard without envy; and the
mighty force of conviction with which he gave it
utterance has served to warm and cheer a thousand
hearts. God had revealed his absolute goodness in
the very core of that large and loving heart; and,
in the blaze of that divine light, he ceased to discern
the darkness around.    The result is, that he has
contributed more than perhaps any other man of our
age to kindle amongst us a fervent and fearless love
towards God, which may help us, as it helped him,
to say, " Though he slay me " - ay, and far worse,
slay in my sight those who have never sinned as I
1 Archbishop King, at the conclusion of his celebrated
Treatise, -containing some valuable observations, and some
singularly naif examples of the circular mode of argument, -
sums up his conclusions with much complacency thus: " The
difficult question, then,'Whence came evil?' is not unanswerable. It arises from the very nature and constitution of
created beings, and could not be avoided without a contradiction. Though we are not able to apply these principles to
all cases, we are sure they may be so applied" (Treatise on
the Origin of Evil, 4th edit. p. 145). I wish I could share the
archbishop's plenary satisfaction in the results of his labors.




28                  Preface.
have done - yet even so, "yet I will trust in him."
But he has only provoked from the scientific side
a somewhat contemptuous rejection of his dogmatic
optimism, as making no real attempt to grapple
with the difficulty of evil, or recognize its extent.'
Lastly: there remains the door of escape which
Mr. Mill has set ajar,- the hypothesis that God,
though benevolent, may be weak and ignorant,
unable to do better than he has done for his creatures, albeit that is bad enough.2  This theory I
must here dwell upon for a few moments, both
because it will, no doubt, for some time to come hold
considerable place in men's thoughts, and also because it very importantly touches the chief purport
of this book, —our hopes of the life after death.
If God be really so feeble a being as Mr. Mill suggests, if his contrivances be so "clumsy " (p. 30),
and even his own immortality open to doubt
(p. 243), it is idle to argue any further concerning
his goodness; for he may be sincerely desirous of
giving to us eternal joy hereafter, and yet fail to do
so as completely as he has failed to give us perfect
1 It is evident from his biographies, that, in his earlier
years, Theodore Parker was very deeply impressed by the
sufferings of animals, and much disturbed thereby. What
was the key by which he escaped out of Doubting Castle, I
have never been able to ascertain.
2 " (And, since the exertion of all his power to make it as
little imperfect as possible leaves it no better than it is, they
cannot but regard that power, though vastly beyond human
estimate, yet as in itself not merely finite, but extremely
limited." - Essays on Religion, p. 40.




Preface.                29
happiness here. This world being the bungle it is
reported to be, it is hopeless to count on what the
sequel of it may prove.
If God's wisdom be really " limited," and his
contrivances "clumsy," there is in Nature a very
singular anomaly; for it appears that he has made
a being more clever than himself, and able to point
out where he has failed, if not exactly how to do
better. The intelligence of man is the highest work
of God with which we are acquainted (though nothing hinders us from supposing he may have made
indefinitely nobler intelligent inhabitants of other
worlds); but to suppose that this chef d'oeuvre of
the human brain is endowed with such similar but
superior powers to its Maker as to be qualified to
criticise and discriminate the clever from the clumsy
among them, would be astonishing indeed. I do
not mean this remark in the sense of the " browbeating" of the human intellect to which divines
are so prone. There can be no audacity in exercising any faculties with which we are gifted. I
only desire to observe that there is, on the face of
the matter, something very like absurdity in supposing that we, who on the hypothesis are ourselves God's handiwork, could find the end of his
knowledge or wisdom. Practically, when we reflect
on any one branch of the divine art, - on the architecture of the starry heavens, on the chemistry of
the ever-shifting gases and fluids and solids in which
creation every hour is born and dies, on the mech3*




30                 Preface.
anism of the frame of an animalcule, or of our own
bodies, say, of the hand alone, as exemplified in
Sir Charles Bell's splendid treatise, -it seems
indeed monstrous for us to open our lips regarding the wisdom of the Creator.
Where the limits of his power may lie is another
question, of which it seems impossible we should
ever guess the answer.   Undoubtedly Christian
theologians have written much folly about "' Omnipotence;" having first invented a purely metaphysical term, and then argued back from it to facts, as
if it were a specific datum within our measurement,
like the horse-power of a steam-engine or an hydraulic-press. A more sober and reverent mode of
regarding the stupendous Power above us may, as I
have long hoped and argued, become a L" note " of
theism; and, in the full admission that there must
be some limits even to supreme might (limits existing in the very nature of things, which cannot at
once be, and not be, or unite contradictory properties, such as those of a circle and a triangle), we
may find some help in contemplating such evils as
those which seem to follow inevitably on the grant
of moral freedom to a finite being such as man.
But such limitations of the divine Power as Mr.
Mill seems to contemplate would narrow it (if I
understand him rightly) far beyond this mere negation of contradictions; and, if we are to admit them
into our philosophy, it ought surely to be on the
ground that there are marks of such limits in




Preface.                31
Nature, -places where the creative energy seems to
have fallen short, or the obvious design has aborted.
Now, it is possible that some evils in Nature - some
forms of disease, for example -may seem to possess this character; but unquestionably the greater
mass of evil bears no such marks. It is, as I have
just said, woven into the very tissue of life on the
planet, and seems just as much a part of the great
plan as all the rest. All the terrible things in
the world - the ruthless beak, the poisoned fang, the
rending claw - are as much an integral part of the
work as the downy breast of the bird, or the milk of
the mother-brute. Further: there is a very curious
parallel, which I do not think has received sufficient
attention, between the exceptional ugliness in a
beautiful world and the exceptional evil in a Good
one, which, apparently, alike demand some other
solution than that of a limitation of the Maker's
power. The Creator has covered the earth, and
filled the waters, with beauty. Almost every animal
and shell, every tree and flower and seaweed, the
mountains, the rivers, the oceans, every phase of
day and night, summer and winter, is essentially
beautiful. Our sense of beauty seems to be, not so
much a beneficent adaptation to our dwelling-place
(like our sense of taste for our food), but rather a
filial sympathy with our great Father's pleasure in
his own lovely creation, -a pleasure which he must
have enjoyed millions of years before our race existed, when all the exquisite forms of animal and




32                 Preface.
vegetable life filled the ancient lands and seas of the
earliest geologic epochs. Nothing but a preference
for beauty, for grace of form, and varied and harmonious coloring, inherent in the Author of the cosmos, can explain how it comes to pass that Nature
is, on the whole, so refulgent with loveliness. But
even here there are exceptions. Putting aside all
man's monstrosities (and the beings who could
create the Black Country might be counted by a
dweller in the planet Mars as the brood of Ahrimanes), there are in the animal and the vegetable
kingdom objects which are, strictly speaking, as
ugly as the vast majority are beautiful. The same
principle which authorizes us to pronounce an antelope or a I-Iimalayan pheasant graceful and beautiful requires us to admit that the form of a rhinoceros is clumsy, and the colors of a macaw harsh and
grating. If the song of the nightingale to its mate
be musical, that of a peacock is frightful; and, if a
firefly ranging among the roses of a southern night
be a dream of beauty, a hairy and bloated tarantula
spider hanging on the tree beside it causes us to
shudder at its hideousness. Even amidst the flowers,
which seem like love-gifts from heaven to man,
there are, now and then, to be found some evillooking, crawling, blotched, and sickly-smelling
things, not to speak of those cruel and gluttonous
Dionaea, which, by the irony of fate, have been
brought so specially to our notice at this moment,
as if, even in the study of the lilies of the field, we




Preface.                33
could no more be sure of finding comfort and rest
of heart. Now, all these uglinesses in Nature are, I
submit, real analogies to the sufferings of sentient
creatures. They are few enough to be distinctly
exceptional, but yet great and many enough, and
bound up so completely in the chain of things, as to
leave us no choice but to accept them as holding the
same relation to the Author of Nature as all the
rest.
What view can we take, then, of this mystery of
ugliness, since it. would seem that any hypothesis
which may account for it may very possibly fit that
yet greater and more dreadful mystery of suffering?
Putting it thus before us, it seems absurd to say that
perhaps the divine power was not equal to the task
of harmonizing the macaw's color, or the peacock's
voice, or of reducing to proportion and grace the
unwieldy rhinoceros or the revolting spider. That
his power should act freely in constructing the lion
and the horse, the eagle and the ibis, the lark and
the butterfly, and yet should be unaccountably
thwarted and trammelled when he made the animals
so strangely contrasted with them, is almost ridiculous to suppose. It seems, then, as impossible to
frame an hypothesis which shall fit this ~esthetic
anomaly of Nature, as one which shall meet the
moral anomaly of pain.
Thus, in short, it appears that every one of the
theories on the origin of evil which have been put
forth from the days of the Pentateuch to the appear



34                 Preface.
ance of these Essays on Religion, are more or less
unsatisfactory and incomplete; and we may, with
only too great probability, resign the hope that we
shall ever hear of a better, or that any CEdipus will
arise in the ages to come to resolve " the riddle of
the painful earth," and relieve us from its direful
pressure.
Two things only, I conceive, remain for us to do
in the matter.  The first is, to define somewhat
more closely than, while oppressed by the declamations of pessimists, we are generally able to do,
what it is in Nature which the human moral sense
recognizes as evil. Secondly, to convince ourselves
what is the testimony to the goodness of the Creator
to be set over against it, which may enable us, not
by any means to honor him on the balance, but
to give him our heart-whole love and allegiance,
and treat the mystery of evil as we should treat the
inexplicable conduct of a revered father.
Of course, no attempt to accomplish adequately
either of these purposes can be made in these pages.
I shall only shortly indicate the character of the
conclusions to which, in each case, I have myself
arrived.
The first thing to be done, if we desire to define
what we mean by evil, is to determine what we are
justified in expecting as good, and then ask, What
is there lacking of such good in the universe as we
actually behold it? There is a principle which has
been often laid down by sceptics, as if it were a




Preface.                35
self-evident axiom, but which appears to me to be
nothing short of a monstrous misstatement. They
affirm, that the existence of evil for an hour in the
realm of a beneficent deity is just as inexplicable
as the final triumph of evil to all eternity; and consequently, that where we find so much evil as prevails
on earth, it is wholly impossible to say what extent
and duration, even to infinity, may not be permitted
to evil in other worlds, present or future.
This argument, I contend, is wholly fallacious.
It turns on two false assumptions, - first, the perverse ascription to God of an omnipotence involving
contradictions (e.g., that a creature could be made
virtuous in a world devoid of trials); and, secondly,
the application of the limitations of time proper to
a weak and ignorant being such as man, to a being
who is in certain possession of the power to carry
out his purposes whenever he sees fit. The justice
and goodness of God must, indeed, be the same as
the justice and goodness of man: such is the
cardinal postulate of all sound theology. But it
does not follow, because man is bound to do justice and mercy at once, when the opportunity is
presented to him (since he never knows whether it
may come again), that God is similarly morally
bound to rectify immediately every wrong, and relieve
every pang. On the contrary, it seems clear, that,
to an eternal and all-foreseeing Being, this principle
of human ethics has no application, and that he
rightly says to man,




36                 Preface.
"Tu n'as qu'un jour pour etre juste
J'ai l'eternite devant Moi."
Even human parents are authorized to inflict pain,
surgical or penal, which they reasonably believe to
be calculated to benefit their children; and it is
obvious that the rights of the divine Father, whose
resources of compensation are infinite, must extend
in this direction far beyond the bounds of the earthly
horizon. All this line of argument, then, as against
the divine justice, I consider to be wholly invalid.
The point at which the human sense of justice as
regards the relations of the Creator to the creature
(a sense which I humbly believe God himself has
planted in us, and authorized us to exercise) actually
pronounces itself, is far different. We feel that it
would be unjust to create a being the sum of whose
existence should be evil, who endured, on the whole,
more misery than he enjoyed happiness. And this,
I maintain, holds good, even if the moral ill-deserts
of that being should appear to merit overwhelming
retributive punishment. The cruelest of all injustices would be to create a being, so.constituted, and
placed in such conditions, as that it should in any
way come about that he should sink, not only into
such misery, but such sin as should finally turn the
scale, and make his whole existence a curse. Evil
cannot be fitly predicated of any amount of suffering within these bounds, as if it were inconsistent
with the divine justice; and all that the goodness




Preface.                37
of God leads us to expect is, that no suffering, small
or great, should ever be meaningless and unnecessary, but that it should either have been inevitable
as the condition of larger good, and in the maintenance of that eternal order in whose fixed warp
the woof of our freedom alone can play; or else
corrective and purgatorial, at once just, and in the
highest sense merciful.
Taking our stand at this point, what is there that
we must define as evil in the world?  The outlook
is threefold, and the answers correspondingly various. Has God been just and good to us? Has
he been so to other men? Has he been so to the
brutes? Most frequently men confound all these
questions; and the answer which they find for the
first determines that which they adopt for the second
and the third; and thus the optimism of the prosperous, and the pessimism of the disappointed, may
be readily explained. But though the dealings of
God with each of us, as known to ourselves alone,
may, and indeed do, serve us as presumptive evidence of the character of his dealings with others,
it is plain it can be only on condition that we read
them in their true moral significance. Mr. Morley
has expressed somewhere his unmitigated disgust at
those who are ready to proclaim that God is very
good, because their lot happens to be a fortunate
one, regardless of the misery of their fellows. But
it is surely no less disgusting to find others denounce
him as cruel and unjust, because (albeit he has
4




38                 Preface.
treated them with infinite forbearance) he has left
them to suffer some of the consequences of their
errors; or because, in bestowing ninety-nine precious
gifts, he has withheld the hundredth for which they
crave? Here we come to one of many illustrations of the fact that the spiritual element in us
alone enables us to judge truly of spiritual things.
Spiritual men, without exception, testify, that, to
their experience, God has been tenfold better than
their deserts, more kind, more long-suffering, more
infinitely father-like and merciful. Enduring every
kind of loss, pain, or disappointment, their testimony is always the same; and, however much their
faith is tortured by the evils they witness around
them, it has never so much as occurred to them to
think that God might have been better to themselves
personally than he has actually been. It is reserved
for quite another order of minds to express indignation, and a sense of injustice as regards their own
destinies, and to argue that God has not (as Marcus
Aurelius said) " done well for me and for the world;"
that he ought to have given them their heart's desire,
-health, wealth, or success; and that they have a
right to complain of his dealings. What is the
secret of this difference? It is, very simply, that
the spiritual man has learned somewhat of what God
is, and, correspondingly, of what he is himself,the one so good and holy, that the very thought of
injustice cannot be directed towards him after the
experience of his forgiving love; the other so sinful,




Preface.                39
so vacillating, so ungrateful, that his never-ending
wonder is, how God continues to him the least of his
mercies. Very possibly, among the chief of God's
kindnesses he may reckon some acute suffering of
body or mind which has driven him back from the
ways of worldliness and sin, and restored him to his
better self. Thus, then, to the question, "Has
God been good and just to us individually?" it
will be found, I think, that different answers will
generally be given by religious and irreligious men.
The first never think themselves to have deserved
so much good as they have received: the second
rarely think themselves to have deserved so much
evil.
On first noticing this fact, the natural corollary
seems to be, that in the life of every man, could we
read it similarly from the inside, we should likewise
trace the same contrast. But the rule cannot hold
good as regards the tens of thousands who have
never known any thing deserving the name of a
religion; whose natures have been crushed, warped,
stunted from childhood, or trampled down in manhood or womanhood, into the mire of vice and
shame, instead of being lifted into spirituality; nor
yet of the millions of innocent children who have
suffered and died in infancy. Some difference will
appear in the incidence of the preponderance of evil
in the moral or in the physical life, according as we
regard happiness as the end and aim of existence,
or believe that end to consist in virtue, and eternal




40                 Preface.
union with God. But in either case (as I have
argued at length in the succeeding essay), it is certain that the mass of mankind neither attain to such
degree of happiness nor of virtue as that we can
pronounce it to be positively "' good," or to any
which excludes very considerable evil.
Even here, however, regarding this great amount
of evil in human life, we must guard ourselves
against exaggeration, and especially against the fallacy of treating it as if it ever, or anywhere, outbalanced good. Where evil passions should actually
preponderate over innocent or virtuous propensities,
society must fall asunder, and human affairs come
to a standstill; and where want and pain should
prevail over satisfied appetite and ease, mortal life
must terminate. In these days we need to be reminded again of the once familiar observation, that
" it is a happy world, after all; " that all our senses
normally convey pleasure, not pain; and that the
exercise of the faculties of heart and brain and
limbs are all (under their proper conditions) delightful. We remark on a case of destitution, or
on a friend's bodily suffering or bereavement; but
we could not find tongue to tell of all those around
us who have sufficient food and clothing, who are
free from pain, and who enjoy the sweet happiness
of home affections. Many of us live for months
and years without pain; but few live a day without
pleasure, if it be only the pleasure of food and sleep,
and of intercourse with their kind.




Preface.                41
And again: it ought to be borne in mind, as setting limits to our notions of evil, that it has diminished, in a perceptible degree, in successive ages.
Perhaps this lessening is not so great as we once
fondly imagined, and that the progress of mankind
is far from being achieved without drawbacks: still
it would appear there are decidedly more and higher
pleasures now enjoyed, and fewer and lesser pains
now suffered, by mankind, than in any preceding
age of the world.
Here, then, rest our conclusions regarding evil
in human existence. It is vast; and much of it is
wholly inexplicable by any of the hypotheses which
have passed current as its explanation. But, great
as it is, the good in human life is greater still, and
shows a constant tendency to gain ground upon it.
Regarding the suffering of animals, it seems, that,
if our fathers treated it much too lightly in their
sublime contempt for the brutes, we are not exempt
from the danger of taking too dark a view of it.
Mr. Mill says, for example,l that " if a tenth part
of the pains which have been expended in finding
beneficent adaptations in all Nature had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would
not have been found in the entire existence of the
lower animals, divided, with scarcely an exception,
into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties
1 Nature, p. 58.




42                Preface.
necessary to protect themselves!"  I cannot but
protest against words like these, as quite equally
misleading with the easy-going optimism of Paley
and his congeners. The lives of the lower animals,
so far as we can understand their consciousness, are
not, on the whole, a pain, but a pleasure. When
undisturbed by human cruelty, they suffer but little,
or rarely till the closing scene; and though that is,
alas! too often one of anguish, it scarcely occupies,
in any case, a hundredth or a thousandth part of
their existence. In the interval of days, months, or
years, between birth and death, they have evidently
much ease, and not a little delight. They enjoy the
gambols of youth, undimmed by the pains of human
education; the passion of love, unchecked by shame
or disappointment; the perpetually recurring pleasures of food, rest, and exercise; and (in the case
of the female birds and brutes) the exquisite enjoyments of their tender motherhood. The sum and
substance of their lives under all normal conditions
is surely beyond question happy, and the anxieties
and cares which in their position would be ours,
and which we are apt to lend them in imagination, are
by them as totally unfelt as are our miserable vanities, our sorrowful memories, and our bitter remorse.
The scene which the woods and pastures present to
a thoughtful eye of a summer morning is not one
to "blacken" the character of the Creator, but to
lift up the soul in rapture, and prompt us to add a
human voice of thanksgiving to the chirp of the




Preface.                 43
happy birds, the bleating of the playful lambs, and
the hum of the bees in the cowslips and the clover.
The law by which the death of one animal is
needful to the life of another is undoubtedly one
whose working it is impossible for us to contemplate
without pain. The process of killing and devouring, if, on the whole, less productive of suffering
than the'slow death of age and want, is yet, in millions of cases, accompanied by circumstances horrible to think of. Nor is it at all evident why natural
death should not itself have been made painless,
rather than that recourse should have been had to
such an alternative. Obviously, if creatures had not
been made to devour one another, scarcely a hundredth part of those which now throng the earth and
waters could have existed; and each individual may
be said to hold his life on the tenure of relinquishing
it when summoned for another's support.' Still the
law is undoubtedly, to our sense, a harsh one; and
when we add to its action the sufferings of animals
from disease, from noxious insects and parasites,
from cold, from hunger, and, above all, from the
cruelty of man,2 we have undoubtedly accumulated
1 Archbishop King says, " God could have created an inanimate machine which should have supplied animals with food.
But a being that has life is preferable to one that has not.
God, therefore, animated that machine which furnishes out
provision for the more perfect animals." - Origin of Evil,
c. iii. ~ 5.
2 It is probable that every harmless little calf killed by
the vile old process for producing white veal suffers as much
as a crucified man.




44                 Preface.
a mass of evil very awful to contemplate. But it
is wrong to exaggerate even here, or speak as if
the lives of the brutes were, on the whole, a curse,
and not a blessing. Even we, who in our cruelty so
often seek them only to hurt and destroy, yet see
them- bird, beast, and insect - ninety-nine times
out of a hundred, happy, and enjoying themselves,
for once we notice them in any kind of pain. The
same rule applies to our impressions as in the case
of human suffering. We are so much more struck
by the sight of pain than of ordinary pleasure and
well-being, that we carry away a vivid impression
of the former, and forget the latter.
Brought to its actual limits, then, I conceive the
problem of evil stands before us as a vast, but not
an immense, exception in a rule of good. A certain large share of it we can recognize as having
great moral purposes fully justifying its existence,
and even elevating it into the rank of beneficence.
Such are the sufferings (of rational beings) which
punish and repress sin, and those through whose
fires the noblest and the purest virtues have ever
passed to perfection. That there is some wondrous
power in suffering thus to bring out of human souls
qualities immeasurably nobler than are ever developed without its aid is a fact equally plain to
those who have watched the almost divine transformation it sometimes effects upon characters
hitherto hard, selfish, or commonplace; and to those
who have noted how thin-natured and unsympathetic




Preface.                 45
if not selfish, are at the best, those men and women
who have lived from youth to age in the unbroken
sunshine of prosperity. Even among very ordinary
characters, and where the lesson of suffering has
not been deep, there are very few of us, I believe,
who, after the lapse of a little while, would wish that
we could unlearn it, or return to be the slighter,
feebler, shallower-hearted beings we were before it
came.   Rather do we recognize the truth of the
poet's words: -
" The energies too stern for mirth,
The reach of thought, the strength of will,'Mid cloud and tempest have their birth;
Through blight and blast their course fulfil."
Another share of evil may be attributed to, though
not altogether explained by, the beneficent purpose
of securing preponderating physical advantage to
the sufferer; as, for example, the pains which guard
the integrity of the bodies of animals. But, beyond
all these, we are compelled mournfully to conclude
that there exists, both in human life and in the life
of the brutes, a large mass of evil, which can by no
such hypotheses be accounted for consistently with
the benevolence of the Creator, and which utterly
baffles now, and will probably forever baffle, the
ingenuity of mortal man so to explain.
What is it that shall help us to look this great
residuum of inexplicable evil in the face? Where
shall we find ground of faith whereon we may take
our stand, and confront it with unshaken hearts?




46                    Preface.
Strange it is indeed to say, that I have hopes that
the publication of the Essays on Nature, the Utility
of Religion and Theism, which will give such bitter
pain to all believing hearts, such double sadness to
those who, like myself, regard their author with undying honor and gratitude, may even prove the
turning-point of this controversy, may set us at last
on the right track for the solution of the problem.
For what have we in these powerful, limpidly clear,
bravely outspoken words? We have, for the first
time perhaps in human history, revealed sharply and
distinctly what that element in human nature must
be, which, to the majority of mankind, is the origin
and organ of religion, and which it is so transparently evident that Mr. Mill had not.l Hitherto we
1 Let it be understood, that, in speaking of the religious
sentiment as deficient in Mr. Mill's nature, I use the term
expressly in the sense of that spiritual organ whereby man
obtains direct perception of the living God. In the broader meaning of the word, implying general reverence and tenderness
towards all things noble and holy, - a sense of the mystery
surrounding human life, and a fervent devotion to the ideal
of duty, - Mr. Mill was assuredly an eminently religious man.
How it came to pass that such a soul could by any mortal
hand be debarred from the happiness of direct recognition of
God, is one of the riddles wherewith the spiritual as well as
the physical world is full. As he himself says, "It is possible
to starve an instinct;" and, as Mr. Upton has well explained
in his profound paper on the "Experience-Philosophy and
Religious Belief," beside all other conditions on which spiritual knowledge is obtained, it is needful "that the understanding should be freed from all tyrannous misconceptions
which preclude or distort the intellectual cognizance of spiritual truth." Nothing short of such a divine blow as smote




Preface.                 47
have seen it in its highest development in the saints,
and had opportunity to learn what it positively is.
But so natural does it seem to man, so much does
it, in ordinary men and women, harmonize with and
shade off into the moral, affectional, and ratiocinative faculties, that it was easy to mistake their
action for its own. Now it seems possible to learn
more of it by the aid of the complete self-revelation
of a very noble mind, wherein, owing to almost
unique circumstances, the whole element has been
eliminated; and we are left to mark what are the
tracts of human nature which it normally covers,
and which are found to lie bare, like the seashore
when that mighty tide has flowed away back to its
bed. We behold one of the keenest intellects of
this or any century, and, on the human side, one of
the tenderest and most capacious of hearts; a man
whose moral sense (whatever were his theories of its
nature) quivered with intensest life, and was true as
needle to the pole of the loftiest justice to man, to
woman, and to brute, who yet, great philosopher as
he was, when he comes to deal with a subject on
which the rude tinker of Bedford has instructed the
world, writes like a blind man discoursing of colors,
St. Paul would have been strong enough to overthrow the
"tyrannous misconceptions" wherewith Mr. Mill's education must have fenced his mind. I need scarcely add, that,
in my view, the absence of conscious recognition of the relations between God and the soul is very far indeed from implying the non-existence of such relations, or the loss of some
of the richest blessings which they bestow.




48                   Preface.
or a deaf man criticising the contortions of a violinist wasted on the delusion of music. When he
speaks of the utility of religion, he confounds, as if
they were identical, those realms of human nature
which public opinion or human authority may sway,
and those which, in the solemn hours of visitation
from the Divine Spirit, fall under the inner law of
conscience and of love. And, when he writes of the
consciousness of God, all he has to say of it is to
refer to the metaphysical subtleties of Cousin about
the laws of perception, and to add contemptuously, -
" It would be a waste of time to examine any of these
theories in detail. While each has its particular logical
fallacies, they labor under the common infirmity, that one
man cannot, by proclaiming with ever so much confidence
that he perceives an object, convince other people that they
see it too.... When no claim is set up to any peculiar
gift, but we are told that all of us are as capable as the
prophet of seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels, nay,
that we actually do so; and when the utmost effort of
which we are capable fails to make us aware of what we are
old we perceive, -this supposed universality of intuition
is but'The dark lantern of the spirit,
Which none see by but those who bear it;'
and the bearers may be asked to consider whether it is not
more likely that they are mistaken as to the origin of an
impression on their minds than that others are ignorant of
the very existence of an impression on theirs." 1
1 P. 163.




Preface.                49
The friends who can have told Mr. Mill that he
saw, or was capable of seeing, religious truth as a
Tauler or a Fenelon saw it, or of feeling on the subject as even much less religious men are accustomed
to feel, were bold indeed. It may have been a hard
task to say that such was not the case. Nobody
could have ventured upon it during his life, or even
after his death, had he not thrown down the challenge, and elaborately explained to us the way in
which his religious instincts were destroyed by his
ruthless father. But now the matter stands plain;
and I confess I look with some confidence to the
results of the act of the elder Mill in extirpating the
organ of religion from his child's heart, as serving
to reveal to us the place it naturally takes among
human faculties. Even at the cost of all the desolation the book will spread around, it is, perhaps, well
that this dreadful experiment should, pnce for all,
have been tried, and not in any' vile body " of fool
or egotist, but in the person of one of the ablest,
and in all things beside one of the very noblest, of
men.
That lesson, then, is this: that, as we did not first
gain our knowledge of God from the external world,
so we shall never obtain our truest and most reliable
idea of him from the inductions which science may
help us to draw from it. Spiritual things must be
spiritually discerned, or we must be content. never
to discern them truly at all. In man's soul alone,
so far as we may yet discover, is the moral nature




50                 Preface.
of his Maker revealed, as the sun is mirrored in a
mountain lake. While all the woods and moors and
pastures are quivering in its heat, we only behold
the great orb reflected in the breast of that deep,
solitary pool. If (as we must needs hold for truth)
there be a moral purpose running through all the
physical creation, its scope is too enormous, its
intricacy too deep, the cycle of its revolution, like
that of some great sidereal period, too immense, for
our brief and blind observation. It must be enough
for us to learn what God bids us to be of just and
merciful and loving, and then judge what must be
his justice, his mercy, and his love. That Being
whom the sinful soul meets in the hour of its penitence, and the grateful heart in its plenitude of
thanksgiving, and every man who really prays in
the moments of supreme communion, - that God is
One concerning whom the very attempt to prove that
he is infinitely good seems almost sacrilege. It is
as goodness, as holiness, love and pity ineffable,
that he has revealed himself. Shall we treat all
that we have so learned on our knees as idle selfdelusions, and barricade with iron shutters the windows of the soul which look out heavenward, and
this in the name of sense and reason? Nay; but let
us fling those windows wide open, and again, and yet
again, seek to renew the celestial vision. These
sacred faculties of our nature have a right to their
exercise, as well as those which tell us of the properties of solids, fluids, and gases, of light and elec



Preface.                         51
tricity.   Their reports may       be false?    So maybe
every thing we call knowledge, every report of the
senses, every conclusion of the logical intellect.         A
persistent and widely recognized fact of human consciousness may be illusory; but there is no better
proof to be had, even of the existence of an external
world.'
1 An excellent illustration of this subject, expressing very
closely my own view of it, is to be found in the following letter, published in the Spectator, Sept. 5, 1874: -
" Will you give me space for an illustration in support of that which,
apart from revelation, is surely the best proof of all of the existence of
God, - the existence, viz., of that religious instinct in man, which, on
Prof. Tyndall's and Mr. H. Spencer's own scientific principles, should
be the subjective response to some objective reality, - the adaptation of
the creature man to his' environment'? The dog has a religion, and
his deity is man. Previous to the introduction of man upon the scene,
the dog must have been simply dog, minus this quasi-religious faculty.
But man appears, and makes his appeal to the dog-nature: in response,
a capacity for human fellowship is developed in the dog, and is inherited; so that a craving for such fellowship becomes, thenceforth, part
of his nature.
" Now, if we imagine some being, some detached intelligence, with
power to observe the dog in his development through the ages, but to
whom the man, on his introduction, is invisible, what a strange problem would present itself for his solution! Would not the higher development of the dog, as now observed by him, be analogous to the callingforth of the religious instinct in the creature man? The observer
would now see with wonder the frequent reference to a seemingly
higher will, not always cheerfully yielded to. He would note the
upward look, the overcoming of mere animal impulses, the occasional
wilful outbreak of the lower nature, bringing with it a sense of guilt,
to be followed by shame, penitence, and meek submission to chastisement; strangest thing of all, he would see this chastisement seemingly
accepted as a medium of reconciliation with some invisible being,
whereby peace and contentment are restored to the canine mind.
" Which would be the soundest conclusion for such an observer as I
have supposed to come to, - that these phenomena of dog-conscious



52                      Preface.
The great root passion of normally constituted
humanity, the craving to find some One to whom to
look up with absolute moral reverence, a passion,
which, even within the last few months, the greatest
thinkers on the agnostic side have one after another
admitted to be a fundamental and ineradicable element in our nature, -     that exalted aspiration can
never find the smallest satisfaction in the notion of
a probable God, who is probably more benevolent
than otherwise. Mr. Mill arrives at the conclusion
that such lights as we possess " afford no more than
a preponderance of probability of the existence of
a Creator, of his benevolence a considerably less
preponderance; that there is some reason to think
that he cares for the pleasure of his creatures, but
by no means that this is his sole care, or that other
purposes do not often take precedence of it." 1
Further on, he grants that the "ideally perfect
character... may have a real existence in a
ness were self-evolved, mere subjective illusions; or that, outside the
range of his vision, there was some real object to call them forth? To
the obvious criticism, that, as a matter of fact, the dog does apprehend
man, his deity, by his senses, while man does not thus apprehend God,
the reply is, that though, in many cases, it may be latent, there is in man
a higher sense whereby, and that with an intense reality, the invisible
God has been and is apprehended by countless thousands.
" Supposing the evolution theory to be true, the question arises,
When did man, the thinking animal, become man the religious being?
May not this example of a somewhat parallel phenomenon in a lower
field supply an answer; viz., When his nature, however previously
developed, was first consciously acted upon by a higher nature? I
am, sir, &c.,                       "HENRY F. BATHER."
1 P. 208.




Preface.                53
Being to whom we owe all such good as we enjoy." 1
But such an hypothesis can only be admitted on condition of supposing that " his power over his materials was not absolute;" that "his love for his
creatures was not his sole actuating inducement; " 2
and, finally, that, even of his " continued existence," we have not a thoroughly satisfactory I" guaranty." s But, as such a being as this is no God at
all to the needs either of the conscience or of the
heart, we are, consequently, not surprised to find
Mr. Mill setting him aside in favor of that " standard of excellence," Jesus Christ. Here is another
wonderful exemplification of the eminent presence
of the moral, and the total absence of the spiritual,
element ih this great thinker. He perfectly recognized the moral beauty of Christ's character as
transcribed by history; but his inward eye was
closed to that supreme loveliness which is spiritually revealed to every soul which enters into communion with God, and which, shining full into the
heart of Christ, made him the mirror wherein
humanity has ever since seen it reflected.
The fact that we want a perfect God does not, of
course, prove that any such Being exists; but it
leaves such a Deity as Mr. Mill has propounded
for our quasi-belief altogether outside the religious
question. If the intellect or the fancy may be contented with a probable God, provisionally accepted
as benevolent, it is certain that the religious senti1 P. 253.  2 p. 243.  8 p. 243.
5*




54                 Preface.
ment can no more attach itself to such a Deity than
a man can embrace a cloud. A balance of probabilities may properly determine our choice of an
investment for a sum of money; but, when it comes
to the gift of our heart's allegiance, we need a
different kind of assurance. No man can stand by
patiently while arguments pro and con are carefully
weighed, and begin to love when the scale turns by
a hair on the side of benevolence, and drop on his
knees in reverence as justice begins to preponderate, and adore when the balance of good appears
finally by some degrees heavier than that of evil.
If this be so, then it follows that the inductive
method is forever inapplicable to the solution of the
greater problems of theology, because, under the
most favorable circumstances, it can only give us a
balance of more or less probability,- a general,
not a universal proposition. We are compelled to
seek in some other modes of thought an assurance
of quite another kind.
I am far from conceding that no more decisive
witness to the divine Existence and Goodness than
Mr. Mill has found in the external world is to be
drawn therefrom strictly by the inductive method.
Respecting God's existence, it seems to me the
summary of arguments in Mr. Thornton's recent
admirable treatise' leaves the scientific atheist a
standing-room so infinitesimally small, that nothing
1 Old-Fashioned Ethics, &c. See the chapter on Recent
Phases of Scientific Atheism.




Preface.                55
short of one of those angels of whom the rabbins
taught that a legion may rest on the point of
a needle could support himself thereon. And,
regarding the divide moral character, I must protest
against the unaccountable manner in which, when
the experience-philosophy holds its court, the most
important of the witnesses is rarely or ever put in
the box. Why is it, I ask, that while every minute
fact of organic and inorganic Nature is freely cited
as bearing testimony more or less important to the
character of the Creator, - why is the supreme fact,
the existence of man, of a being who loves, and who
prays, who has deep set within him the ideas of
justice and of duty, a being capable of becoming a
hero, a martyr, a saint,-why is this greatest of all
the facts of Nature which our globe presents, passed
over by the experimentalist with no notice at all so
far as it bears on the theistic argument? Let us
waive, for a moment, all question of personal intuitive or spiritual knowledge. Let us suppose that
we, individually, have no such transcendental moral
or religious knowledge, and that we are regarding
the human race altogether ab extra. Even so, such
"facts of experience" as an Isaiah, a Christ, a
Buddha, a Plato, a Marcus Aurelius, certainly claim
attention as much as any of the facts from which
the Creator's indifference to his creatures' welfare,
or incapacity to make them happy, has been inductively inferred. After all which has been said of
recent years regarding the way in which our moral




56                 Preface.
natures may be supposed to have been developed
out of the instincts of the ape, there is nothing so
wonderful in all the wide circuit of science as that
it should happen, that in a world teeming with
injustice, and in which Nature's " recklessness " is
her prevailing characteristic,1 there should exist a
being whose brain has acquired such a "set" of
passionate love for justice, as that, for its sake, he
is often ready to sacrifice happiness and life.
And again: I think even the experience-philosophy, when its conclusions are reduced to logical coherency, points to the perfection of the moral attributes
of the Supreme Being. Such a Being either has, or
has not, a moral nature. If he have one, then he
cannot be partially good or partially just,- half
God, half Devil, -with a fickle or a checkered
character.  So much as this is involved in the
hypothesis of a Creator transcending all the wants,
pains, weaknesses, ignorances, and passions of the
creature.  If any preponderance of evidence in
Nature, then, appears to show that God has moral
purposes, and that those purposes are, in the majority of cases, benevolent, we are compelled, for mere
coherency sake, to arrive per saltunt at the conclusion, that, if he be good so far, he must be good
altogether. On these grounds, then, even such a
small residuum of the sublime idea of God as is left
us by the rigid application of the experimental philosophy to theology may be made to harmonize
1 Essays on Religion, p. 28.




Preface.                  57
with and corroborate the faith derived from a higher
source of knowledge; and the Atheistic and Kakotheistic creeds stand condemned, even in the court
of Nature.
But I repeat, that such arguments have in my eyes
but little worth save as intellectual satisfactions;
and I would as lief, for my own part, forego all such
conclusions of my understanding regarding the Great
Power who dwells behind the veil of Nature, if I
could not find in my heart the Lord of life and love,
our all-holy, all-merciful Father and God.
A few words must be added, in conclusion, respecting Mr. Mill's remarks on the doctrine with
which this little book is directly concerned, - that
of the immortality of the soul. After having described the reasons which he conceives have acted
as powerful causes of the belief, not as rational
grounds for it, and then stated the arguments deduced from the goodness of God, he observes: —
" These might be arguments in a world, the constitution
of which made it possible, without contradiction, to hold it
for the work of a Being at once omnipotent and benevolent;
but they are not arguments in a world like that in which
we live.... With regard to the supposed improbability of
his having given the wish without its gratification, the same
answer may be made. The scheme which either limitation
of power, or conflict of purposes, compelled him to adopt,
may have required that we should have the wish, although
it were not destined to be gratified.... There is, therefore, no assurance whatever, of a life after death on grounds




58                   Preface.
of natural religion. But to any one who feels it conducive,
either to his satisfaction or his usefulness, to hope for a
future state as a possibility, there is no hinderance to his
indulging that hope. Appearances point to the existence
of a Being who has great power over us, - all the power
implied in the creation of the cosmos, or of its organized
being, at least, -and of whose goodness we have evidence,
though not of its being his predominant attribute; and, as
we do not know the limits of either his power or his goodness, there is room to hope that both the one and the other
may extend to granting us this gift, provided that it would
be really beneficial to us." 1
After having held before us this even balance of
probabilities that we shall, or shall not, live again
after death, Mr. Mill further discusses how far the
indulgence of hope in a region of mere imagination
ought to be encouraged, or discouraged, as a "departure from the rational principle of regulating our
feelings, as well as opinions, strictly by evidence,"
and gives his verdict in favor of " making the most
of any even small probabilities on this subject, which
furnish imagination with any footing to support
itself upon." 2 This observation, again, is followed
up by many pertinent remarks on the benefits derivable from looking habitually to the brighter and
nobler side of things; and, with regard to the prospect of immortality, he adds, that the benefit of the
doctrine " consists less in any specific hope than in
the enlargement of the general scale of the feelings," 8 and that it is "legitimate, and philosophi1 Essays on Religion, pp. 209, 210.  2 P. 245.  3 P. 250.




Preface.                59
cally defensible, while we recognize as a clear truth
that we have no ground for more than a hope."
Now, to those amongst us who do not believe that
great benefits are ever derived from crediting delusions, and who do not feel in themselves the inclination to cultivate and water a hope which they know
to be a flower stuck rootless by a child in the ground,
this kind of exhortation is as strange as that which
follows it on the " infinitely precious familiarity of
the imagination with the conception of a morally
perfect Being;" the same idealization of our standard of excellence in a person " being quite possible
even when that person is conceived as merely imaginary."   Meditating upon imaginary gods, and
cherishing hopes which are known to depend on an
even balance of probabilities, seems, to most of us,
very like the mournful preservation of a casket
when the jewel is stolen, of a cage when the bird is
flown, forever reminding us of an irreparable loss.
Far better, to our apprehensions, would it be to
gather courage from our despair, and face as best
we may the facts (if facts they be) that we have
either no Father above, or that he is weak and
unwise, and that our hopes beyond the grave hang
on a straw, than mock these solemn trusts of the
human soul in God and immortality by "making
believe," like children, that we possess them when
they are ours no more. " Si Dieu n'existait pas il
faudrait l'inventer," is an epigram which has now
1 Essays on Religion, p. 250.




60                  Preface.
been paralleled, " If we are not immortal, we had
better think ourselves so."  Yet there seems some
contradiction in Mr. Mill's view of the advantages
of the hope altogether. In the preceding essay on
the Utility of Religion, he makes very light of it.
He says, -
" When mankind cease to need a future life as a consolation for the sufferings of the present, it will have lost its
chief value to them for themselves. I am now speaking of
the unselfish. Those who are so wrapped up il self, that
they are unable to identify their feelings with any thing
which will survive them require the notion of another selfish
life beyond the grave to keep up any interest in existence." 1
Here, again, surely we meet the singular train of
misapprehensions which seem to crowd upon the
writer from his incapacity to understand the religious
sentiments of other men. It is precisely the selfish
man who has had a comfortable life here below, who
may inscribe on his tombstone that he' From Nature's temperate feast rose satisfied,
Thanked Heaven that he had lived, and that he died,"
and made no demand for further existence for himself or anybody else. But the unselfish man, who
has looked abroad with aching heart upon a sinful
and suffering world cannot thus be content to rise
with a sanctimonious grace from the feast of life
(so richly spread for him), and to leave Lazarus
starving at his doors. That his own life on earth
1 P. 119.




Preface.                61
should have been so happy, so replete with the joys
of the senses, the intellect, and the affections;
that he should have been kept from sinking into the
slough of vice, and permitted to taste some of the
unutterable joys of a loving and religious life, - all
this makes it only the more inexplicable, and the
more agonizing to him to behold his brothers and
sisters -no worse, he is well assured, and often far
better, than himself - dragging out lives of misery,
and privation of all higher joy, and dying perhaps
at last, so far as their own consciousness goes, in
final alienation and revolt from God and goodness.
It is for these that he demands another and a better
life at the hands of the divine Justice and Love; and
in as far as he loves both God and man, so far is he
incapable of renouncing that demand, and resting
satisfied because he has had a pleasant mortal existence, and because younger men will enjoy the like
after him, and, when he is gone, help to " carry on
the progressive movement of human affairs."  The
prayer of his soul, " Thy kingdom come," includes
indefinitely more than this.
Further: the writer's lack of the religious sense
is once more revealed by the absence of any reference, in the summary of the reasons why men hope
for another life, to that which must always be to
religious persons the supreme hope of all. Mr.
Mill expresses, in a few most touching words (what
he, of all men, could not have failed to know), how
the sceptic loses one most valuable consolation,6




62                Preface.
" the hope of re-union with those dear to him, who
have ended their earthly life before him." " That
loss," he adds, " is neither to be denied nor extenuated. In many cases, it must be beyond the reach
of comparison or estimate, and will always suffice
to keep alive in the more sensitive natures the
imaginative hope of a futurity, which, if there is
nothing to prove, there is as little in our knowledge
or experience to contradict."  These words will
find an echo in every heart. There is no "' extenuation " of the immeasurable loss of the hope of
meeting once more with the beloved dead; and,
when M. Comte sets forth the satisfaction of being
buried by their side, - that we may perish, instead
of living, together, - it would seem as if he meant
to mock at the anguish of mortal bereavement, as
some grim tyrant who has promised to release a
captive, and fulfils his word by giving back his
corpse. But has Mr. Mill, who so deeply understands what the longing for the re-union of human
love may mean, never known the aspiration of every
religious man for the communion of divine love in
a world where we shall sin against it no more, and
where it may be more perfectly unbroken than is
possible while we stand behind the veil of the flesh?
This longing desire, which lies at the very core of
every God-loving heart, is surely worth mention
among the reasons for hoping for immortality, even
if it cannot be accepted, according to the principle
of experimental philosophy, as ground for the faith




Preface.                63
that every son of God who has felt it is, even in
right thereof, immortal.
But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most
ungrateful, task of offering my feeble protest against
the last words given to us of a man so good and
great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I
needs must deem them) are more instructive to us
than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers
whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should
put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled
with a spark of the generous ardor for the welfare
of his race which flamed in his noble heart, and
animated his entire career.
In conclusion, while commending to the reader's
consideration what appears to me the true method
of solving the problem of a life after death, I have
but to point out the fact, that on the answer to that
great question must hang the alternative, not only
of the hope or despair of the human race, but of
the glory or the failure of the whole cosmos, so far
as our uttermost vision can extend. Lions and
eagles, oaks and roses, may be good after their
kind; but if the summit and crown of the whole
work, the being in whose consciousness it is all
mirrored, be worse than incomplete and imperfect,
an undeveloped monster, an acorn mouldered in its
shell, a bud blighted by the frost, then must the
entire world be deemed a failure also. Now, man
can only be reckoned on any ground as a provisionally successful work, - successful, that is, provided




64                Preface.
we regard him as in transitu, on his way to another
and far more perfect stage of development. We
are content that the egg, the larva, the bud, the
half-painted canvas, the rough scaffolding, should
only faintly indicate what will be the future bird
and butterfly and flower and picture and temple.
And thus to look on man (as by some deep insight
he has almost universally regarded himself) as a
" sojourner upon earth," upon his way to " another
country, even a heavenly," destined to complete his
pilgrimage, and make up for all his shortcomings
elsewhere, is to leave a margin for believing him to
be even now a divine work in its embryonic stage.
But if we close out this view of the future, and
assure ourselves that nothing more is ever to be
expected of him than what we knew him to be during the last days of his mortal life; if we are to
believe we have seen the best development which
his intellect and heart, his powers of knowing, feeling, enjoying, loving, blessing, and being blessed,
will ever obtain while the heavens endure,- then,
indeed, is the conclusion inevitable and final. Man
is a failure, the consummate failure of creation.
Every thing else —star, ocean, mountain, forest,
bird, beast, and insect - has a sort of completeness
and perfection. It is fitting in its own place; and
it gives no hint that it ought to be other than it is.
" Every lion," as Parker has said, "' is a type of
all lionhood; but there is no man who is a type of
all manhood." Even the best and greatest of men




Preface.                65
have only been imperfect types of a single phase
of manhood, -of the saint, the hero, the sage, the
philanthropist, the poet, the friend, - never of the
full-orbed man who should be all these together.
If each perish at death, then, as the seeds of all
these varied forms of good are in each, every one
is cut off prematurely, blighted, spoiled. Nor is
this criterion of success or failure solely applicable
to our small planet, a mere spark thrown off the
wheel whereon a million suns are turned into space.
It is easy to believe that much loftier beings, possessed of far greater mental and moral powers than
our own, inhabit other realms of immensity. But
thought and love are, after all, the grandest things
which any world can show; and if a whole race
endowed with them proves such a failure as deathextinguished mankind would undoubtedly be, then
there remains no reason why all the spheres of the
universe should not be similar scenes of disappointment and frustration, and creation itself one huge
blunder and mishap. In vain may the president
of the British Congress of Science dazzle us with
the splendid panorama of the material universe
unrolling itself "' from out of the primeval nebula's
fiery cloud."  Suns and planets swarming through
the abysses of space are but whirling sepulchres,
after all, if, while no grain of dust is shaken from
off their rolling sides, the conscious souls of whom
they have been the palaces are all forever lost.
Spreading continents and flowing seas, soaring Alps
6*




66                Preface.
and fertile plains, are worse than failures, if we,
even we, poor, feeble, sinful, dim-eyed creatures
that we are, shall ever  vanish like the streak of
morning cloud in the infinite azure of the past."
For the concluding essay in this book, wherein I
have endeavored to explain what I deem to be the
best hope of the human race here on earth, I have
to crave the reader's forgiveness for two defects, of
which I am thoroughly sensible. One is, that I have
attempted to compress the statement of a large and
somewhat revolutionary theory of human development into a compass far too small to do justice
to whatever claims it may have upon acceptance.
Should the psychological fact, which I imagine
myself to have for the first time brought to notice,
provoke any discussion, I could readily double again
and again the illustrations of it given in these brief
pages; and, even since they were written, I may
boast that they have received singular confirmation
(so far as the story of the Aryan race is concerned)
in the profound work of the Rev. George Cox.l It
would, however, no doubt require a somewhat voluminous treatise dedicated to the purpose to establish thoroughly the principle for which I contend.
Secondly, I must ask (albeit I scarcely expect to
receive) condonation for the presumption of offering
a new word (heteropathy) to define the hitherto
unnoticed sentiment to which I wish to direct attention. Between the inevitable result of causing
1 History of Greece, vol. i ch. ii.




Preface.                67
every critic to make merry with the word, instead of
seriously discussing the thing it signifies, and the
opposite danger of leaving my argument logically
floundering among terms none of which express
accurately what I mean, I have chosen the former
alternative, and must, of course, suffer the consequences, against which, however, I now put forth
this plea in mitigation. Persons who feel any genuine interest in a somewhat curious, if not really a
novel or valuable, psychological inquiry, may perhaps, if they should come to the conclusion that
they have gained a new idea, be willing to accept
along with it a compendious term, having a score
of analogies in the language, to afford it definite
expression.
Finally, if the sketch I have attempted to draw of
the evolution of the social sentiment appear to possess historical truth, it remains only to remark,
that the long progress upward of mankind, which I
have traced from the primeval reign of violence and
antagonism to that of sympathy and mutual help,
has not supplied us with the slightest clew to the
mystery of how, at each successive stage, and as the
higher sentiment dawns, there is a corresponding
overruling inward command to follow the higher, and
disregard the lower impulse. Nothing in the progress of the emotion explains either the existence or
progress of the moral sense of obligation, any more
than the anatomy of a horse explains how he is
found with bit and bridle. Other things grow, nay,




68                 Preface.
every thing in our nature grows, as well as these
emotions. Every taste alters, every sentiment develops; but nothing within us corresponding to the
moral sense develops simultaneously alongside of
them, setting the seal of approval on the tastes and
feelings of adult life, and of disapprobation on
those of childhood.'If, then, this regulative principle, or intuition of a duty to follow the higher emotion, and renounce the lower, stand out no less
inexplicable when we have traced the long history
of one of the chief emotions to be regulated, we
have surely obtained at least a negative reply to the
desolating doctrine recently introduced,-that the
moral sense in man is only the social instinct of
the brute modified under the conditions of human
existence. These cultivated instincts, rising into
humane emotions, are not the moral sense itself, but
only that which the moral sense works upon; not
that which, in any way, explains the ethical choice
of good, and rejection of evil, but merely the good
and evil things regarding which the choice is exercised.  Whence we derive the solemn sense of duty
to give place to the higher emotion, rather than to
the lower (a sense which, undoubtedly, grows simultaneously with the growth of the emotions which it
controls), is another problem whose solution cannot
here be attempted. One remark only need be made
to forestall a commonplace of the new phase of
utilitarianism. We are told that our personal intuitions of duty are the inherited prejudices of our




Preface.                69
ancestors in favor of the kind of actions which have
proved, on experience, to be most conducive to the
general welfare of the community; or, as Mr. Martineau well calls them, " the capitalized experiences
of utility and social coercion, the record of ancestral fears and satisfactions stored in the brain, and
re-appearing with divine pretensions only because
their animal origin is forgotten." If this be the
case, how does it happen that we have all acquired,
in these days, a very clear intuition that it is our
duty to preserve the lives of the aged, of sufferers
by disease, and of deformed children? The howl
of indignation which followed the publication of a
humanely intended scheme of euthanasia for shortening the existence of such persons for their own
benefit, may afford us a measure of what the feelings of modern Christendom would be, were some
new Lycurgus to propose to extinguish them for the
good of the commonwealth. Yet what, in truth, is
this ever-growing sense of the infinite sacredness of
human life, but a sentiment tending directly to counteract the interest of the community at large? Mr.
Greg has clearly expounded, that our compassion for
the feeble and the sickly defeats, as regards the
human race, the beneficent natural law of the " Survival of the Fittest; " 1 and Mr. Galton considers
it to involve nothing short of a menace to the
civilization whence it has sprung. Nature kills
off such superfluous lives among the brutes; and
1 See the whole remarkable chapter, Enigmas, iii.




70                 Preface.
savages and Chinese follow Nature, to their great
advantage and convenience. Yet even the Chinese
do not profess to have any sense of moral obligation
to drown their superfluous babies; and we, who
ruthlessly entail on our nation all the evils resulting
from allowing diseased and deformed people to live
and multiply, have actually a " set of the brain" in
favor of our own practice, and decidedly against
that of the natives of the Flowery Land! Till this
enigma be satisfactorily explained, I think we are
justified in assuming, that, whencesoever the awful
and divine idea of moral duty may have descended
to us, it has, at all events, not been derived from the
inherited prejudices of our ancestors in favor of
the kind of actions which are " most conducive to
the general welfare of the community," and have
even been recognized so to be for thousands of
years.




THE LIFE AFTER DEATH.








TIHE LIFE AFTER DEATH.
I.
T   ARTHLY minds, no less than heavenly
bodies, seem constrained to pursue their
walk by a compromise between opposing forces.
Our orbits lie halfway between the tracks which
we should follow, did we obey exclusively centripetal selfishness or centrifugal love,- the
gravitation of the senses, or the upward attractions of the soul. Especially is this compromise
observable in the case of our anticipation of
prolonged existence after death. Not one man
in a thousand lives either as if he relied on
these hopes, or renounced them; as if he expected immortality, or resigned himself to annihilation. The average human being never gives
entire loose to his passions on the principle,
" Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die;"
but he constantly attaches to the transient con7                       73




74         The Life After Death.
cerns of earth an importance, which, if death
be a prelude to a nobler existence, is not merely
disproportionate, but absurd. The sentiments
he entertains towards God are not such as might
befit an insect towards him who is preparing to
crush it; but neither are they those of a son to
a Father, into whose home on high he is assured,
ere long, of a welcome. He mourns his departed friends not altogether with despair, but with
very little of the confident " hope of a joyful
resurrection," which his clergyman officially
expresses while he commits their bodies to the
ground. He awaits his own demise with regret.
or resignation, nearly always measured by his
happiness or misery in the world he quits, rather
than by his expectations of one or the other in
that which he is about to enter; but he rarely
contemplates the possibility of final loss of consciousness, or fails to project himself eagerly
into interests with which, in such contingency,
he can have no concern whatever. In a word,
he lives and dies so as to secure for himself
pretty nearly the maximum of care and sorrow,
and the minimum of peace and hope.
It is in a certain degree inevitable, that some
such indecision should pertain to our feelings
regarding the life after death. Our belief that
such a life awaits us is derived (as I hope




The Life After Death.        75
presently to show), not from any definite demonstration, such as is furnished to us by the logical
understanding, but from the testimony of our
moral and spiritual faculties, which varies in
force with the more or less perfect working condition of those faculties at all times. Yet there
can be few thoughtful men or women amongst
us who do not desire some more equable tenure
of the priceless "hope full of immortality."
If, during the years of multifold youthful enthusiasms, or of world-engrossed middle age,
the threat of death seemed dreamlike (so full
was our life), and the further hope beyond a
dream within a dream, too faint and filmy for
thought to seize upon it, such capacity for indifference inevitably passes away with the shock of
a bereavement, an illness, or the symptoms of
failing strength; and we marvel how it has been
possible for us to forget that interests so near and
so stupendous yet hang for us all undetermined
in the balance. Or if, in the vivid ecstasy of
early religion, it happened to us to think that
the joy of once beholding the face of God was
enough, and that we were content to die forever the next hour, even this experience, after
a time, makes annihilation seem doubly impossible, and prompts the question, which has but
one answer,



76          The Life After Death.
" Can a finite thing, created in the bounds of time and
space,
Can it live, and grow, and love Thee, catch the glory of
thy face,
Fade, and die, be gone forever, know no being, have no
place?? 1
And, as the wrong and injustice of the world
by degrees force themselves on our awakening
consciousness, we learn to appeal with confidence to God, if not on our own behalf, yet for
all the miserable and the vice-abandoned, that
he should open to them the door of a happier
and holier world than they have known below.
And, fow mankind at large, the solution of the
problem of immortality which will be generally
received in the future reconstruction of opinion
must prove of incalculable importance. Should
the belief in a life after death still remain an
article of popular faith after the fall of supernaturalism, then (freed, as it must be, of its
dead-weight of the dread of hell) the religion
of succeeding generations will possess more than
all the influence of the creeds of old; for it
will meet human nature on all its noblest sides
at once, and insult it on none. On the other
hand, if the present well-nigh exclusive devotion
to physico-scientific thought end in throwing
1 Verses, by E. B. Henry King and Co., London.




The Life After Death.         77
the spiritual faculties of our nature so far into
disuse and discredit as to leave the faith in immortality permanently under a cloud,' then it is
inevitable that religion will lose half the power
it has wielded over human hearts. The God
with whom our relations are so insignificant
that he has condemned them to terminate at
the end of a few short years, -the God whose
world contains so many cruel wrongs destined
to remain unrectified forever, - the God who
cares so little for man's devotion that He will
" suffer his Holy One to see corruption," -that
God may receive our distant homage as the
Arbiter of the universe; but it is quite impossible that he should obtain our love. Nor will
the results of the general retention, or loss, of
the faith in a future life on the morals of mankind, be less significant than those affecting
their religion. They will not, I believe, be of
the kind vulgarly apprehended. The fear of
hell has been vastly overestimated as an engine
of police; for the natures which are capable of
receiving a practical check to strong passion
from anticipations only to be realized in a distant world, are (by the hypothesis) constituted
with singularly blended elements of imagination
1 See the remarks on this subject in Christ in Modern Life,
by the Rev. Stopford Brooke, p. 194.
7*




78         The Life After Death.
and prudence, the furthest possible from the
criminal temperament. And the hope of heaven has been, probably, even less valuable as a
moral agent, having spoiled the pure disinterestedness of virtue for thousands, by degrading
duty into that " other-worldliness," which is
only harder and more selfish than worldliness
pure and simple. But, though the loss of the
bribes and threats of the life to come would
tend little to lower the standard of human virtue, it would be quite otherwise as regards the
final closing of all outlook beyond this world,
and the shutting-up of morality within the narrow sphere of mortal life. We need an infinite
horizon to enable us to form any conception of
the grandeur and sanctity of moral distinctions;
nor is it possible we should continue to attach
to virtue and vice the same profound significance, could we believe their scope to reach no
further than our brief span.  Theoretically,
right and wrong would come to be regarded as
of comparatively small importance. Practically,
the virtue which must shortly come to an end
forever would seem, to the tempted soul, scarcely deserving of effort; and the vice which must
lie down harmless in the sinner's grave, too
mere a trifle to waste on it remorse or indignation. Life, in short, after we had passed its




The Life After Death.         79
meridian, would become in our eyes more and
more like an autumn garden, wherein it would
be vain to plant seeds of good which could
never bloom before the frosts of death, and
useless to eradicate weeds which must needs
be killed ere long, without our labor. Needless
to say, that, of that dismal spot, it might surely
soon be said, -
" Between the time of the wind and the snow
All loathsome things began to grow; "
and that, when winter came at last, none would
regret the white shroud it threw over corruptici and decay.
Nor ought we to hide from ourselves, that,
under such loss of hope in immortality, the
highest forms of human heroism must needs
disappear, and cease to glorify the world. The
old martyrs of the stake and the rack, and
modern martyrs of many a wreck and battlefield and hospital, have not braved torture and
death for the sake of the rewards of paradise;
but they have at least believed that their
supreme act of virtue and piety did not involve
the renunciation, on their part, of all further
moral progress, and of all communion with God
throughout eternity. It is not easy to see how
any virtue is to help a man to renounce virtue,




80          The Life After Death.
nor even how the love of God is to make him
ready to renounce the joy of his love forever.
Deprived, then, of its boundless scope, human
morality must necessarily be dwarfed more and
more in each successive generation, till, in comparison of the mere animal life (which would
inevitably come to the front), the nobler part
in us would dwindle to a vanishing-point, and
the man return to the ape.
What are the probabilities that the faith in
immortality may escape the wreck of the supernatural creeds, and what are the spars and rafts,
if any such there be, to which individually we
may most safely cling? To answer these questions, it is necessary to cast a glance around us
on the present attitude of thinking men on the
matter. A few books and articles — among
which I would specially direct the reader's
attention  to four of Mr. Stopford Brooke's
admirable discourses —give some hint of the
currents of thought now passing over us; but
there is little doubt, that, before long, a much
larger share of attention will be given to the
subject, and that it "yill form in truth the battleground for one of the most decisive struggles
1 A miserable pseudo-scientific treatise, Le Lendemain de
la Mort, by Louis Figuier, has already run through four or
live editions in as many months. Simple readers ask for
bread, and the Frenchman drops into their mouths a bonbon.




The Life After Death.        81
in the history of the mental progress of our
race. Our standpoint at this moment is somewhat peculiar. We are losing the old ground,
and have not yet found footing on the new.
The delusion which has prevailed so long in
England, that we acquire such truths as the
existence of God and our own immortality by
means of logical demonstration, appears to be
slowly passing away. We hardly imagine now,
as English divines from Paley to Whately habitually took for granted, that, if we convince (or
"vanquish ") a man in argument concerning
them, his next step must infallibly be to embrace them heartily, as the Arabs did Islam,
at the point of the sword. Especially we begin
to perceive that we have been on the wrong
track in dealing with the belief in a future
life; nay, that we have been twice misled in
the matter. The old popular creed having presented the doctrine to us as a matter of historical revelation, we were first trained to think of
it as a fact guaranteed by a book, and, accordingly, of course to be ascertained by the criticism of that book. Our eternal life was secure,
if we could demonstrate the authenticity and
canonicity of certain Greek manuscripts; but,
were the Bible to prove untrustworthy, our
only valid ground of hope would be lost, and




82            The Life After Death.
the immortality (which, in the face of Egypt
and India, we were complacently assured had
been only "brought to light through the gospel ") would be re-consigned to the blackness
of darkness. From this primary mistake, those
who think freely in our day are pretty nearly
emancipated.     The "apocalpytic side of Christianity " has ceased to satisfy even those religious liberals who still take its moral and
spiritual part as absolutely divine; and the
halting logic which argued from the supposed
corporeal resurrection of the Second Person of
the Trinity to the spiritual survival of the mass
of mankind, has been so often exposed, that it
can scarcely again be produced in serious controversy.1
1 That the death of Christ, not his supposed resurrection,
furnishes a strong argument in favor of immortality, will be
shown by and by. Is it not probable that the great myth of
his bodily revival owes its origin simply to the overwhelning
impression which the scene of the Passion must have made
on the disciples, transforming their hitherto passive Pharisaic
or Essene belief in a future life into the vivid personal faith
that such a soul could not have become extinct? In a lesser way,
the grave of a beloved friend has been to many a man the
birthplace of his faith; and it is obvious, that, in the case of
Christ, every condition was fulfilled which would raise such
sudden conviction to the height of passionate fervor. The
first words of the disciples to one another on that Easter
milorn may well have been, "He is not dead. His spirit is
this day in paradise, among the sons of God." It was the
simplest consequence of their veneration for him, that they




The Life After Death.               83
While we have escaped, however, from the
error of supernaturalism, a second, and no less
fatal mistake has risen in our way. The prevalent passion of the age for physical science
has brought the relation of physiology to the
problem of a future life altogether into the foreground of our attention, as if it formed the
only important consideration; and of course on
this side there was never any hope of a successful solution.   Apologists of vivisectors made it,
indeed, their excuse that those modern sworn
tormentors    were  "seeking the religion of the
future " in the brains of tortured dogs; but no
one, I presume, ever seriously expected any
other result than that which we behold.          No
should feel such assurance, and give it utterance with prophetic fire. In that age of belief in miracles, this new-born
faith in the immortality of a righteous soul was inevitably
clothed almost immediately in materialistic shape; and, by
the time the Gospels were written, it had become stereotyped
in traditions which we can class only as Jewish ghost-stories.
If this conjecture be admitted, we are absolved equally
from the acceptance, as historical, of the monster miracle of
the New Testament, and from the insufferable alternative of
recourse to some hypothesis of fraud, collusion, or mistake.
It cannot have been on any such base or haphazard incident
that the reliance of Christendom has rested for eighteen
centuries. Even with its blended note of human error, it is,
after all, the reverberation of that earthquake which rent the
hearts of those who watched on Calvary, and tore the veil of
mortality from their eyes, which has ever since echoed down
the ages, and still sounds in our ears.




84         The Life After Death.
ossiculum luz, no "infrangible bone," such as
the rabbins averred was the germ of the resurrection-body, no "indestructible monad," such
as Leibnitz dreamed, has come to light, and
no "gray matter," or "hippocampus," or multiplied convolutions of the human brain, are
found to afford the faintest suggestion of a life
beyond mortality. The only verdict which can
be wrung from Science is, that the cessation of
all conscious being at death is "not proven."
She recognizes a mysterious somewhat termed
"Life," whose nature she has yet failed to
ascertain, and concerning whose possible changes
she is therefore silent. And, further, having
proved that no force is ever destroyed, she
admits that it is open to conjecture, that the
force of the human will may have its "conservation" in some mode whereby conscious
agency may indefinitely be prolonged. But,
beyond this point, Science refuses to say one
word to encourage the hope of immortality.
She remains neutral, even when she forbears to
utter oracles of despair. Nay, rather is she no
prophetess at all, but may better be likened to
some gaunt sign-post beside the highway of
life, pointing with one wooden arm" to the desolate waste, and with the other to fair fields and
fresh pastures, but giving no response to our




The Life After Death.         85
cry of anguish, " Whither have our beloved
ones gone? "
Nor will the analogies of Nature help us
better than the physiological analysis of our
own frames. The "fifty "    nay, rather the
five thousand - seeds, of which " she scarcely
brings but one to bear," and the wrecks of the
myriad forms of animal life which lie embedded
in the rocks under our feet, reveal the lavishness of her waste. All the sweet old similes
in which our forefathers found comfort-the
reviving grain, "sown in corruption, and raised
in power;" the crawling larva endued with
wings as Psyche's butterfly-fail, when seriously criticised, to afford any parallel with the
hoped-for resurrection of the human soul. Nay,
Nature seems constantly to mock us by reviving
in preference her humblest products, and bringing up, year after year, to the sunshine of spring,
the clover and the crocus and the daisy, while
manly strength and womanly beauty lie perishing beneath the flowers, hid forever in the
hopeless ruin of the grave.
And, lastly, there are certain arguments
which may be classed as metaphysical, which
were once generally relied on as affording demonstration of a future life. The value of these
arguments; from Plato's downwards, - that the
8




86         The Life After Death.
idea of a dead soul is absurd; that the soul,
being "simple" and "one," cannot be "dissolved;" that, being "immaterial," it cannot
die, &c., -is extremely difficult to estimate.
It is possible they may point to great truths;
but it is manifest that they all hinge on certain
assumptions concerning the nature of the soul,
and the supposed antithesis between mind and
matter, which we are learning each day to regard with more distrust; in fact, to treat as
insoluble problems. In this direction also, then,
it is not too much to conclude we cannot hope
to find a satisfactory answer to our inquiry.
When we have dismissed the expectation of
obtaining the desired solution, either from a
supernatural revelation, or from physics or
metaphysics, where do we stand? We are left
to face, oil one hand, a number of very heavy
presumptions against the survival of consciousness after death, and, on the other hand, the
sole class of considerations which remain to be
opposed to them.
The presumptions against survival are so
plain and numerous, that none of us can fail to
be impressed with their force. There is, first,
the obvious fact that every thing we have seen
of a man perishes, to our certain knowledge,
in his grave, and passes into other organic and




The Life After Death.        87
inorganic forms. The assumption is physiologically baseless that something, and that something his conscious self, lives elsewhere. And,
starting from this baseless assumption, we find
no foothold for even a conjecture of how he is
transferred to his new abode, where in the astronomical universe that abode can be, and what
can be the conditions of existence and consciousness, without a brain, or a single one of
our organs of the senses. The fact that injuries to the brain in this life are capable of
clouding a man's mind, and distorting his will
in frenzy or idiotcy, presses severely against the
assumption, that the entire dissolution of that
brain will leave intellect and volition perfect
and free. Nor do even these enormous difficulties exhaust the obstacles in the way. If man
be immortal, he must have become an immortal
being at some point in his development after
the first beginning of physical life. But to
name even a plausible date for so stupendous a
change in his destiny is utterly impossible; and
the new theory of evolution saddles us yet
with another analogous difficulty, namely, to
designate the links in the chain of generations
between the ascidian and the sage, when the
mortal creature gave birth to an heir of immortality. It is almost impossible to overstate the




83         The Life After Death.
weight of these and other presumptions of a
similar kind against the belief in a life after
death.  Let it be granted that they are as
heavy as they could be without absolutely disproving the point in question, and making the
belief logically absurd. They render, at all
events, the fact of immortality so improbable,
that to restore the balance, and make it probable, an immense equiponderant consideration
becomes indispensable.
Where is that counterweight to be found?
What can we cast into the scale which shall
outweigh these presumptions? Certainly nothing in the way of direct answers to them, nor
of plausible hypotheses to explain how the
conditions of future being may possibly be
carried on. Confionted by the challenge to
produce such hypotheses, we can but say, with
one of the greatest men of science of the age,
that, " the further we advance in the path of
science, the more the infinite possibilities of
Nature are revealed to us;" and, among those
possibilities, there must needs be the possibility
of another life for man. Beyond this, we cannot proffer a word; and it must be some consideration altogether of another character which
can afford any thing like a positive reason for
believing in immortality in opposition to the




The Life After Death.        89
terrible array of presumptions on the other
side. That consideration, so sorely needed, is,
I believe, to be found, nay, is found already by
the great mass of mankind, in FAITH, -faith
in its true sense of TRUST in goodness and
justice and fidelity and love, and in all these
things impersonated in the Lord of life and
death.  Not the supernatural argument, nor
yet the physical, nor the metaphysical, but the
moral, is the real counterpoise to all the difficulties in the way of belief in a life beyond the
grave.
That this is the true ground of whatever confidence we can rationally entertain on the subject, is, I think, clear on very short reflection.
It has been but partially recognized, indeed,
that such is the case; and the teachers who
have undertaken to demonstrate immortality on
natural grounds have very commonly presented
their moral arguments as if they were purely
inductive, and belonged to the same class of
logical proofs as we have sought for in vain in
physics and metaphysics. But their syllogisms,
when carefully examined, will invariably be
found to involve a major term, which is not a
fact of knowledge, but only a dogma of faith.
They conduct us halfway across the gulf by
means of stepping-stones of facts and inductions,
8*




90         The Life After Death.
and then invite us to complete our transit by
swimming. They open our cause in the court
of the intellect, and then move it for decision
to the equity-chamber of the heart. A few
pages hence, I shall hope to give this assertion
full illustration. For the present, it will be
sufficient to remind the reader that the arguments usually drawn from the general consciousness of mankind, from the many injustices of
the world, from the incompleteness of moral
progress in this life, &c., all involve, at the crucial pdint, the assumption that we possess some
guaranty that mankind will not be deceived,
that justice will triumph eventually, and that
human progress is the concern of a Power whose
purposes cannot fail. Were the faith which
supplies such warrants to prove irresponsive to
the call, the whole elaborate argument which
preceded the appeal would be seen at once to
fall to the ground. If, then, the strength of a
chain must be measured by that of its most fragile link, it is clear that the value in sum total
of all such arguments, however multiplied or
ingeniously stated, is neither more nor less than
that which we may be disposed to assign to
simple faith.  It is a value precisely tantamount to that of our moral and religious intuitions,-to the value (as I hope presently to




The Life After Death.        91
show) of all such intuitions culminating in one
point together. But, beyond this, it is nothing.
This conclusion, however distasteful it may be
to us, is one which eminently harmonizes with
all we can learn respecting the method of the
divine tuition of souls. There is one kind of
knowledge which the Creator has appointed
shall be acquired by the busy intellect, and
which, when so acquired, is held in inalienable
possession. There is another kind of knowledge
which he gives to faithful and obedient hearts,
and which even the truest of them hold on the
precarious tenure of sustained faith and unrelaxing obedience. The future world assuredly
belongs to this latter class of knowledge. It is,
as one of the greatest of living teachers has
said, " a part of our religion, not a branch of
our geography."  Why it is so, and why our
passionate longings for more sense-satisfying
information cannot be indulged, we can even
partially see; for we may perceive that it would
instantaneously destroy the perspective of this
life, and nullify the whole present system of
moral tuition by earthly joys and chastisements.
The mental chaos into which those persons
obviously fall who in our day imagine that
they have obtained, tangible, audible, and visible
proofs of another life, supplies evidence of the




92         The Life After Death.
ruinous results which would follow, were any
such corporeal access to the other world actually opened to mankind.
Let us, then, courageously face the conclusion
which we seem to have reached.    The key
which must open the door of hope beyond the
grave will never be found by fumbling among
the heterogeneous stores of the logical understanding. Like the one with which the Pilgrim
unlocked the dungeon of Giant Despair's Castle, it is hidden in our own breasts, - given to
us long ago by the Lord of the Way.
This essay is not the place, even were I possessed of the needful ability, to determine the
true "Grammar of Assent" as regards such
faith as is now in question. I must limit myself to addressing those readers who are prepared to concede that spiritual things are
" spiritually discerned," and moral things morally; and that the human moral sense and
religious sentiment are something more than
untrustworthy delusions. To those who doubt
all this, who believe in food and houses and
railways and stocks and gravitation and electricity, but not in self-sacrificing love or justice
or God, I can say nothing. The argument has
been shown to have no standpoint on any
grounds they will admit. That they should




The Life After Death.        93
disbelieve in immortality is the perfectly logical outcome of their other disbeliefs. It would
be entirely inconsequent and irrational for them
to believe in it.
Assuming, then, that I address men and
women who believe in God and justice and
love, I proceed to endeavor to show how,
even should they stand appalled by the difficulties of belief in immortality, they may yet
oppose to those difficulties moral arguments so
numerous and irrefragable, that the scale may
well turn on the side of belief. I hope to show,
that, by many different but converging lines,
Faith uniformly points to a life after death,
and that, if we follow her guidance in any one
direction implicitly, we are invariably led to the
same conclusion. Nay, more: I think it may
be demonstrated that we cannot stop short of
this culmination, and afterwards retain intact
our faith in any thing beyond matters of sense
and experience. Every idea we can form of
justice, love, duty, is truncated and imperfect,
if we deny them the extension of eternity; and,
as for our conception of God, I see not how
any one who has realized the "riddle of the
painful earth" can thenceforth call him "good,"
unless he believe that the solution is yet to be
given to that dark problem hereafter.




94         The Life After Death.
The following are some of the channels in
which faith flows towards immortality.
I. There is one unendurable thought: it is,
that justice may fail to be done in time or in
eternity. This thought makes the human soul
writhe like a trampled worm. Other ideas are
sad, even agonizing; but this one cannot be
borne. No courage, no virtue, no unselfishness,
will help us to bear it. The better we are, the
more insufferable it is. To receive it into the
soul is madness. On the other hand, every
threat besides, however sorrowful or terrible, if
it be but overshadowed by the sense "it will
be just," becomes endurable, nay, is followed
by a sort of awful calm. Could we even feel
certain that our guilt merited eternal perdition,
then the doom of hell would bring to us only
dumb despair. Something greater than ourselves within us would say to the wailings of
our self-pity, "Peace, be still."  But let us
only doubt that there is any justice here or
hereafter; let us think that wrong and tyranny
may be finally triumphant, and goodness and
heroism ultimately defeated, punished, and
derided; and, lo! there surges up from the very
depths of our souls a high and stern remonstrance, an appeal which should make the hollow heavens resound with our indignation and
our rebellion.




The Life After Death.        95
The religions of the world, well nigh in the
proportion in which they deserve to be called
religions, and not mere dreams of awe and wonder, are the expressions of the universal human
aspiration after justice.  Even the Buddhist
creed (whose acceptance by the myriads of
Eastern Asia for two millenniums gives the lie
to so many of our theories, and seems to show
human nature different under another sky),even this abnormal creed insists that righteousness rules everywhere and forever, even when
it teaches there is no righteous Ruler on high,
or, "peradventure, he sleepeth" in the eternal
slumber of Nirvana. The doctrine of Karma
- that every good and every evil action inexorably brings forth fruit of reward or fruit of
punishment, in this life or some other life to
come- is the confession of three hundred million souls, that, if they can endure to live without God, they yet cannot live without justice.
Nay, it is more. It is evidence that human
reason can accept such a blank absurdity as the
idea that the unintelligent elements may bring
about moral order sooner than the human spirit
can rest satisfied that such moral order is
nowhere to be found. Gravitation and electricity may weigh self-sacrifice and purity in their
balances, and the winds and waves may measure




96         The Life After Death.
out the punishment of cruelty and falsehood;
but virtue cannot be without reward, nor can
the crimes which human tribunals fail to reach
escape retribution forever.
The shapes which this desire of justice
assumes in the earlier stages of human thought
are, of course, rude and materialistic in the
extreme. Men cannot expect from Nemesis, or
Karma, or Jehovah, higher justice than they
have begun to apprehend as the law of their
own dealings. But everywhere throughout
mythology, history, and poetry, we may trace
the parallel lines of the moral growth of each
nation, and the corresponding development of
its belief, that, over and above human justice,
there is a justice-working Power, personal or
impersonal, controlling all events, and making
war and plague and famine, the earthquake and
the storm, the punishments of crime, and health
and victory, length of days, abundant wealth
and numerous progeny, the rewards of virtue.
The obvious failure of the exhibition of any
such overruling justice in multitudes of instances
has commonly driven the bewildered observers
to devise explanations, more or less ingenious, of
each particular case, but rarely, if ever, to the
much more logical course of abandoning the
expectation of such justice. Half the myths




The Life After Death.        97
of the elder nations are nothing more than
hypotheses invented to justify Providence, and
explain consistently with equity some striking
inequality in the distribution of prosperity and
adversity. As negroes and Canaanites underwent more cruel oppressions than other races,
their supposed progenitor, Ham, must have incurred some special curse. As women endure
peculiar sufferings, and are in early times altogether enslaved by men, so Eve must have merited the punishment of bringing forth children in
sorrow, and being " ruled over "by her husband.
As the cities of the plain were overwhelmed
by a terrific convulsion, so it was certain Sodom
and Gomorrah were more wicked than Memphis
or Thebes. In Grecian fable, the calamities
which befell the house of (Edipus presupposed
" The ill-advised transgression of old Laius; "
and even such trivial matters as the blackness
of the crow and the chatter of the magpie
might be traced to the punishment of a human
offender transformed into the bird, whose whole
race thenceforward, like that of Adam, was
destined to bear the penalty of "original sin."
Nor do the monuments of the graver thoughts
of mankind bear less emphatic testimony than
mythology to the universal desire to "see justice
9




98         The Life After Death.
done." Beginning with the Vedas and Genesis,
Homer and Herodotus, we may trace the straining effort of every writer to "point a moral" of
reward and punishment, even when the facts to
be dealt with lent but faint color to the lesson
that perfidious chiefs will always be defeated,
and good kings crowned with victory and prosperity. The story of ruined cities is always told
in the same spirit:"They rose while all the depths of guilt their vain creators sounded;
They fell because on fraud and force their corner-stones
were founded. "
In every age and nation, epics, dramas, and
popular legends, wherever they may be found,
either directly aim to represent what we have
significantly learned to name "poetic justice,"
or pay the idea still deeper homage by founding the tragedy of the piece on the failure of
justice. Never is the notion absent, either from
the ethical poets, such as the author of Job,
Euripides, Dante, or Milton, or from those who
have followed the principle of art for art's sake,
— Eschylus, Shakspeare, and Goethe. Each of
us in the course of life exemplifies the cycle of
human thought in the matter. In childhood
we read history with impatient longing for the




The Life After Death.         99
triumph of patriots and heroes, and the overthrow of their oppressors; and we prefer ancient history to modern, because it seems to
offer a clearer field for the vindication of ethical
ideas. In youth we find delight in the romances
which exhibit virtue as crowned with success,
and wickedness defeated; and it is invariably
with a mingled sense of surprise and indignation, that we fling down the first tale which
leaves us at its conclusion with our legitimate
anticipations of such a denoilment unsatisfied.
To this hour the play-going public, which
represents the youthful-mindedness of the community, refuses to sanction any picture of life
wherein, ere the curtain falls, the hero is not
vindicated from all aspersion, and the villain
punished and exposed. Only far on in life, and
in literary culture, do we begin, with many misgivings, mournfully to recognize the superior
verisimilitude of tales which depict virtue as
receiving no reward, and guilt no punishment,
in this world.
The question, "How mankind has come to
possess this confidence in Nemesis?" will, of
course, be answered differently according to our
various theories of the origin of all moral sentiments. Dr. Johnson ascribes our passion for
justice to the simple source of fear lest we should




100        The Life After Death.
personally suffer from injustice,- an hypothesis
which would be highly satisfactory, provided, in
the first place, we were all so good that we had
every thing to hope and nothing to dread from
justice; and, secondly, provided our interest
in justice never extended backward in time, and
far off into distance, immeasurably beyond the
circle of events in which we can ever have personal concern. The theory which would accord
with the general neo-utilitarian doctrine now in
fashion would be a little more philosophic than
this. Our modern teachers would probably tell
us, that our expectation of justice is the result
of the "set" of the human brain, fixed by experience through countless generations. As our
sense of duty is, on their showing, derived from
the repeated observation of the utility of virtuous actions, so, on the same principle, our expectation of justice must come from numberless
observations of instances wherein justice has
been illustriously manifested.  It is, indeed,
easier to see how the constant association of
the ideas of guilt and punishment, virtue and
reward, formed by such observations, should
produce the expectation to see one always follow the other, than it is to understand how the
observation of the utility of virtue should impress upon us the solemn categoric imperative,




The Life After Death.        101
"Be virtuous."   The expectation of justice
might be merely an intellectual presumption
of the same character as our anticipation of
the recurrence of day and night, or any other
phenomena associated in unbroken sequence.
The sense of duty is a practical spur to action,
whose relation to its supposed origin of longobserved utility remains, when all is said, a
" mystic extension" of that prosaic idea altogether unaccountable.
But there is, unfortunately, a difficulty in the
way of availing ourselves of this easy solution
of the origin of the universal expectation of
justice. It is hard to see how the " set of our
brains" towards such expectation could have
been formed by experience, considering that no
generation seems to have been favored by any
such experience at all. To produce such a
" set," it would (by the hypothesis) be necessary
that the instances wherein justice was plainly
exhibited should be so common as to constitute
the rule, and those wherein it failed exceptions
too rare to hinder the solid mass of conviction
from settling in the given direction. Like a
sand-bar formed by the action of the tides and
currents, our " set of brain " can only come from
uniform impressions; and, were the angle of
pressure to shift continually, it is clear it could
9*




102        The Life After Death.
take no permanent shape whatever. Now, does
any one imagine that such uniform and perspicuous vindication of justice in the course of
events has been witnessed by mankind at any
age of the world's history? Is there any thing
like it impressed upon our own minds as we
read, day after day, of public affairs, or reflect
on the occurrences of private life? Are we
accustomed to see well-meant actions always
followed by reward, and evil ones infallibly productive of failure or disgrace? Even at the
present stage of moral advance in public
opinion and in righteous legislation, can we flatter ourselves that things are so arranged as to
secure the unvarying triumph of probity, veracity, modesty, and all the other virtues, and the
exemplary overthrow of fraud, impudence, and
selfishness? Suppose a cynic to hold the opposite thesis, and maintain that we are continually
punished for our generosity and simplicity, and
rewarded for cunning and hypocrisy.  Should
we be able to overwhelm him with a mass of
instances to the contrary, ready at a moment's
notice in our memory? Can we imagine (as a
single illustration of the subject) that the thousands of adulterating tradesmen and fraudulent
merchants in England at this moment would
pursue their evil courses so consistently, did




The Life After Death.        103
daily experience really warn those sagacious
persons that "honesty is the best policy "? Of
course, as we recede towards times when laws
were far less just than they are now, and oppression and violence were far more common, the
scene becomes darker and less hopeful. Looking back through the vista of the historic and
prehistoric ages, the probability of finding a
reign of Astrwea, when right always triumphed
over might, becomes necessarily " fine by degrees,
and beautifully less," till we are driven to the
conclusion, that, if we owe the set of our brains
towards justice to the experience of our ancestors, that "set" must have been given when
justice was rarely manifest at all, "and the
earth was full of violence and cruel habitations."
The share which the purely physical laws have
had in punishing moral offences has, doubtless,
been always what it is now; and that share, to
all our knowledge, is extremely obscure. If
health and longevity are the frequent accompaniment of one class of virtues, disease and death
are equally often incurred by another; nor is
there any sort of token that abundant harvests
or blighted fields, prosperous voyages or tempest-driven wrecks, have any relation to the
moral character of the mariner or the agriculturist, or that, from the observation of such events




104        The Life After Death.
for sixty centuries, a theory of morals could
possibly have been evolved. Practically, it is
obvious that men do not see wickedness, and
infer punishment, but, rather, when they see
punishment, they infer wickedness. A thousand
tyrants had been more cruel than Herod, and
yet had never been " smitten by God" with the
portentous disease of which the Idumaean died.
A hundred invaders before Xerxes had trampled
on the necks of conquered nations, but no
Nemesis had deserved a temple for rebuking
their pride, no Hellespontine waves had risen
in tempest to destroy their fleets.
It is not experience, then, it never could be
experience gained in such a world as ours, which
has impressed on the brain of man its "set"
towards the expectation of justice, or inspired
its string of accordant aphorisms, that "the
wicked will come to a fearful end," that "murder will out," that "honesty is the best policy,"
and that "the righteous" man is never forsaken, nor his seed destined to "beg their
bread." From some other source, remote from
experience, we must have derived an impression
which we persistently maintain, and endeavor
to verify in defiance of ever-recurring failure
and disappointment.  What that source may
be, it does not vitally concern the present argu



The Life After Death.         105
ment to determine. Probably the expectation
may most safely be treated as the imperfect
intellectual expression of a great moral intuition, forming an ultimate fact of our moral constitution. All such deep but dim intuitions,
when rendered into definite ideas, are necessarily imperfect, and liable to error. We err both
as to the time and the form in which they are
to be fulfilled. We feel that justice ought to
be supreme; but, when we translate that sentiment into an idea, we fondly picture the great
scheme of the universe developed within the
sphere of our vision. Like children possessed
of a magnet, we imagine the pole to which it
points may be found in the neighboring field.
Our magnet is true enough; but
" The far-off Divine Event,
Towards which the whole creation moves,"
is beyond our horizon. And, similarly, we give
to our spiritual intuitions materialistic forms,
which are far from rendering them veraciously.
The concrete, the visible, the tangible, are inevitably the earliest expressions even of our highest sentiments. We feel the majesty of God,
and picture him seated on a throne. We feel
his justice; and the myth of a day of judgment
rises before us. In like manner, our intuitive




106        The Life After Death.
expectation that virtue will be rewarded clothes
itself in all manner of carnal shapes of crowns
and riches; and our expectation that vice will
be punished, in similar shapes of pain and
infamy. At a further stage of human thought,
when the anticipation of physical reward and
punishment in this life has been, of necessity,
postponed to, or supplemented by, those of
another world, we substitute the almost equally
materialistic rewards of Elysium and Paradise,
or penalties of Jehanum and Hell. It needs a
long course of progress to get beyond such
ideas, and learn to render spiritual sentiments
spiritually, and moral ones morally only.  It
militates nothing against the veracity of the
original profound intuition of justice, that hitherto men have thus mistranslated it into the
promise of a speedy settlement of the great
account in the gross earthly coin of physical
good or evil here or hereafter. That intuition
will, doubtless, be far more perfectly fulfilled in
the grander scope of eternity, and by means of
the transcendent joys and sorrows of the spiritual life. When we have advanced far enough
to feel that all other good and evil are as nothing in comparison of these, it will be easy to
see how the Supreme Justice may use those
tremendous instruments in its ultimate dealings




The Life After Death.        107
with merit and demerit, and reward virtue, not
with the.dross of earthly health or wealth, or
of celestial crowns and harps, but with the only
boon the true saint desires, - even the sense of
union with God; and punish vice, not with disease and disgrace, nor with the fire and worms
of hell, but with the most awful of all penalties, -the severance of the soul from divine
light and love. No one who has obtained even
a glimmering of the meaning of these spiritual
realities can hesitate to confess that his soul's
most passionate craving after justice may be
superabundantly fulfilled in such ways, even in
worlds not necessarily divided into distinct
realms of reward and punishment, but where,
as in another school, and higher stage of being,
our spiritual part shall have freer scope, and
leave the carnal in the shade.
We now proceed to the next step of the argument, which, as yet, makes no appeal beyond
experience. We assume that mankind at large
anticipates and desires that justice may be done.
Is it done in this world? We have seen that it
is not outwardly or perspicuously vindicated: is
there, nevertheless, room left to suppose that it
possibly may have been fulfilled in ways hidden
from us, such as the satisfaction of a mens
conscia recti, or the misery of secret remorse?




108        The Life After Death.
The answer to this question has been commonly evaded, or the question itself blinked,
under what I conceive to be a most mistaken
sense of reverence to God. Sometimes we are
told it is not for us to say what is justice; and
sometimes we are reminded how little we can
guess the hidden joys and pangs of our fellowcreatures, and how easily these may counterbalance all external conditions. I do not think
the case is so obscure as is alleged; and I am
quite sure that reverence for God never requires
us to close our eyes to facts. What is in question is not any abstract or occulta justitia, but
precisely our idea of justice, - that expectation,
which, by some means or other, has been raised
in the hearts of men from the beginning of history till now. Is that fulfilled, or room left for
its fulfilment, in this world? I do not hesitate
to affirm that it is not fulfilled, and that, in
thousands of cases, there is no room left wherein
it can possibly be fulfilled up to the hour of
death. No retribution which could satisfy it
has had space to be exhibited. The tyrant, with
his last breath, has crowned the pyramid of his
crimes, and died with the smile of gratified
cruelty on his lips. The martyr has expired in
tortures of body and of mind. Nothing that
can be imagined to have been experienced of




The Life After Death.        109
remorse in the one soul, or of joy in the other,
would rectify the balance.
Two classes of readers will demur to what I
have to say on this topic. One will take the
injustice of the world to be so notorious a fact
as to need no elaborate proof, and will resent as
superfluous any attempt to establish it. The
other will be shocked by the naked statement,
and may even contradict it with impatience.
Let us clear up our position a little. What a
well-developed sense of justice requires for its
satisfaction is, that no one being shall suffer
more than he has deserved, or undergo the penalty of another's guilt. It is nothing to the
satisfaction of such justice, that nine hundred
and ninety-nine persons are treated with exactest equity, if the humblest and meanest bears
sufferings disproportioned to his deserts, nor if
the punishment which A has merited falls upon
B, and the reward of the virtue of C be enjoyed
by D. A single instance of positive injustice
done to a single individual would suffice to
decide the point. Justice is not fulfilled on
earth, if there has been one such case since
creation.
Now, will any one dispute that such cases
have occurred, not singly, but by hundreds and
thousands? Of course there are innumerable
10




110        The Life After Death.
instances, seemingly of crying injustice, in
which, could we see behind the scenes, and
know all the bearings of the matter, we should
find no injustice at all. But there are, also,
other instances in which, rationally speaking, it
is certain there was injustice; and no further
knowledge conceivable could alter our judgment. With all reverence, I will endeavor to
state one such case, about which there can be
little obscurity.
Jesus Christ was assuredly one of the holiest
of men. IHe died in undeserved tortures; and
at the supreme hour of his agony he cried out
in despair, " My God, why hast. thou forsaken
me?"    Instead of flooding his departing soul
with the rapturous vision which might have
neutralized all the horrors of the cross, it
pleased the Father, whom he loved as no man
had loved him before, to withdraw all consciousness of his presence, and to leave him to expire
in darkness and doubt. That ancient story,
stripped of all its misleading supernaturalism,
seems to me the sufficient evidence that God
reserves his justice for eternity.
It is not only the crimes and merits of the
death-hour to which justice fails to mete due
measure upon earth. Nothing is more obvious
than that men are continually doomed to suffer




The Life After Death.       111
for the evil-doing of others, and that the good
which one has sown another reaps. Health and
disease, honor and ignominy, wealth and poverty, every thing we can name in the way of
external good and evil, come to us more often
by the virtue and vice of our parents and neighbors than by any merit or demerit of our own.
Again: the enormous inequality in the distribution of penalties for similar offences leaves a
huge mass of injustice which it is impossible to
suppose is often providentially rectified in this
life. For myself, I do not hesitate to say that
the intolerable cruelty with which sins of
unchastity in women are visited all over the
world, in comparison of the immunity from disgrace enjoyed by profligate men, decides for me
the question. Could we realize the reflections
of many a poor wretch banished from her home
for her first transgression, and driven on helplessly, scourged by hunger and infamy, deeper
and deeper into ruin, till she lies wrecked in
body and soul, - could we understand her feelings as she compares her lot with that of the
man who first tempted her to sin, and whose
fault has never stood in the way of his prosperity or reputation, - we should then learn somewhat of how the supposed justice of the world
appears from another side from that on which
the happy behold it.




112        The Life After Death.
In a world where such things happen every
day, is it possible to maintain that Providence
trims the balance of justice on this side the
grave, or that the inner life's history, if revealed to us, would rectify any apparent outward
inequality? The horror of such cases lies precisely in this, -that the hideously excessive
punishment of the one sinner consists in the
fact that she is forced helplessly into the deepest
moral pollution; while the light penalty of the
other leaves him lifelong space for restoration
to self-respect and virtue.
When we go'back from our own age of comparative equity to darker times, or pass to the
contemplation of the wrongs suffered in semibarbarous countries, the impressions of injustice
multiply and deepen. We think of the hundred
thousand helpless creatures burnt to death for
the impossible crime of witchcraft; the victims
of bigotry or statecraft who have languished
out their lives in the dungeons of the Inquisition, of the Bastille, of every castle which
frowned over the plains of mediaeval Europe;
of the myriads who suffered by that huge
mockery of justice, the question by torture; of
the untold miseries of the slaves and serfs of
classic and modern times; and, finally, of the
crowning mystery of all, the woful sufferings




The Life After Death.        113
of innocent little babes and harmless brutes:
and as these things pass before us, instead of
doubting whether justice sometimes fails, we
begin to doubt whether all history be not the
record of its failure; and, like Shelley, we are
ready to talk of " this wrong world."
What does Faith say now? Surely she stakes
her whole authority on the assertion that there
is another life where such failures of justice will
be rectified? The moral argument for immortality, drawn from the consideration of its necessity to give ethical completion to the order of
Providence, is quite irrefragable. Either moral
arguments have no practical validity, or in this
case, at all events, we may rely upon the conclusion to which they point. Man's noblest and
most disinterested passion - a passion which
may well be deemed the supreme manifestation
of the divine element in his nature - will, if
death be the end of existence, have proved a
miserable delusion; while God himself will
prove to have created us, children of the dust,
to love and hope for justice, but himself to disregard justice on the scale of a disappointed
world.
I have devoted so large a space to this particular line of considerations in favor of a life
after death, because I conceive that it has
10




114        The Life After Death.
hardly received all the attention it deserves, or
been generally stated as broadly as is requisite
to exhibit its enormous force.  We are not
unfrequently reminded that our personal sense
of justice is unsatisfied in this world; but it is
rarely set forth, that it is the sacred thirst of
the whole human race for justice which is
defrauded, if there be no' world beyond. We
are often exhorted to hope that the Lord of conscience will not prove himself less just towards
us than he requires us mortals to be to one
another; but we are not bidden resolutely and
with filial confidence to say - the more boldly,
so much the more reverently - either man is
immortal, or God is not just.
II. Another line of thought leading to the
same conclusion lies parallel with the above, but
can here be only briefly indicated. Creation, as
we behold it, presents a scene in which not
only justice fails to be completed, but no single
purpose, such as we can attribute for a moment
to a good and wise Creator, is thoroughly worked
out or fulfilled. If we take the lowest hypothesis, and say he meant us merely to be happy, -
to have just such a preponderance of pleasure
over pain as should make existence, on the
whole a boon, and not a curse, - then it is clear
that there are multitudes with regard to whom




The Life After Death.        115
his purpose fails; as, for example, the poor babes
who come into the world diseased, and who
die, after weeks or months of pain, without
enjoyment of any kind. And if we take a more
worthy view of the purpose of creation, and
suppose that God has made us, and placed us in
this world of trial, to attain the highest end of
finite beings, namely, virtue, and union with his
own Divine Spirit, then still more obviously, for
thousands of men and women, this blessed purpose is abortive; for their mortal life has ended
in sin, and utter alienation from God and goodness. If God be wise, he cannot have made
his creatures for ends he knew they would never
reach; nor, if he be good, can he have made
them only for suffering, or only for sin. There
is no escape from the conclusion to which faith
points unhesitatingly; namely, to a world
wherein the beneficent designs of God will
finally be carried out.
As the preceding argument appealed to the
justice of God, so this one hinges on his
goodness and his wisdom. It is essentially a
theistic argument, as distinguished from the
pantheistic glorification of intellectual greatness.  The pantheist says that a philospher
ought to be immortal; for he is the crown of
things. The theist says that a tortured slave,




116        The Life After Death.
a degraded woman, must be immortal; for God's
creature could not have been made for torture
and pollution. To minds which have been wont
to ponder on the theme of the meaning and
purpose of creation, this ground of faith in
immortality is, perhaps, the most broadly satisfactory of any. Having once learned to think
of God as,the almighty Guide, who is leading
every soul he has made to the joy of eternal
union with himself, it becomes simply impossible to lower that conception, and think of him
as content to " let him that is unjust be unjust
still," and permit his rebellious child to perish
forever with a blasphemy on his lips.
III. Again: the incompleteness and imperfection of the noblest part of man, compared to
the finished work which creation elsewhere presents, affords ground for the presumption that
that noblest part has not yet reached the development it is intended to attain. The green
leaf gives no promise of becoming any thing but
a leaf; and in due time it withers, and drops
to the ground, without exciting in the beholder
any sense of disappointment. But the flowerbud holds out a different prospect.  If the
canker-worm devour it ere it bloom into a rose,
we are sensible of grievous failure; and a gar.
den in which all the buds should so perish would




The Life After Death.        117
be more hideous than any desert. The body of
a man grows to its full stature and complete
development; but no man has ever yet reached
his loftiest mental stature, or the plenitude of
moral strength and beauty of which he is capable. If the simile be just which compares the
physical nature to a scaffolding, and the spiritual to the temple built up withiil;, then we
behold the strange anomaly of a mere framework made so perfect, that it could gain nothing,
were it preserved to the fabulous age of the
patriarchs; while the temple within is never
finished, and is often an unsightly heap. The
"City of God" cannot be built of piles never
to be completed, nor his garden of souls filled
with flowers destined all to canker ere they
bloom.
IV. Human love also urges on us an appeal
to faith, which has probably been to millions of
hearts the most conclusive of all. We are fond
of quoting the assertion, that
"'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
But its truth may very much be questioned,
unless we can trust that the " many waters" of
the dark river " cannot quench love," and that
we shall surely rejoice still in that light of life




118        Thie Life After Death.
upon the farther shore. Intense love becomes
torture, if we believe it to be a transient joy, the
"meteor gleam of a starless night," and fear
that it must soon go out in unfathomable gloom.
To think of the one whose innermost self is to
us the world's chief treasure, the most beautiful
and blessed thing God ever made, and believe
that at any moment that mind and heart may
cease to be, and become only a memory, every
noble gift and grace extinct, and all the fond love
for ourselves forgotten forever,- this is such
agony, that, having once known it, we should
never dare again to open our hearts to affection,
unless some ray of hope should dawn for us
beyond the grave. Love would be the curse of
mortality, were it to bring always with it such
unutterable pain of anxiety, and the knowledge
that every hour which knitted our heart more
closely to our friend, also brought us nearer to
an eternal separation. Better never to have
ascended to that high Vita Nuova where selflove is lost in another's weal, better to have
lived like the cattle, which browse and sleep
while they wait the butcher's knife, than to
endure such despair.
But is there nothing in us which refuses to
believe all this nightmare of the final sundering
of loving hearts? Love itself seems to announce




The Life After Death.        119
itself as an eternal thing. It has such an ele.
ment of infinity in its tenderness, that it never
fails to seek for itself an expression beyond the
limits of time; and we talk, even when we know
not what we mean, of "undying affection,"
" immortal love." It is the only passion, which,
in the nature of things, we can carry with us
into another world; and it is fit to be prolonged,
intensified, glorified forever. It is not so much
a joy we may take with us, as the only joy
which can make any world a heaven when the
affections of earth shall be perfected in the
supreme love of God. It is the sentiment which
we share with God, and by which we live in
him, and he in us. All its beautiful tenderness,
its noble self-forgetfulness, its pure and ineffable delight, are the rays of God's sun of love
reflected in our souls.
Is all this to end in two poor heaps of silent
dust decaying slowly in their coffins side by side
in the vault? If so, let us have done with
prating of any faith in heaven or earth. We
are mocked by a fiend. Mephistopheles is on
the throne of the universe.
V. Another and very remarkable moral argument for immortality was put forth some years
ago by Prof. Newman, and has never (to my
knowledge) attracted the attention it deserves.




120          The Life After 1Death.
It cannot be stated more succinctly than in his
own volume     of "Theism"      (p. 75).    After
describing our pain at the loss of a friend, he
continues, -
" But if virtue grieve thus for lost virtue justly,
How, then, must God, the fountain of virtue, feel?
If our highest feelings, and the feelings of all the holy,
Guide rightly to the divine heart, then it would grieve
likewise,
And grieve eternally, if goodness perish eternally.
Nay, and as a man who should live ten thousand years,
Sustained miraculously amid perishing generations,
Would sorrow perpetually in the perpetual loss of friends,
Even so some might judge the divine heart likewise
Would stint its affections towards the creatures of a
day..
Would it not be a yawning gulf of ever-increasing sorrow
Losing every loved one just when virtue was ripening,
And foreseeing perpetual loss, friend after friend, forever,
So that all training perishes, and has to be begun anew,
Winning new souls to virtue, to be lost as soon as won?
If, then, we must not doubt that the Highest has deep love
for the holy,
Such love as man has for man in pure and sacred friendship,
We seem justly to infer that those whom God loves are
deathless;
Else would the divine blessedness be imperfect and
impaired.
Nor avails it to reply by resting on God's infinitude,
Which easily supports sorrows which would weigh us
down;




The Life After Death.          121
For if to promote virtue be the highest end with the
Creator,
Then to lose his own work, not casually and by exception,
But necessarily and always, agrees not with his infinitude
More than with his wisdom, nor more than with his
blessedness.
In short, close friendship between the Eternal and the
perishing
Appears unseemly to the nature of the Eternal,
Whom it befits to keep his beloved, or not to love at all.
But to say God loveth no man is to make religion vain:
Hence it is judged that' whatsoever God loveth liveth
with God.'"
In the five ways now specified, the moral arguments drawn from the phenomena of human
life and sentiment, and from all that we may
conjecture of the divine purposes, lead up indirectly to the conclusion that there must be
another act of the drama after that on which
the curtain falls at death.
There remain some other lines of thought,
converging towards the same end, which cannot
now be followed out; as, for example, the ennobling influence of the belief in immortality,
which faith refuses to trace to    a delusion.
Space only can be reserved to touch briefly on
the two forms in which      mankind   possesses
something like a direct consciousness of a life
after death, and in which faith therefore, speaks,
11




122        The Life After Death.
immediately, and without any preliminary argument. These two forms are, 1st, The general
din consciousness of the mass of mankind, that
the soul of a man never dies; 2d, The specific
vivid consciousness of devout men, that their
spiritual union with God is eternal.
VI. The first of these forms of direct faith
is too familiar a topic to need much elucidation.
The extreme variability of its manifestations in
nations and individuals makes it difficult to
estimate its just value, and to decide whether
we have a right to treat it as a mere tradition,
or as the quasi-universal testimony of the soul
to its own natural superiority to death. It may
be remarked, however, that the belief, when
examined carefully (e.g., as in Alger's admirable "History of the Doctrine of a Future
Life "), bears very much the characteristics we
should attribute to a real and spontaneous instinct, and not to any common tradition, such
as that of a deluge, disseminated by the various
branches of the human family in their migrations. 1st, The belief begins early, though,
probably, not in the very earliest stage of human development; 2d, It attains its maximum
among the highest races of mankind, in the
great primary forms of civilization (e.g., the
Egyptian, Vedic-Aryan, and Persian); 3d, It




The Life After Death.       123
projects such various and even contrasted ideals
of the future world (e.g., Valhalla and Nirvana),
that it must be supposed to have sprung up indigenously in each race, and by no means to
have been borrowed by one from the other; 4th,
Finally, the instinct begins to falter at a later
stage of civilization, when self-consciousness is
more developed, and the practice of arguing
about our beliefs takes the place of more simple
habits of mind, -a stage which we may, perhaps, exactly mark in Roman history, when, as
Cicero tells us, "there were some in his day
who had begun to doubt of immortality."  All
these characters would certainly form "notes"
of an original instinct in the human soul, testifying to its own undyingness, and are not easily
accounted for on any other hypothesis.
It will be observed that this consciousness
of immortality, and the expectation of justice,
spoken of above, are entirely distinct things.
Though confluent at last, they have remote
sources. It is at a comparatively late stage of
history, that the expectation of justice projects
itself beyond the horizon of this world, and at
an equally late one when the consciousness of
immortality crystallizes into a definite idea of
a state of rewards and punishments.
Direct reliance on this consciousness of im



124        The Life After Death.
mortality, when it happens to be strongly developed in the individual, is probably the origin
of that robust faith which we still find, not
rarely, among persons of warm and simple natures. Those amongst us who lack such vivid
instinct may yet obtain, indirectly, a ground of
confidence from the observation of its almost
universal prevalence, implying its divine origin
and consequent veracity. That the Creator of
the human race should have so formed our
mental constitution as that such a belief should
have sprung up, and prevailed over the whole
globe, and yet that it should be, from first to
last, a mistake, is an hypothesis which faith
cannot endure. The God of truth will have
deceived the human race, if the soul of a man
dies with his body.
VII. Lastly: the most perfect and direct
faith in immortality is assuredly that which is
vouchsafed to the happy souls who personally
feel that they have entered into a relation with
God, which can never end. It is hard to speak
on this sacred theme without appearing to some
irreverent, to others fanatical. I can but say
that there are men and women who have given
their testimony in this matter whom I think
we do well to trust, even as prophets who have
stood on Pisgah. "Faith in God and in our




The Life After Death.       125
eternal union with him," said one of them,
"are not two dogmas of our creed, but one."
That inner experience which is the living
knowledge of the one truth brings home also
the other. At a certain stage of religious progress, we cannot doubt that the man learns by
direct perception that God loves him, and that
" he is in God, and God in him," in a sense
which conveys the warrant of eternal life. As
humbler souls find their last word of faith to be
that of Marcus Aurelius, - " Thou wilt do well
for me and for the world,"-such a man has
the loftier right to say with assurance, " Thou
wilt guide me by thy counsel, and afterwards
receive me to glory. Thou wilt not leave my
soul in hell, nor suffer thine holy one to see
corruption."
Perhaps the knowledge of his immortality
has come to the saint in some supreme hour of
adoring happiness. Perhaps it has come when
the clouds of death seemed to close round him,
and, instead of darkness, lo! there was a great
light, and a sense of life flowing fresh and
strong against the ebbing tide of mortality; a
life which is the same as love, the same as
infinite joy and trust. It matters not whence
or how it came. Thenceforth there is for him
no more doubt. The next world is as sure as
the present, and God is shining over all.




126        The Life After Death.
Such, for a few blessed souls, seems to be the
perfect " evidence of things not seen."  But
can their full faith supply our lack? Can we
see with their eyes, and believe on their report?
It is only possible in a very inferior measure.
Yet if our own spiritual life have received even
some faint gleams of the "light which never
came from sun or star," then once more will
our faith point the way to immortality; for we
shall know in what manner such truths come
to the soul, and be able to trust that what is
dawn to us may be sunrise to those who have
journeyed nearer to the east than we; who
have surmounted duty more perfectly, or passed
through rivers of affliction into which our feet
have never dipped. God cannot have deluded
them in their sacred hope of his eternal love.
If their experience be a dream, all prayer and
all communion may likewise be dreams. In so
far as we have faith in such prayer and communion, we can believe in the high experience of
the saints, and so in the immortal life to which
it witnesses.




The Life After Death.        127
II.
T   HE immense growth which has taken place
in the moral consciousness of mankind
within historical times may be estimated by a
simple observation. The future life, which was
once altogether uncolored by moral hues, has,
for ages, been painted as if it were a moral
life only - all its happiness, reward; and all its
suffering, either retribution or purification. In
the preceding paper, it was remarked, in passing,
that the consciousness of immortality, and the
expectation of justice, are totally distinct things,
and, though confluent at last, arise in remote
sources. It is at a comparatively late historical era that the expectation of justice projects
itself beyond the horizon of this world, and
equally late when the consciousness of immortality takes shape as an ideal state of rewards
and punishments beyond the grave. But, having once passed into this phase, it is astonishing
how rapidly our moral aspect of the future
world begins to occupy the minds of men,




128        The Life After Death.
almost to the exclusion of every other. The
analogies of the present existence (if they
might be accounted in any measure as guides)
would lead us to infer that hereafter, as here,
the moral life will be only one of the elements
of existence, and, though the most important
of all (and therefore more discernible at a
higher elevation), yet never absolutely bare
and alone, but rather, like the granite foundations of the eternal hills, clothed with forests
of usefulness, and flowery meads of beauty and
affection. Instead of this, the popular idea for
millenniums has been, that, the moment a man
dies, he goes, not into a higher school with its
lessons and its play (often the most instructive
of lessons), but into a divine police-court, where
the presiding magistrate -Minos or Osiris, or
he who frowns behind the altar of the Sistine
- is always sitting in readiness to send him to
the dread prison on one hand, or to dole him
out the arrears of pay for his faith and virtues
on the other. When that sentence has been
passed, all that follows throughout eternity is
(according to the same conception) merely a
sequel thereof, - either punishment or reward,
under different forms of suffering or enjoyment.
Of course, among persons accustomed to
think freely for themselves, such views as these




The Life After Death.         129
carry no authority; but it would be well, if,
before turning our attention to a study of the
problems connected with the possible conditions
of a future life, we could shake ourselves altogether free of them, and start afresh. That
which the past has really bequeathed to us is
an immense consensus of the human race in
favor of the two opinions, "that the soul of a
man never dies," and that "justice will be done
hereafter, if not here." The value of this
almost universal testimony is (as I have endeavored to show in the preceding part of this
essay) very great indeed. But, beyond these
two great general affirmations, the voice of the
ages can say nothing to us of the smallest weight
concerning either the details of the life to come,
or of the special form in which justice is to be
fulfilled. The soul may have consciousness of
its own immortality; and the moral sense may
point to the final triumph of justice, as the
needle points to the magnetic pole: but the
details of how, when, and where, the future life
is to be spent, or how justice is to be fulfilled,
are matters regarding which it is impossible
that we can have any consciousness; and such
ideas as we inherit concerning them must needs
have come to us through the exercise of the
mythopceic faculty of men of old, elevated, as




130        The Life After Death.
time went on, to the rank of divine revelations.
And it is to be remarked, that as these ideas
(e.g., that of a New Jerusalem) were evolved
in accordance with the psychology, politics, aesthetics, and all other conditions of the community which gave them birth, so they inevitably
bear the stamp of their age; and we entangle
ourselves in endless anachronisms by retaining
them now, even with widest latitude of Swedenborgian type-making. Few readers of Gibbon will forget the scorn wherewith that' Lord of irony, the master-spell
Which stung his foes to hate which grew from fear,"
describes the origin of the Apocalyptic vision.
In the state of society in the Roman empire in
the first and second centuries, a town was the
centre of all delights, and the country was considered a place of banishment. "A city," he
says, "was accordingly constructed in the skies
of gold and jewels."  Now in England, on the
contrary, in the nineteenth century, nothing
can be further from our hotions of peace and
repose than a walled town, even if provided
with gates of the singularly incongruous material of pearls. Rather, when Martin, some
years ago, desired to paint the " Plains of Heaven," he innocently sketched a handsome English




The Life After Death.       131
pleasure-ground, with a distant view,- let us
say of the Weald of Kent, or of the Shropshire
woodlands with the Welsh mountains in the
horizon. Had he attempted to depict the blessed walking up and down on the trottoirs of a
gold-paved street, his critics would have treated
him as a caricaturist of the legend of Whittington, rather than as an illustrator of the Vision
of the Seer of Patmos. And yet it may be
questioned, whether, in the minds of thousands
amongst us, orthodox and heterodox, some dim
idea of the Apocalyptic city does not even yet
arise whenever we think of another life,- an
idea, perhaps, more directly derived, in our case,
from Bunyan than from St. John. It would be
superfluous to remark further, how the doctrine
of the resurrection of the body, which accommodated itself to the pneumatology of the
Egyptians and Jewish Pharisee, still colors the
notions of persons who have (so far as they are
conscious) entirely renounced any such belief,
and who are quite aware of the insolubility of
the problems concerning spirit and matter, of
which the ancients cut the knot with so much
decision. If we would avoid following in the
wake of perfectly unseaworthy speculations, we
must needs let all these notions drift away from
us at once and forever.




132        The Life After Death.
Another order of errors, from which it is also
very desirable we should clear our minds, are
those which arise from the old view of the
Creator as a Deus ex macAina, always ready
miraculously to interfere with the order of
things, and bring his moral will suddenly to
bear upon and snap the chain of physical
events. If the soul does, as we believe, survive
the dissolution of the body, then that survival
is assuredly a natural event, prepared for, even
from the first beginnings of our physical existence, and taking place normally as the newborn child enters the world. The child comes
into the light out of darkness, and we seem to
pass into darkness out of light; but the one
transition must be as natural as the other. It
is among the "infinite possibilities of Nature,"
- Nature, whose laws are the changeless habits
of God, -that the immortality of the human
soul must be henceforth anticipated, not among
the beneficent freaks of an erratic Omnipotence.
Excluding these ancient misleadings, and
endeavoring to stand face to face with the bare
fact that the self of man must be disembodied,
if it survive death, what are the conditions of
existence conceivable under such severance?
It is a truism all too familiar, that an unborn




The Life After Death.        133
babe might prophesy of the flowers and stars
which are shortly to meet its eyes, as well as a
living man tell of the things which lie beyond
the tomb.   But I apprehend that the utter,
unilluminable darkness which conceals the
whole outer environment of the future life (a
darkness which no apocalypse could lighten)
does not close quite so impenetrably as has
been generally supposed over the conditions of
the inner world which we must needs carry
with us. Our position is, in a measure, like that
of a blind man who should be told, that, on a
certain day, he should both receive his sight,
and suffer amputation of his arms. What receiving his sight may be, he cannot in the
remotest degree guess or understand; but he
may form some, not wholly false, conception of
what it will be to lose his limbs. At death, a
portcullis falls on the senses, the appetites are
cut off at their roots, and the affections are subjected to a strain of changed conditions hitherto
untried. Perhaps still more intimate changes
may be involved; and, with the loss of its braintablet, memory may alter its character. In any
case, our whole past world is gone, whatever
new one may, either immediately or at a remoter
future, take its place, and supply us with fresh
sensations and ideas.  Like creatures which
12




134        The Life After Death.
have hitherto inhabited the waters, we quit the
element in which we have lived and moved and
had our being; and whatever we have henceforth to experience must come from another.
Yet we carry ourselves into the new element, -
selves which must be affected most importantly
by the transition, but which cannot, in the
nature of things, lose their individuality, or
change instantaneously their ethical status. In
the following pages, regard will be paid exclusively to those problems which arise on contemplating the simple fact of disembodiment and
its consequences; and no attempt whatever
will be made to construct any theory of the
outward conditions of the surviving self, or its
possible environment.  Further, it must be
understood that it is rather with the hope of
stating such problems with some fresh clearness, and leaving the reader to choose between
the dilemmas which arise, than with the bolder
ambition of offering a solution of them, that I
have engaged in this task. Only in a few cases
has it seemed to me that there are indications
sufficientlyobvious to enable us to decide with
some degree of confidence regarding the true
answers to the eager questions of our hearts.
To avoid perpetual circumlocutions, I shall
speak generally of the disembodied self as the




The Life After Death.                135
"soul," without thereby intending to           commit
myself to any particular theory associated with
the word, either as distinguished        from   matter
or (according to the ancient pneumatology)
from  that much-misleading term, " spirit." 1
I. With regard to the intellectual part of us,
which may survive dissolution, the difficulties
seem even more abstruse and insoluble than
those which concern the love which may be
1 It may, perhaps, aid a little to bring reader and writer
to mutual comprehension in these obscure researches, if I say
that such idea as I have been able to form of the rationale of
immortality is, that life, vegetative, animated, conscious, and
self-conscious, forms a series of evolutions, not merely in the
sense of a higher and more elaborate organization, but of a
subtler essence, - a series of sheaths, out of which finer and
finer shoots grow successively, till at last comes the flower of
full consciousness, into whose heart the divine sun pours his
beams directly, and wherein is formed a seed which does not
perish when the petals fall in the dust. The stage of being
at which something, self-conscious or otherwise, survives the
dissolution of the body may be - nay (in my humble opinion),
is almost certainly- a lower one than we have been accustomned to consider. A few only out of the grounds of faith
in human immortality apply to the immortality of the higher
brutes; but human immortality being assumed as a given fact,
and a future life for man being predicated as normal, the
physiological laws (whatever they may be) under which such
survival takes place in our case are almost sure to apply to
creatures many of whom possess intelligence and sentiment
far surpassing those of human infants. The great argument
of justice, of course, applies to ill-used and innocent beasts
with even greater force than to similarly ill-used but more or
less guilty men.




136        The Life After Death.
renewed, or the justice which may be fulfilled
hereafter.  Is knowledge such as we gain on
earth an everlasting treasure? Can we lose it
any more than we can lose the food which we
have swallowed, and which has gone to make
up the tissue of our frames? Or, on the other
hand, can we keep it, and carry it with us,
entering the higher state, one of us as a philosopher, and the other as a boor?  If this last
hypothesis be the nearest to the truth, then we
ask, Whether all kinds of knowledge, or only
the knowledge which deals with Nature or
eternal things, have value in the other world?
Thus we find ourselves conducted to the practical query, Whether the education of earth
ought not to be carried on with reference to
the probable value of mental acquirements beyond the sphere of human concerns?    The
common and orthodox notion of immortality
seems to be, that the silliest or most ignorant
person, admitted into heaven, instantly becomes
wiser than Plato, and far better acquainted
with science than Humboldt. But even new
organs, new capacities, new revelations, can
scarcely convey such knowledge and wisdom
instantaneously.  The  philosopher who has
eagerly sought some hidden truth may find the
light immediately break on his soul; the man




The Life After Death.       137
of science, who has thoroughly understood, and
ardently endeavored to untie, the knots of creation's mysteries, may be enabled to loosen them
by the help of fresh faculties and wider vision:
but it seems well-nigh nonsense to talk of a
clown, who has no notion that there are hidden
truths or mysteries waiting explanation, receiving the whole flood of quasi-omniscience
into the narrow mill-dam of his soul. " To
him that hath shall be given."  For him that
hath not, some rudiments and dawning rays of
knowledge seem all that he is capable of receiving. The Hottentot who died in his kraal an
hour before Sir John Herschel, did he learn in
that hour more about the laws and motions of
the heavenly bodies than Herschel knew? Or
were Herschel's illumined eyes able to take in
at a glance what the Iottentot will take years
to learn, when, as the old Greek epitaph on
Thales has it, " He was removed on high because his eyes, dimmed by age, could no longer
from afar behold the stars "?
The difficulty of conceiving how any mental
act is hereafter to be performed without a brain,
which hitherto has been performed,- if not
"by," yet invariably "with" and "through,"
the brain, -has been, undoubtedly, immeasurably heightened by recent physiological dis12*




138        The Life After Death.
coveries, which have tended more and more at
each step to connect both thought and memory
with changes in cerebral matter. Dr. Carpenter's very remarkable paper in " The Contemporary Review" for May, 1873, "On the Hereditary Transmission of Acquired Psychical
Habits," goes very far indeed towards identifying alike the consciousness of present sensorial
impressions and the memory of past ones, with
physical changes in the brain; and however
willing we may be to retain the notion that
there is a soul in all cases (except, perhaps,
those of unconscious or involuntary cerebration), present and active, using the brain as its
instrument, and no more identifiable therewith
than the organist with his organ, we still find
ourselves face to face with an appalling problem,
when we try to imagine any way in which a
brainless soul can think or remember.  The
two hypotheses open to us in the matter are,
to suppose either, first, that the thing which
we speak of as the soul has many powers
undisclosed now, while it is wrapped in the
sheath of the body, -powers to perceive (as
magnetized persons have been supposed to do)
without use of eyes or ears, and corresponding
powers to remember without a note-book brain;
or, second, that (as Leibnitz insisted with re



The Life After Death.        139
gard to every finite intelligence) the soul is
necessarily always clothed with a material body
more or less rarefied, and that it finds in its
future "spiritual body" of the old Pauline
type fresh organs of consciousness. Of these
abysses of speculation, the present writer has
no intention to do more than skirt the edge,
merely refusing to cover them up, as is too
often done, with cut-and-dried phrases, like
traps awaiting us in the hours of doubt and
darkness. The strain on moral and religious
faith caused by the difficulties attendant on
every theory of a life after death is simply
enormous; and, the more plainly we recognize
that it is so, the safer we are. He is a foolish
engineer who refuses to test, lest it should break
cown under the strain, the strength of the
bridge over which, ere long, every thing dear
to him must pass. One point, however, regarding these solemn problems may, I think, here
be justly noted, having, in effect, come out into
much clearer light than heretofore, in consequence of the physiological discoveries above
mentioned.   The hypothesis of a re-clothing
of the disembodied soul with a new body is
now the less tenable of the two, unless we are
prepared to anticipate an obliteration of memory. It will not suffice to believe that fresh




140        The Life After Death.
senses may be developed in a future frame.
Such senses might properly reveal to us our
future surroundings, as our present ones reveal
those which are now present.  But it is not
conceivable that they should reveal the past;
and, if the memorial tablet of the brain be lost,
it would appear that we must needs find our
new organ of thought a tabula rasa. Thus we
are shut up in the dilemma, that either the soul
carries its own memory with it (ill which case
it would seem as if it may as naturally retain
all other faculties, and so need no fresh body),
or that it does not carry its memory, and so,
when re-embodied, lives beyond Lethe, utterly
unaware of what has passed in this state of
existence.  I am not disposed to insist that
there could be absolutely no fulfilment of justice, no satisfaction of the unquenched thirst
of love, in a world between which and our
own had fallen a veil of oblivion. The consequences of our acts (as I shall by and by
attempt to show) may bring about sure retribution by working themselves into the very
tissue of our souls; and love may draw once
more together, and perfect the friendship of
spirits whose affinity first proclaimed itself here
below. But, undoubtedly, so far as we can yet
grasp such thoughts, the retention or restoration




The Life After Death.       141
of memory is almost, if not absolutely, a sine
qua non among the conditions of such a life
after death as shall altogether fulfil those aspirations which (God-given as we believe them
to be) are our chief pledge that such a life
awaits us.
II. Very interesting, though less important,
are the speculations regarding another world,
which refer to that side of our intellectual
nature which we call the esthetic. How wijl
the beauty of our new habitations touch us?
Or will it be the yet unexplored loveliness of
our own planet which we shall behold at last,
and no longer with careworn hearts or teardimmed eyes? To how many of the sick and
suffering, the narrow-fortuned, the toil-enslaved,
have the scenes of Alps and Andes, Grecian
Isles and Yosemite Valleys, been dreams of
longing never appeased ere death closed their
unsatisfied eyes? What bliss might be given
to many of thee purest of souls, who have
passed whole years imprisoned in sordid streets,
or amid all the ugliness of a sick-chamber, by
merely permitting them "to see those things
which we see," of woods and hills and waters,
the sunrise and the moon walking in glory amid
the clouds?   We dare not say it is a debt




142        The Life After Death.
owing to such souls that they should one day
behold God's beautiful world; but assuredly it
would be no improbable display of his love to
show it to them.
All these questions, however, and all which
concern the mental faculties in another life, are
(as I said a few pages back) even more rebuffing to our poor thoughts and speculations than
those which concern the future of the affections
and the conscience; and to these I hasten, as
also infinitely the most interesting.
III. If there be a life after death, it can
scarcely be but that love will assume therein a
much higher place than it holds here. What
gifts of tongues and prophecy may cease, what
wit and learning and science may "vanish
away," we cannot define; but that love " never
faileth " is no less sure than that we ourselves
shall continue to be. God cannot, - it is reverence itself that makes us say it, - God cannot
have made our human hearts.as if expressly to
contain and feed that light of a world else so
dark, and yet permit the gleam  to be extinguished like the toy-lamps launched on the
Ganges, leaving them to go down the stream
of eternity in the blackness of night. If he
can and does so ordain it, he is not the God




The Life After Death.      143
who has given us the law of justice and fidelity,
nor the adored, all-merciful One whom we have
found in life's supremest hours in the Holy of
holies of prayer.  He is not our God; and
even if he (or it?) be a " Stream of Tendency,"
an " Universum," or the " Deity of the Religion
of Inhumanity," which our various new teachers would have us recognize, religion is evermore closed to us; for we cannot love him, and
the hope of immortality vanishes as a dream.
As Florence Nightingale recently wrote, " Our
ground for believing in a future life is simply
because God is."  His character is the pledge
of our immortality, and it is quite as much the
pledge that the love, which is the most godlike
thing in us, shall be immortal too. Our divines
are so jealous of what they have deemed to be
God's " glory " as the Judge of all the earth,
that they have supposed judging to be altogether his chief concern, and that he calls us
from the grave expressly to punish us or to
reward. But, beside these royal functions of
Deity (if we may so express it), there must remain the cares of the tender Father, the divine
Friend; and it would be strange indeed, if these
should not be vindicated by that good One quite
as surely and perfectly as the others.
One of the many questions which crowd on




144        The Life After Death.
us, when we attempt to construct any theory of
what the future of the affections may be, has,
doubtless, made the hearts of the bereaved ache
whenever it has occurred to them. What warrant have we, that dying long years after our
lost ones, perchance in wholly different spiritual
and moral conditions, we shall ever meet or
overtake them, and not, rather, remain "evermore a life behind," " through all the secular to
be "?  Even granting that they live, and we
live, who has told us that our paths, which happened to approach, like those of a comet and a
planet, for the mere moment of earthly existence, will ever touch again throughout the
cycles of eternity? In view of these agonizing
questions, we can scarcely wonder at those who
have killed themselves with their beloved ones,
rather than allow them to go out alone into the
darkness, striving thus to secure a natural proximity, even while they madly placed the moral
distance of a great crime between them. The
supreme kindness of Providence would seem to
be shown, when it suffers two loving spirits to
pass linked in inseparable embrace through the
awful portals of the unknown world. Could
we anticipate such a lot with certainty, death
would lose half its terrors and all its sadness.
And again: another painful doubt is, How




The Life After Death.        145
shall we recognize our friends in a disembodied
or re-embodied state? Suppose that we both
live again and meet again, how shall we be sure,
that in some strange, glorified form, which passes
us by all unwittingly and unrecognized, we shall
not miss the being whom we would traverse
half eternity to find? These are the anxious,
but, after all, somewhat childish, questions which
the restlessness of severed affection naturally
suggests. But, in truth, we are quite as sure of
re-union with our beloved ones, and of mutual
recognition, as of the immortal life itself. As
we have just observed, the ground of our belief
in that life is the same which guarantees the
restoration of love, and therefore, implicitly,
some sure method of re-union. How it is to be
brought about is the concern of Him who will
lead us into that unseen land partly for that
very purpose. Perhaps we may most readily
conceive of it by supposing (what is, for all
other reasons, most probable), that, in another
life, we shall be indefinitely more free than we
are now, more able to move and to communicate
through space, and having, perhaps, no physical
wants, be at length disinthralled from the endless Liliputian cords which bind us here, and
often keep apart the tenderest friends.  And
again: as to the mutual recognition of departed
13




146        The Life After Death.
spirits, the question really is not, How should
we know, but, How should we not know, the
one who has been soul of our soul, in any form,
or in formless spiritual existence? Even through
the thick veil of the flesh, we are always dimly
conscious of the presence of love. One sympathizing heart amid a crowd of enemies makes
itself felt, and gives strength unspeakable. To
suppose that we could ever, at any time, be
brought into contact with the spirit which has
been nearest to our own, and not recognize it
under any disguise, is wholly gratuitously to
doubt our instincts. But why should we even
postulate that a disguise of any kind is to be
anticipated?  If the spirit wear any frame,
however ethereal, it must bear some resemblance
to the first, since both were the fitting shell of
the same soul. Such a portrait as Titian made
of a man may well stand forever at once for
the glorified image of what he was on earth, and
the faint and imperfect adumbration of what he
is in heaven. Our pitiful grief for
" The garments by the soul laid by,"
which we have placed folded upon the narrow
shelves of the tomb, the agony with which we
have thought of the grave-damp marring what
was so beautiful and so dear, will be soothed,




The Life After Death.       147
perchance, at last, when we behold the yet lovelier raiment of the same beloved soul, alike in
all that we loved so fondly, unlike, inasmuch as
every token of weakness and pain and age and
care will forever have disappeared.
Again: there are problems of another kind
which sometimes cloud the hopes of renewed
affection in another world. How, for example,
are we to reconcile the conflicting claims of
relatives and friends whom we have loved, each
supremely in his turn, but who now await us
together in the " land of the leal "? Supposing
there has been no failure of fidelity, but only
that, as the years flowed on, the love of the
parent, over whose grave the grass has many
times sprung and withered, has been replaced
(so far as one affection ever replaces another,
which is but little) by the love of a child; and,
as friends have drifted away, new attachments
have caught the tendrils of our hearts; and,
when the wife or husband of youth has long
left the earth, we have formed new ties no less
sacred and near? It is a part of the beneficent
order of things, that such transitions should
take place; and, looking back over life, it is
impossible, without ruthless violence to ourselves, to give the preference to one over the
other, or to be willing to renounce one for the




148        The Life After Death.
other. If the love of youth were more vehement, that of middle life is more strong: sweet
as were the affections of early years, still more
tender and grave and noble are the friendships
of age. But how is it possible for us to renew
simultaneously these relations which followed
each other successively? This is the old Sadducean question under a more refined form; and
the answer, that "in heaven there is neither
marrying, nor giving in marriage," is as little
satisfactory a solution to us as it can have been
to the disciples of Antigonus. The later doubt,
as well as the earlier, seems to have sprung out
of the same inveterate propensity for transferring the limitations and negations, as well as the
affirmations, of this life, to a higher sphere. Why
is it we cannot love now many friends with
equal intensity? It is only because we are so
limited, our time and thoughts are so bounded,
and (what is far worse) our hearts are so cold
and narrow, that even when we recognize that
A, B, and C are all deserving of our uttermost
love, we must needs make one supreme, and
give the others only the residue of our tenderness and remembrance. This is the true rationale of the limits of love on earth; and those
who treat them as if they were in themselves
good and desirable things, and who would pre



The Life After Death.       149
fer to give or receive only a narrow and exclusive affection, have hardly yet learned the real
sense of unselfish attachment.
"That love for one, from which there doth not spring
True love for all, is but a worthless thing." 1
But in a state of existence in which we
should be altogether nobler, larger, widerhearted, and pressed on no longer by the endless claims which break up our present time
into fragments, could we not, also, love more
than we do now?     Relieved from  fears of
wretched jealousies, with the cycles of immortality before us, and with the whole scope of
our natures widened, what should hinder but
that we should be able in the same happy
hearts to hold at once the love of all whom we
have ever loved truly on earth, ay, and of
new friends found in heaven? Even conjugal
love, fitting and inevitable as it is that there
should be exclusiveness in it now, may be as
tender hereafter, though no longer passionate,
when the wife meets again the husband, whom,
in dying, she prayed should find another to love
him as well.   She will not be less generous
there than here; nor will the bitter thought
that affection given to another is robbed from
1 Mrs. Browning's Sonnets.
13*




150        The Life After Death.
ourselves prevail more in such connections
hereafter than it does now in happy households
where the children love the parents the more
because they love each and all, and where the
father's and mother's hearts have widened with
every child born to their arms.
Yet no one can seriously believe, on reflection
(what many assume without it), that the next
life will be occupied by a continual return upon
the present. It cannot be that all our earthly
friendships and acquaintances will be renewed,
or that every one with whom we have had a
few moments' intercourse in the course of our
threescore years and ten will certainly meet us
again hereafter. Such re-unions would be, in
thousands of cases, wholly purposeless; and
only the old, narrow heaven could be imagined
to secure such an end. Where will the line be
drawn, if we ace sure to meet some, and by no
means sure to meet others? The answer is
hard to find; yet I think two obvious principles must prevail. One is the liberty of
which we have spoken, the freedom of the disembodied soul to seek out its own affinities in
the spiritual world; and the other is the moral
necessity which will be laid on us to redeem
the unatoned offences and shortcomings of
earth towards those from whom we have parted




The Life After Death.       151
in any thing short of right relations. It could
be no realm of peace to many of us, if we could
not at last say those words, "Forgive me,"
which have been on our lips ever since the hour
when we learned that the doors of the grave
had closed between us and one whom we had
wronged, miscontrued, failed to love as he
deserved.
" The right ear which is filled with dust
Hears little of the true or just."
But if we could not hope to speak hereafter,
" spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost," and let the
dead know all our repentance, immortality
would cease to represent the completion of the
web of existence. Some of the threads which
we most desire to take up would remain forever
ravelled. And we, too, for our share, must
receive the atonements of love and regret for
the pangs which unkindness, mistrust, moroseness, and perchance cruelty, have given us,
from the unjust severity and repression which
crushed the joy of childhood, to the last neglect
of tedious age. Not necessarily or even probably need there be any revision of special acts,
only (what we need so sorely) the admission
that the wrongs done to us are felt to have
been wrongs indeed, and the establishment




152        The Life After Death.
evermore of truer and more just relations.
These reflections belong more properly to the
succeeding portion of this paper, wherein the
moral state of departed souls will be considered; but I cannot but add one word here of
the overwhelming impressiveness of the view
opened to us through such a conception of justice as this. Not by the arbitrary sentence of
an omnipotent Judge, dismissing the persecutor
to the dungeons of hell, and seating the martyr
on the thrones of paradise, would our highest
thought be fulfilled, while the damned one
should forever curse and hate, and the glorified
know that he had an enemy even in the nethermost vaults of death. Only by the subduing
of the heart of the wrong-doer, the vanquishing
not of hint, but of his hate, and the melting of
his spirit in remorse and penitence at the feet
of his victim, can we conceive of the fitting
close of the awful drama. The penitence of
an enemy, which shall be his salvation as well
as his atonement to us — that we may accept
with solemn joy, even when risen a hundred-fold
nearer to God than we are now; but his physical torture, " where the worm dieth not, and
the fire is not quenched " - that we could not
endure, even were we to remain poor and imperfect human creatures still. All the glory of




The Life After Death.      153
the skies would be blackened by the smoke of
the pit, and through the anthems of the archangels our ears would catch the discord of the
wail of the lost.
In brief, then, the persons with whom we
may confidently expect to have relationships in
the world to come are, -
1. Those whom we have loved.
2. Those whom we have hated.
3. Those who have hated us.
I leave the reader to draw the very obvious
conclusions regarding the influence which such
expectations ought to have upon our present
feelings. To look on those whom we love as
ours forever- ours in a purer sphere than this
- is to ennoble and sanctify our love. To look
on those whom we hate, or on those who hate
us, as beings with whom, some day or other, we
must be reconciled, is to deprive hatred of its
sting, and almost to transform it into love.
But admitting that our hearts, in another
life, may be wide enough to gather into them
every affection of the past at once, it would
still seem hard to guess how the natural ties
of our human nature will bind us hereafter.
There are friendships which seem obviously
made for an eternal world, which have had
their roots in religious sympathies or the inter



154        The Life After Death.
change of moral help, and which would scarcely
need any modification to be transferred to the
spiritual realms. They have been a part of our
heaven always. But, on the other hand, there
are affections, if not more tender, yet more human, than these, which, when they are severed
by death, seem almost irreparably snapped
asunder. We and the departed may meet again
as spirits in a world of spirits, but never more
(so our hearts moan in their despair),-never
more as mother and child, son and father, husband and wife. All the infinite sweetness of
those purely human ties seems as if it must exhale, and be lost, when the last act of mortal
companionship has been accomplished, and the
kindred dust has been laid side by side. And
yet need we be so sure it is so? Are not our
thoughts of these temples of flesh, wherein God
has caused us to dwell, far too little reverent,
and too much tinged, even yet, with the old
gnostic notions of the impurity of matter, the
unholiness of Nature, which have pervaded
all post-Pauline Christianity? I cannot but
think that it is in a true direction modern sentiment is growing, while it tends continually to
dignify and hallow the body, and to find infinite
beauty and sacredness in the relations which
spring out of its mysterious laws. So long as




The Life After Death.       155
men and women deemed themselves holier as
celibates than as husbands and wives, and that
the laws of Nature were supposed to have been
set aside to give Christ an immaculate mother
(as if natural motherhood were not the divinest
thing God has made), -so long as this was the
case, it was inevitable that the bonds of consanguinity should be supposed to be finally unloosed
by death. But with other thoughts of our sacred human rights, of all the depth of meaning
which lies (rarely half fathomed here) in the
names of father and mother, brother and sister,
husband and wife, son and daughter, shall we
have no hope, that, when our spirits meet
again, it will be in such sort as that the old
beloved ties shall never be forgotten, but rather,
that what fell short in our comprehension and
enjoyment of them will yet be made up? It
seems to me almost to follow from the very
statement of the problem that it must be so.
But sin?  What can we hope or think of
future re-union, when heinous guilt has been
incurred on one side or the other? How are
relations and friends, once dear to each other,
to meet after the revelation of this gulf between their feet?
I confess that it has been with great surprise
that I have read the eloquent words on this




156        The Life After Death.
subject of a distinguished living writer, with
whose scheme of theology in general I have
almost entire sympathy, and for whose manly
honesty, and powerful grasp of thought, I entertain sincere admiration. In speculating on the
awful probabilities of "elsewhere," Mr. Greg
lays it down, as if it were an obvious truth,
that love must retreat from the discovery of
the sinfulness of the person hitherto beloved,
and that both saint and sinner will accept as
inevitable an eternal separation.1 Further: Mr.
Greg thinks it possible, that, at the highest
summit of finite existence, the souls which have
ascended together through all the shining ranks
for half an eternity of angelic friendship will
part company at last; thought forever superseding love. "Farewell, we lose ourselves in
light."  It would perhaps be wrong to say
that the two views hang logically together, and
that the mind which (with all its capacity to
understand and express the tenderest feelings)
yet holds that there may even possibly be something more divine than love, may well also
imagine that love cannot conquer sin. But is
it not only by a strange transposition in the
true table of precedence of human faculties
that either doctrine can be accepted? Let us
1 Enigmas, first edition, p. 263.




The Life After Death.       157
suppose two persons loving each other genuinely and tenderly in this life (so much is
granted in the hypothesis). The very power
of the worse to love the better truly and unselfishly is ipso facto evidence of his being loveworthy, of his having in him, in the depth of
his nature, the kernel of all goodness, the seed
out of which all moral beauty springs, and
which whosoever sees and recognizes in his
brother's soul cannot choose but love. " Spirit,"
says the Bhagvat Ghita in one of its deepest
utterances,-" spirit is always lovely."  There
is something at the very root of our being, which,
when revealed to any other spirit, calls forth
spontaneously sympathy and affection.  It is
because we do not commonly see this innermost
core of our fellow-men, because it is hidden
under a mass of fleshly lusts and worldly ambitions, or because they cover it up carefully in a
thousand folds of artificial and second-hand
sentiments, that they are so little interesting
to us. But let chance blow aside the mantle for
an instant, let us see a human heart in the
moment of its supreme joy or agony, remorse
or victory, and, hard as the nether mill-stone
as our own hearts may be, they will vibrate
like the Lia-Fail when the true king stood on
it to be crowned. When we conceive of a holy
14




158        The Life After Death.
God loving such creatures as ourselves, it is
only by the help of the faith that his eye can
see this "lovely spirit" beneath all its coverings and concealments. Whether there exists,
or has ever existed, a rational creature of God,
in whom there was no such germ of goodness
and innermost core of loveliness, it is impossible to say. Hideous tales there are of men,
with the hearts of tigers and the brains of murderers, who have passed through childhood and
youth without once displaying a trait of infant
tenderness or boyish affection, and who seem
utterly incapable of understanding what selfsacrificing love may mean.  The dog which
dies to save his master is a million-fold more
human than they. What may be the key to
the horrible mystery of such lives of moral
idiotcy, whether, indeed, they ever really exist
in all the deformity which has been painted,
and, if so, whether fearful physiological maleformations of brain, and the negation of every
good influence in childhood, are not to be held
accountable for the monsters' growth, I cannot
now argue. But one thing is certain from the
very statement of the case: a mall who has
ever once truly loved anybody is no such creature. The poor, self-condemned soul whom Mr.
Greg images as turning away in an agony of




The Life After Death.         159
shame and hopelessness from the virtuous friend
he loved on earth, and loves still at an immeasurable distance, - such a soul is not outside
the pale of love, divine or human. Nay, is he
not, even assuming his guilt to be black as
night, only in a similar relation to the purest
of created souls, which that pure soul holds to
the All-Holy One above?      If God can love
us, is it not the acme of moral presumption
to think of a human soul being too pure to
love any sinner, so long as in him there remains any vestige of affection?   The whole
problem is unreal and impossible. In the first
place, there is a potential moral equality between all souls capable of equal love; and the
one can never reach a height whence it may
justly despise the other. And, in the second
place, the higher the virtuous soul may have
risen in the spiritual world, the more it must
have acquired the godlike insight which beholds the good under the evil, and not less the
godlike love which embraces the repentant
prodigal.1
1 It is with sincere pleasure that I add, on the republication of this paper, the following generous admission and candid revision of his judigment, which Mr. Greg has appended
to the last (seventh) edition of his Enigmas of Life. After
quoting some observations of the Rev. J. Hamilton Thor and
the above, he says, -




160           The Life After Death.
But, if such a dream of future separation for
loving souls be wholly baseless, what can we
imagine of the real relation which may subsist
"The force of these objections to my delineation cannot
be gainsaid, and ought not to have been overlooked. No
doubt, a soul that can so love, and so feel its separation from
the objects of its love, cannot be wholly lost. It must still
retain elements of recovery and redemption, and qualities to
win and to merit answering affection. The lovingness of a
nature, its capacity for strong and deep attachment, must
constitute, there as here, the most hopeful characteristic out
of which to elicit and foster all other good. No doubt, again,
if the sinful continue to love in spite of their sinfulness, the
blessed will not cease to love in consequence of their blessedness. If so, it is natural, and indeed inevitable, to infer that
a chief portion of their occupation in the spiritual world will
consist in comforting the misery, and assisting in the restoration, of the lost whom they have loved. We shall pursue this
work with all the aid which our augmented powers on the
one side, and their purged perceptions on the other, will combine to gather round the task; and in the success and completion of that task, and in that alone, must lie the consummation of the bliss of heaven.
" But this is not the only, nor perhaps the most irresistible,
inference forced upon us by the above considerations. If so
vast an ingredient in the misery of the condemned consist in
the severance from those they love, this same severance must
form a terrible drawback from the felicity of the redeemed.
How, indeed, can they enjoy any thing to be called happiness hereafter, if the bad - their bad, not strangers, but their
dearest intimates, those who have shared their inmost confidences, and made up the intensest interests of their earthly
life - are groaning and writhing in hopeless anguish close at
hand? (for every thing will be close to us in that scene where
darkness and distance are no more.) Obviously only in one
way, - by ceasing to love; that is, by renouncing, or losing,
or crushing, the best and purest part of their nature, by abjur



The Life After Death.              161
hereafter between souls attached in faithful
friendship, but of which one is of far higher
moral standing than the other? It is a very
ing the most specific teaching of Christ, by turning away
from the worship and imitation of that God who is love. Or,
to put it in still terser and bolder language, how, given a hell
of torment and despair for millions of our friends and fellowmen, can the good enjoy heaven, except by becoming bad?
without becoming transformed, miraculously changed, and
changed deplorably for the worse? without, in a word, putting
on, along with the white garments of the redeemed, a coldness and hardness of heart, a stony, supercilious egotism,
which on earth would have justly forfeited all claim to regard, endurance, or esteem? Our affections are probably the
best things about us, - the attributes through which we most
approach and resemble the divine nature: yet, assuming the
hell of theologians, those affections must be foregone or
trampled down in heaven, or else heaven will itself become
a hell. As a condition, or a consequence, of being admitted
to the presence of God, we should have to forswear the little
that is godlike in our composition. Do not these simple reflections suffice to disperse into thin air the current notions
of a world of everlasting pain?
"One further corollary may be briefly indicated. Hell, if
there be such a place or state, though a scene of merited and
awful suffering, must be full of the mighty mitigations which
hope always brings, and can scarcely be devoid of an element
of sweetness which might almost seem like joy, if the consciousness be permitted and ever present to its denizens, that'elsew here' guardian angels -parents who have'entered
into glory,' wives who cluster round the throne, sisters and
friends who have'emerged from the ruins of the tomb and
the deeper ruins of the fall' - are forever at work, with untiring faithfulness, and the sure instincts of a perfected intelligence, for the purification of the stained, the strengthening
of the weak, the softening of the fierce and hard, and the
final rescue of them all." -Postscriptum, p. 311.
14*




162        The Life After Death.
hard thing to conceive how the guilt of a
beloved soul would look from the regions of
celestial purity; but I think something may be
done to. help ourselves, if we endeavor to fix
our attention steadily on what would probably
hold an analogous position in our eyes, namely,
the sins of our own long past years. Passing
over the mere faults of childhood, many of us
can unhappily remember committing very serious errors at a period of youth when we had
attained to full responsibility. Looking back
to one of these sins, say, after twenty or forty
years, how does it strike us? We do not, I
apprehend, feel much of the indignation against
ourselves which in a certain measure warps
our judgment of offences still recent, the disgust
of sloughs into which even now we do not feel
safe but that our foot again may slip. We can
think of the old faults, long lived over or conquered, calmly as of the faults of another person. But it is of another whose inmost mind,
and all whose antecedents, are intimately known
to us. Very commonly we feel that we deserved the heaviest punishment for our misdeeds; that what did befall us of evil was
perfectly merited, and that much heavier chastisement would not have exceeded our deserts.
Yet we never feel that we were deserving of




The Life After Death.       163
reprobation, of being finally abandoned by God
or man. We say to ourselves, " I was odious
at that age.  How heartless, self-engrossed,
false, sensual, ungenerous, I was! Truly there
was hardly a spark of good in me, and I wonder
my friends bore me any affection." But, even
while we thus condemn ourselves, there is a
latent comprehension of how it all came about;
how we had slipped into this fault, or been led
into that one; found ourselves entangled by a
preceding act, and driven into the third; and
how, all through, there was, at bottom, the possibility of becoming better, the seed of somewhat which God's kind hand has since planted
in a happier soil. Probably few of us turn
from such memories save with the thanksgiving
of the Psalmist to Him who has taken our feet
out of the net, out of the mire and clay, and
set them on a rock, and ordered our goings.
But, while we bless God for his mercy to our
sinfulness, that mercy only seems to us the
natural act of a divine Creator who penetrates
all the depths of his creature's soul, and with
a compassion all-forgiving, because all-knowing,
pities and helps our helplessness. The creeds
which have taught men that God first gives
over his children to a reprobate mind, and then
consigns them to a world of reprobation, find




164        The Life After Death.
nothing to countenance them in the experience
of the heart. They teach, strictly speaking, an
unnatural God. The natural Father-God is a
very different Person. Now, in a certain faint
and far-off way, we can imagine (not presumptuously, I think) the sympathy of God for the
struggling soul to be like that which we should
feel for a beloved child whose faults we understood better than any earthly parent, and even
better than we understand the faults of our
own youth. There is no abatement needful of
the full measure of condemnation for the sin.
There is only the reservation (never forgotten
in our own case) that the sinner was something
else besides a sinner, that there were outlying
tracts of his nature over which the blight never
wholly prevailed; that he was, after all, worth
saving. And like this sympathy of God for us
in our worst and darkest hours must surely be
the sympathy of a glorified soul for its sinful
brother. Like him, he must hate the sin which
stands revealed in the blaze of heaven in
blacker hues than moral realities ever wear in
the dim twilight of earth. But, like him, he
must feel ineffable tenderness and pity for the
spirit wearing that foul stain, and a godlike
will to help him to perfect purification. It
would not be too much, indeed, to imagine the




The Life After Death.       165
very converse of the eternal parting of "elsewhere," even the self-losing of the purer soul
in its infinite longing for the pardon of the
sinful one, and its flight through all the worlds
of space, locked in an embrace, not, like Paolo
and Francesca's, of a common guilt, but of a
common prayer.
And again: at the summit of existence, far
up above the clouds and storms of sin and penitence, in the high realm of everlasting peace,
will love have no more place?    Then the
greatness of man must consist in somewhat else
than the greatness of God.  God has not been
content to "lose himself in light," and live
alone in his ineffable radiance throughout eternity. He has filled the universe with life and
love; and his own awful joy, so far as we may
catch the glitter of its sheen, must consist in
love, -in loving those whom he blesses, and
blessing  those whom  he loves.  Whatever
other mysteries of joy are hidden in him, what
delight he may take in the beauty of his
glorious works, or the rhythmic dance of the
clusters of suns, or yet in sources of happiness
utterly inconceivable and unknown to us, there
must remain, even for him, one joy greater than
these, —the joy of infinite love and eternal
benediction. As we climb up, age after age,




166        The Life After Death.
the steps of the interminable ascent, nearer and
more like to him,
I" Aloft, aloft, from terrace to broad terrace evermore,"
we must share that joy; and, if we could " lose
ourselves" at all, it would rather be in the
ocean of love than in the unbreathable ether
of a purely intellectual existence. Christ must
have become more godlike, and therefore more
loving, during the millenniums since he trod the
Via Dolorosa. Assuredly he has not attained
a stage whereunto Goethe might fitly have
preceded him.
There is, however, no greater mistake, I
imagine, than the fundamental one of supposing
that any "self-losing," "absorption," or merging of personality of one kind or another, can
possibly form a step of progress hereafter. The
advance through inorganic, vegetative, animated, conscious, and self-conscious existence,
and again from the lowest savage to the loftiest
philosopher or heroic martyr, is all in the direction of a more and more perfect, complete,. and
definite personality. The severance of the Ego
firom the Non-ego may, indeed, be held in one
sense to be the supreme result of all the machinery of the physical life; and ~the whole
history of thought tends to show that a better




The Life After Death.       167
recognition of the distinction has been at the
root of the superiority of the Western over the
Eastern and classic nations. Morality, of course,
is grounded in it; and the ages before personality was clearly self-conscious were necessarily, like the years of infancy, ages before
morality. To suppose that there is a height in
the range of being, whereto having attained,
this supreme, slowly-evolved personality suddenly collapses like a volcanic island, and subsides into the ocean of impersonal being, in
which " He " becomes "It," is to suppose that
the whole scheme of things is self-stultifying,
a great "much ado about nothing," the building-up of a tower which should reach to heaven,
but which is, in truth, only a child's house of
cards, to be swept flat as soon as the coping is
laid on it.
The meeting of two souls here or hereafter
in perfect affection is not, as our inadequate
and misleading metaphors often seem to imply,
a blending in which personality is lost, but,
rather, the act wherein personality comes out
into most definite form. As in strong moral
effort or vivid religious consciousness, so in the
not less sacred outburst of pure human love,
the intensity with which we admire, revere,
sympathize with, embrace soul to soul the sou]




168        The Life After Death.
of a friend, is like the heat which brings out all
the hidden scriptures on our hearts. We are
never so truly ourselves as when we go out of
ourselves.  And as Emerson says that "the
first requisite for friendship is to be able to do
without friendship," so it is those natures which
are most self-sustained, and possess the most
vigorous and defined personality, with smallest
of blurred and slovenly margins, which are
most capable of vivid and stringent friendship.
And, on the other hand, there are people who
may rather be said to slop over into each other
- to invade each other's personality, and lose
their own -than to be united, as true friends
ought to be, like the Rhone and the Arve, absolutely clear and distinct even when running
side by side in the same channel.
IV. The moral condition of the dead is (as
I have remarked) the one point concerning
them on which the thought of Christendom has
persistently fastened.  Yet it has fixed on a
view of that moral state which originated in a
comparatively dark and rude age of ethical
feeling, and must necessarily have given place
long ago to higher conceptions, were it not for
the stereotyping process by which the Cyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge supposed to be




The Life After Death.      169
contained in the two Testaments has been
closed against either correction or amendment
for eighteen centuries. While our clergy say
as little as they can help about the eternity of
torment, we are all aware that any serious
attempt to remove the doctrine from the church
formularies, or even to place the dogmas of the
resurrection of the body, and the physical
penalties with which it is threatened, in the
category of open questions, would be met by
invincible opposition.  We have conquered
from the adherents of the Book of Genesis the
million ages of past geologic time; but the
million millions of ages of future torment in
the lake of fire we have by no means won from
the disciples of the Book of the Apocalypse.
They will give up almost any doctrine sooner
than this. As Theodore Parker said, they cry
out in dismay, when such a thing is named,
"What? give up hell? our own eternal hell?
Never, never, never! "
We shall accomplish very little, however,
towards the removal of this dreadful cloud from
the souls of men by merely pointing out how
gloomy it is, or even by proving how it darkens
the face of the Sun of righteousness.  Consciously or unconsciously, it is felt by the orthodox to be a necessary part of their whole scheme
15




170        The Life After Death.
of theology; and the atonement, which is their
rainbow of hope, would fade and disappear,
were that black cloud to pass away from behind
it. Our only course is to do justice to the profound sentiment of the infinite solemnity of
moral realities, the "exceeding sinfulness of
sin," out of which sprung such ideas, and
then, if possible, show how the same sentiment,
guided by the calmer reflection and more refined
ethical judgment of a later age, may project
other ideas of a future world, vindicating the
divine Justice and Love, no longer as in the
awful diptych of an eternal heaven and an
eternal hell, but in one harmonious picture of
a world of souls all ascending by various paths,
thorny or flower-strewn, towards the Father's
throne.  It cannot be doubted, I apprehend,
that it was the intense sense of the horror and
ill-desert of sin, which impressed itself on the
minds of the first teachers of Christianity as
the correlative of their new-born sense of the
love of God, which drove them to make the
future world of retribution darker, more hopeless, and embracing a larger class of souls, than
any other prophets ever painted it. Christianity
is nearly the only religion in the world which
teaches that there is such a thing as eternal
torture, and that it awaits ordinary sinners.




The Life After Death.       171
The paradox, that this should be the lesson of
the creed which also teaches more clearly than
any other that " God is love," is explicable only
on the hypothesis, that with the fresh conviction of God's goodness came likewise to the
early Christians a fresh conviction of the heinousness of human guilt. They could actually
see no light through it at all. Christ himself
never said a word implying that Dives would
ever taste one cooling drop, that the " worm"
would ever die, or the fire of hell ever be
quenched. But, then, there is no token in the
New Testament that he, or any of his apostles,
dreamed of composing a scheme of theology
such as Calvin and Jonathan Edwards delighted
to construct; each doctrine dovetailing neatly
into the next till the whole terrible "puzzle"
is square and complete. Iad they done so, it
could hardly have been but that most merciful
Heart which uttered such tender words of peace
and pardon to Magdalen, and the adulteress,
and the crucified thief, or even his who wrote
the Epistles to Timothy and to Philemon,
would have thrilled with horror at the thought
that they were practically bequeathing to Christendom for eighteen centuries the idea of a God
whose cruelty should exceed that of all the
tyrants of Persia or of Rome, and towards




172          The Life After Death.
whom men should lift their tear-worn eyes,
divided ever between natural filial trust and
the abject terror of slaves awaiting their doom.
Viewed from the side of man, and man's guilt,
they could threaten limitless punishment of sin.
Had they looked at it from the side of God,
and thought what the character of the Creator
involved and guaranteed, it would have been,
I venture to affirm, impossible for Christ or his
followers to have left this hideous dogma of a
world of perdition, unrelieved by the assurance,
that, even into the lowest pit of sin and suffering, the Father's love should penetrate, and the
Father's arm lift up the fallen.'
But if, on the one hand, human guilt must
remain for us, as for the greatest souls of the
past, an abyss of darkness we cannot fathom;
and, on the other hand, the goodness of God
stands out rounded into such an orb that we
1 A MS. sermon by an old divine, Archbishop Cobbe,
affirms that the Greek words in St. Matthew, signifying " Thou
fool," were probably translated from the Aramaic original,
and might be rendered more accurately, " Thou reprobate."
I know not on what authority the archbishop made this
statement; but, if verifiable, it would mark a very curious
anomaly in the teaching of Christ. He condemned it as a
mortal sin, deserving of hell-fire, for a man to treat his brother
as irreclaimable and morally worthless. Yet he taught that
the Father would actually consign that brother, as such, to
eternal perdition.




The Life After Death.       173
know evermore, that " in him is no darkness at
all," nor in his universe any final evil, - how
are the two truths to be reconciled? How are
we to avoid subtracting somewhat from our
sense of the ill-desert of sin, while affirming
with fearless confidence that it is finite and
evanescent? I believe this is a problem having
a very practical bearing on the religious life of
the time; and I doubt very much whether the
common substitute for the doctrine of the eternity of future physical pain - namely, a definite
period of such pain after death —will at all
meet the requirements of the case. Whatever
be the relations of pain and sin (and I am far
from denying that they exist), they are not of
a kind which wholly satisfy the mind. They
seem to offer a form of retribution, and a method
of restoration, but not necessarily to constitute
one or the other. Something different from
mere suffering is needful to complete an " atonement " (or renewal of union) between the sinful
soul and the divine Holiness. Not every " fire "
would be a "purgatory." In fact, among the
mysterious uses of pain, it is hardly possible to
reckon it as a simple counterpoise thrown into
the scale against guilt, and of itself adjusting
the balance of justice. Those who hold that
there is no such thing as punishment in the
15*




174        The Life After Death.
divine order, and those who hold that a certain
definite modicum of pain apportioned to each
sin fulfils that order, seem to me equally to err.
Surely the clew to the truth must lie in some
other direction? Our bodies, with their pleasures and pains, are so much a part of ourselves
now, that our moral lessons must necessarily
come to us partly through them. Very naturally, that intimate union and its consequences
were transferred in the imagination of the men
of old to another world; and the doctrine of
the resurrection of the flesh (which happened
to descend to us with more valuable heirlooms
in one line of our mental pedigree) has served
to give some sort of color to our persistence in
their ideas. But, looking at the matter from the
standpoint of modern psychology, it is hard to
see what we can have to do beyond the grave
with physical pains of any kind. Of course, it
is possible to imagine that the new bodies with
which we may (or may not) be clothed should,
from the first, be inlets of suffering.  But as
they can hardly be supposed to receive the taint
of the diseases of the poor sin-stained frames
left in the grave, whatever pains they may
endure must be conceived of as purely arbitrary,
and of a kind bearing no analogy to any order
of the divine government with which we are
acquainted.




The Life After Death.             175
But, though it is most difficult to conceive of
physical suffering under the conditions of a new
life (unless as the reflex of more sensitive frames
with the sufferings of the soul), it is, on the
contrary, almost saliently obvious, that the disembodied soul must immediately pass into a
state wherein mental pain proportioned to its
moral guilt will be unavoidable. We have no
need to imagine a burning vault, pit of devils,
or any other machinery of the divine inquisition: the mere fact of disembodiment, it would
seem, must adequately account for all that is
needed to work out the ends of justice.'
In those rare hours when the claims of the
body are for a time partially suspended, - when
we are neither hungry nor thirsty, nor somnolent nor restless; when no objects distract our
eyes, and no sounds play upon the ear; when
we feel, in a word, neither pain nor want nor
1 " When the portals of this world have been passed, when
time and sense have been left behind, and this'body of
death' has dropped away from the liberated soul, every
thing which clouded the perception, which dulled the vision,
which drugged the conscience, while on earth, will be cleared
off like the morning mist. We shall see things as they really
are, ourselves and our sins among the number. No other
punishment, whether retributive or purgatorial, is needed.
Naked truth, unfilmled eyes, will do all that the most righteous vengeance could desire" (ENIGMAS, p. 260). The following two pages of this essay are among the most beautiful
and striking in the range of literature.




176         The Life After Death.
pleasure, from our corporeal frames, - we obtain in a few moments more self-insight than in
weeks and months of ordinary life. A prolongation of such a condition under disease, wherein
(in some-rare cases) the body's wants are reduced
to a minimum without such positive pain as to
occupy the mind, —in interminable, sleepless
nights, and days when in solitude and silence
the hours go by almost uninterrupted by those
changes of sensation produced in healthy life
by food, ablutions, and exercise, - then, it would
seem (from the testimony of those who have
passed through  such  experience), the soul
becomes self-conscious to a degree quite inconceivable under ordinary conditions. The physical life falls comparatively into the background;
the spiritual and moral life come forward; and
the facts of our relations towards God, our
sense of past transgressions, and our hopes of
existence beyond the nearly-opened grave,
become realities quite as sensibly felt as those
of our bodily surroundings. We have but to
imagine one degree more of such separation
from physical interruptions and sensations, and
conceive ourselves as actually severed from the
body; and it becomes clear that we should
instantly, and from that circumstance alone,
pass into a purgatory.  Even if we should




The Life After Death.       177
retain no recollection of the special sins of earth,
their consequences-sensible at iast in our degraded natures, our mean and malignant sentiments, our withered hearts —would be the
heaviest curse. Every thing we have ever done
of evil has undoubtedly left its stain on us in
ways like these, even should the actual recollection of it be effaced with the brain-record of
memory. We —our very selves, whatever in
us can possibly survive the dissolution of the
body -must carry with us, nay, rather in us,
these dreadful results. As Theodore Parker
says quaintly, "The saddler does not remember
every stitch he took when a'prentice; but every
stitch served to make him a saddler." So every
act we have done of good or evil, every sentiment we have indulged of loving or hateful, has
gone to make us saints or sinners. We may
repent the past, abhor it, renounce it, with the
whole force of God-supported will; but, as even
Aristotle knew, " of this even God is deprived,
to make the past not to have been." The sins
have been committed; and the trail of them over
our souls must remain, even if we forget them
one by one.
But if (as seems infinitely more consonant
with the divine order) we pass through no river
of oblivion on leaving the world, but, on the




178        The Life After Death.
contrary, find all the past unrolling itself in one
long unbroken panorama from the hour of death
backward to the first hours of childish consciousness, then will our purgatory be complete
indeed.  Then, as we look, unhurried, dispassioned, at one hour of mortal life after another,
remembering all we felt and did in it, all the
weaknesses and mixed motives which spoiled
our purest moments, all the selfishness, the bitterness, the ingratitude, perchance the sensual
vice or cruel vindictiveness, which blackened
the worst, then in very truth shall we learn at
last - what it has been idly dreamed that only
hell could teach -" the exceeding sinfulness of
sin." The thought is almost too tremendous to
dwell upon; yet it is but the simplest consequence from the laws of mind, as we know
them. There is no need for the Almighty to
bare his arm, and hurl us into the lake of fire.
He has only to leave us alone with our sins, to
draw the curtain between us and the world,
and our punishment must come with unerring
certainty.
This is the awful purgatory which I believe
awaits us all. Is there nothing but terror in it
for the sinner, and sadness for the saint? Nay,
but is there not, also, somewhat of deep and
stern satisfaction? At the best moments of




The Life After Death.       179
life, have we not longed for such an insight
into our own dark souls, such a sense of the
guilt which we dimly knew existed, but under
which our hardened consciences remained numb?
Will it not be something gained, when the
scales which ever cover our eyes when we
strive to look inward shall fall from them at
last? We shall then know, and be sure we
know truly, what is the whole evil of our
hearts, the sinfulness of our acts. There wilt be
no more uncertainty, and fear of self-delusion,
of walking in a vain shadow of self-acquittal,
or, it may be, of ill-allotted self-condemnation.
We shall know our true place in the moral
world, our true relation to the all-holy God.
And we shall not only know what is true, but
suffer what is just. We shall endure all the
agony, and also learn the infinite relief, of a
repentance at last adequate, and proportioned
to our sinfulness. The pain will fall, where it
ought to fall, upon our hearts themselves; and
as Cranmer held his "guilty hand" to the fire,
so, perchance, shall we, instead of striving to
escape, even desire to hold them to their torture. That entire, absolute, perfect repentance
will be the great and true expiation; and, when
it has been accomplished, the blessed justice of
God will be vindicated, and all will be well.




180        The Life After Death.
Is there an outlook beyond this purgatory,
wherein time can have no meaning? Assuredly
there must be. There yet must remain for the
souls which God has made and purified both
work to do for him, and joy in him and in one
another.  There must be the service of his
creatures, the learning of his truth, the reconciliation with every foe, the re-union of immortal affection, and the everlasting approach,
nearer and nearer through the infinite ages, to
perfect goodness, and to Him who is supremely
good. But these things lie afar off, where eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of
man conceived, the things which God hath
prepared for those who love him, ay, and for
those, also, who now love him not.




DOOMED TO BE SAVED.








DOOMED TO BE SAVED.
IN old times, two or three centuries ago, men
believed that they could sell their souls to the
Devil. No one seems to think such a bargain
possible now, though the belief in the existence
of the strange Incarnate Evil, the Great Bad
God, with whom it was supposed to be transacted, still forms part of the accepted creed of
Christendom. I am not concerned now to discuss the absurdity and blasphemy involved in.
this doctrine of a cruel and relentless Wolf left
freely by the Shepherd of souls to prowl forever through his hapless fold. But I shall ask
of you to dwell in imagination, for a few moments, on the state of one of the hundreds of
men and women who formerly believed with
unhesitating credulity that they had bartered
their existence to the Fiend, and were henceforth forevermore, and without hope of escape,
the sworn servants of Satan.
183




184         Doomed to be Saved.
Probably such imaginary transactions generally happened somewhat in this way. A man
was violently goaded by vindictiveness to desire
the ruin of an enemy, or by want or avarice to
long for gold, or by passionate love to covet the
possession of the person he loved. At the same
time he entertained, undoubtingly, the dangerous belief that there was a power always at
hand ready to gratify his desires at the price of
a penalty to be paid only in the distant future.
If we attempt to realize the terrible, ever-present
temptation which such a belief would offer, I
think it will appear only too natural, that, in
some moment when his longings were most
vehement, the tempted wretch should say, " I
will be revenged," or "I will be rich," or  I
will gain the woman I love, even if I lose
my soul! I will give myself to the Devil forever, if he will do for me what I want." Supposing, after this, by some perfectly natural
chance, the man did obtain his end, his enemy
fell sick or died, a little money unexpectedly
came in his way, or the woman he loved returned
his passion, from that moment, he would inevitably conclude Satan had accepted the bargain,
and fulfilled his part of the contract. There
was no more retrocession possible. He was no
more free to draw back, and give up his coveted




Doomed to be Saved.        185
gains. Hell had hold of him by a bond which
could never be broken. He was the servant of
sin, outlawed from God and heaven, and the
society of the good and innocent, and destined,
without hope of pardon or reprieve, to pass,
whenever his new master chose to call him, to
the realms of everlasting torture and despair.
What, I ask, would be the result on a man's
character of finding himself so doomed? I
think, that, after the first flush of gratified
passion had subsided, the poor deluded wretch
must always have felt creeping over him a
horror such as no experience of our lives can
render altogether comprehensible. Even the
fact of his success (being at the same time the
pledge that the barter was actually made) must
have brought with it a thrill of unspeakable
awe. Then as time went on, and the gratified
desire sank down among his passions, while
natural affections and harmless interests resumed their ordinary sway, there would begin
a period of unmitigated agony. No innocent
pursuit could be followed, no pure affection
cherished, no kindly action performed; for the
man would know that he would be an object of
loathing and horror to the nearest and dearest,
did they understand his real condition, and that
none would take a gift from his hand. Every
16*




186         Doomed to be Saved.
allusion made by those around him to religion,
the memory of his own innocent childhood, the
spectacle of death and interment, would each
be like a fresh lash of despair. By degrees, I
believe, even a very bad and irreligious man,
finding thus every avenue to good closed to
him, would begin to envy every beggar by the
wayside, every dying sufferer in the hospital,
nay, every criminal going to the gallows, who
was not, like himself, utterly and eternally shut
out from God and goodness. Of course, the
belief in the futility and hopelessness of any
repentance on his part, the idea that the Fiend
would laugh, were he to attempt to pray, would
finally drive him into absolute recklessness and
hardness of heart. He would say, "Evil, be
thou my good," and give himself up to such
gross pleasures, such malignity, cruelty, perfidy, and blasphemy, as his miserable heart
might choose in its despair. Looking back after
the lapse of ages to the historical proofs that
our fellow-men have actually gone through this
hideous torture, we feel now as if the nightmare
must have been more than the brain of man
could bear, and that the having caused such
direful woe must be added to the long list of
terrors, persecutions, and ascetisms, which go
farther, perhaps, than Christians commonly




Doomed to be Saved.       187
imagine, to counterbalance the benefits which
humanity has received from their creed. If the
faith which had its origin in the pure spirit of
Christ, but which so soon became corrupted,
has indeed bound up many a broken heart, it
has also assuredly broken many, -in monasteries
and nunneries, in the dungeons of the Inquisition, ay, and in Protestant homes, whence
guiltless and believing souls have been driven
into mad-houses, under the terrors of the unpardonable sin.
But for us, who neither believe it possible to
sell our souls at all, nor in a Devil to whom we
might sell them, is there any lesson in this sad
old story? I think there must be one; for
we believe exactly the reverse of that hideous
doctrine which drove these poor wretches to
destruction. Our faith teaches us that our only
Lord is goodness itself impersonated; and that
we are not "sold" to him by any act of our
own, not even "reconciled" to him by any
atonement or mediator, but are his by birthright
and by nature, - his as the child belongs to its
parent,- his as a man's thought is his own. We
are each of us thoughts of God. We owe our
being to having been in that infinite Mind; and,
as the author of the Book of Wisdom says,
"Never wouldst thou have made any thing,




188         Doomed to be Saved.
hadst thou not loved it." The Creator cannot
disgusted be with his creature's infirmities, or
wearied of his weakness, or ready to abandon
him because of his sin; for he has understood it
all from the first; and in his book were all our
transgressions written, when as yet there were
none of them, and we hung as innocent babes
upon our mothers' breasts.
I know that this faith is held by us in the
very teeth of scores of passages in the Bible,
and of the denunciation of ten thousand orthodox divines. Nay, there are some even among
those who have left orthodoxy far behind, who
yet hold that it is both a false, and especially a
dangerous, creed to teach men that God loves
them always, and that they are certain to be
saved (to use the much misapplied old phrase)
at last. Let us inquire more carefully how this
may be, seeing that, in a great measure, the
practical side of our religion depends on our
sense of the matter.
I think it will be found that sin looks very
differently in proportion as we regard it from
its own level, or from a little higher up, or from
a region still farther above it. The man who
is quite on a level with the sin, who is himself
cruel, unchaste, deceitful, dishonest, drunken,
hears always of another falling into his sin with




Doomed to be Saved.        189
a certain evil pleasure. As we say, it "keeps
him in countenance," and prevents him feeling
shame. He finds no jests so diverting as those
which tell of cheats and drunken brawls, adulteries and filth. A large mass of literature,
from the old story of Gil Bias and Fielding's
novels, down to the latest French romances,
prove how widespread is this taste for tales of
vice, this propensity to " rejoice in iniquity."
But when a man has begun in earnest to try
and amend his own life, and has learned to hate
his own sins, he ceases to find any thing amusing or ridiculous in the sins of others. His
feeling about them becomes one of righteous
anger, if the offence involve cruelty or perfidy;
of disgust and loathing, if it be one of sensual
vice. He wishes heartily that justice may be
done on the offender; and, beyond this, lie has
no feeling towards him but contempt and abhorrence. Fortunately the majority of people
in every civilized community have attained at
least so far as this point; and it is, so far as it
goes, a very sound standing-ground, and one
infinitely superior either to the pleasure of the
grossly wicked, or to the sentimental softness
and laxity about crime, which is one of the evil
fashions of our day. I confess, when I hear of
a mob being with difficulty prevented from




190         Doomed to be Saved.
tearing to pieces some monster who has committed an act of dastardly cruelty, I cannot
altogether regret the exhibition of righteous
popular indignation; and, on the other hand, I
know few worse symptoms of national moral
health than a great crowd cheering and doing
honor to a villain.
But does no man, I would ask, get beyond
the stage of mere anger at crime? I think
even very poor aspirants after goodness do so,
especially if they are parents. Suppose a man
or a woman to have striven for years to bring
up a young lad in honesty and religion; to
have watched his boyish faults and repentances,
his efforts to do well, and his sorrow and shame
when he failed. At the end of all, the elder
friend hears, perhaps, that the youth has committed a forgery, or seduced an innocent girl,
or has sunk into habits of perpetual drunkenness. What are the feelings with which he
receives the sad tidings? Surely they are very
different from mere anger and indignation, and
a fierce desire to punish the offender? He will,
indeed, feel (inasmuch as he is human) a horrible shock of surprise and disappointment, and
also, perhaps, some personal resentment, that all
his good counsels have been thrown away. But
beyond all this, and far more deeply, he will




Doomed to be Saved.        191
grieve that such wickedness should be done,
and done by the man he knows so well, whose
soul has so often lain bare to him, who was
capable of so much better things. He will
understand how certain faults in his nature,
certain temptations in his lot, have led him on,
step by step, till he has been entangled in sin,
and has fallen so miserably. And then his
heart will go out in pity and compassion unutterable towards the unhappy one. He will
know that his condition is infinitely deplorable,
- that if he repent, and feel his guilt, he must
endure agonies of remorse; and that if he be
callous, and feel it not, it is so much the worse.
He will estimate the man's misfortunes as ten
thousand times heavier than if he had lost his
health or wealth, or become blind or maimed.
And if he be the father or master of the offender, and obliged in some way to visit his transgression with punishment, he will earnestly
strive, that, even in punishing him, he may do
him good, and bring him to a better mind, so as
to lead to his restoration to peace and virtue,
and entire reconciliation with himself.
Now, I challenge those who forbid us to believe in the infinite mercy of God to say which
of these three ways of viewing sin is most
godlike, most probably nearest to the way in




192         Doomed to be Saved.
which God must view it. Will he feel pleasure
in it? Assuredly not.   Will he feel mere
anger and wrathful indignation? I think it
was very natural that the old Hebrews, who
had just reached that stage themselves, should
suppose he did so; but I also think that it is
monstrous for a race who have for two thousand years taken Christ's blessed parable of the
Prodigal Son as the very word of God to do
any thing of the kind. I think, if we were
not caught in the meshes of that wretched Augustinian scheme of theology, which makes the
atonement necessary to appease God's wrath,
and postulates eternal hell to compel us to
accept it, -I think, I say, if it were not for
this theology, all Christendom must have long
ago come to see, that, at the very least, God
feels towards a sinner as a father or a saint
would do, and not as a man less good or wise
or merciful, -the great Policeman of the universe. And remember, when we are presuming to speak of the awful character of God, it
is not our business to inquire what it is just
possible he may be or do without injustice or
cruelty, but what is the very highest, the
noblest, the kindest, the most royal and fatherlike, thing we can possibly lift our minds to
conceive. When we have found that, we may




Doomed to be Saved.        193
be assured it is the nearest we can yet approach to the truth. By and by, when we are
loftier, nobler, and kinder, too, we shall get
nearer to it still. Of all impossible things, the
most impossible must surely be, that a man
should dream something of the good and the
noble, and that it should prove, at last, that his
Creator was less good and less noble than he
had dreamed. We theists, then, I conceive,
are justified (even in this dim world of imperfect and uncertain vision) in holding clearly
and boldly, as the very core of our faith, that
God loves eternally and unalterably every
creature he has made; and that our sin, while
it draws a thick veil over our eyes, and makes
it impossible to give us the joy of communion
with him, yet never changes him, never blackens that Sun of love in the heavens.
Nor is it only by argument and analogy that
we come to this conclusion. The Lord of conscience, who bids us forgive till seventy times
seven; the Lord of life, the Father of spirits,
who reveals himself to us in the supreme hour
of heartfelt prayer; that God whose voice has
so often called us back from our wanderings,
and put it into our hearts to pray, and then has
blessed and restored us again and yet again,
- that God, we know, is never to be alienated.
17




194         Doomed to be Saved.
He is our Guide for ever and ever, Friend,
Master, Father, Lord. As physically we live
and move and have our being in him, so morally
we live in his bosom, and are surrounded by his
love and pity. Poor, froward, rebellious babes,
struggling now with the pains of mortality, and
now stretching out vain hands of longing to
seize forbidden joys, -with all our wrestlings
and struggles we neverx fall out of his arms.
They close round us, even at our worst. The
Calvinists hold, as one of their " Five Points,"
the "Final Perseverance of the Saints."  We
theists believe in that "perseverance " too, and
are persuaded that no human heart which has
once known the unutterable bliss of loving h(od
can ever forget it, or cease to yearn to return
from every wandering to his feet. But we also
believe in the final salvation of those who are
not saints, but sinners, nay, of the very worst
and most hardened of mankind. As one of the
wisest men I ever knew (the late Matthew
Davenport Hill) once said to me, "I believe in
the aggressive power of love and kindness, and
in the comparative weakness of every obstacle
of evil or stubbornness which can be opposed
thereto."  We do not think man's evil can, in
the long-run of the infinite ages, outspeed finally
God's ever-pursuing mercy. He must overtake




Doomed to be Saved.        195
us sooner or later. True, it may be late, very
late, before he does so; not necessarily in this
world, not, perchance, in the next world to come.
We may doom ourselves to groan beneath the
burden of sin, and writhe beneath the scourge of
just and most merciful retribution, again and yet
again, no one knows how long. We may choose
evil rather than good, and vileness instead of
nobleness, and be ungrateful and sinful almost
as he is long-suffering and infinitely holy; but
it is almost, not quite. God will get the better
of us at last.
Is this indeed a "dangerous creed"? Will
men be the worse and harder, and more daringly
wicked, for holding it? My friends, we are all,
I fear, very unworthy types of what theists
should be; nay, I have never yet seen man
or woman, not that hero-soul Theodore Parker,
not that true saint of God, Keshub Chunder
Sen, who altogether and perfectly attained those
alpine heights to which theism should lift us.
But yet even at our weakest, we know that we
are not the worse for believing in the infinite
goodness of God. Was any one ever the worse
for having an earthly father who would grieve,
or a mother who would weep and pray for him
in his sin, rather than curse him, and cast him
off? Human nature is bad enough: I am not




196         Doomed to be Saved.
disposed to underrate its vices and meanness.
But with all my soul I repudiate and reject the
blasphemy that it can grow worse for having a
better knowledge of God.
The results of a settled faith that we are
inevitably destined to become good and blessed
ought obviously to be as nearly as possible the
precise converse of the results of the belief of
the poor wretch who imagined he had sold himself to the Power of Evil. Just as he must have
looked round, and envied the meanest or most
suffering of mankind, so we must look upon the
happiest or most fortunate who hold darker
creeds as far less blessed than ourselves. To
them, half the horizon is covered by a great
lurid cloud, out of which come the thunders
and the bolts of doom, and which may at any
moment blot out the sun forever from their
sight, even as they believe that to tens of thousands of the dead he is hid forevermore. For
us, that shroud of blackness has rolled utterly
away; and the glory of God shines wide as
earth and heaven, showering blessings on the
head of every creature he has made. It is
only our own dim eyes, blinded by the mists of
sin and selfishness, which sometimes fail to see
him.
And again: just as the Fiend-bought man




Doomed to be Saved.         197
dreamed it was of no use for him to try to
return to virtue, or to yield to the softening of
his heart when the sweet dews of penitence fell
on him (as they fall sometimes on us all): so we,
on the contrary, must needs know that it is no
use for us to persist in rebellion, and harden ourselves against the thought of God's love. We
are doomed (O blessed doom!) to be conquered
at last, and brought in remorse and shame, and
yet with the infinite peace of restoration, to our
Father's arms. We are destined to be noble,
not base; pure, not unholy; loving, not selfish
or malicious. Sooner or later throughout the
cycles of our immortality, all the vile sensuality,
the yet more hideous hate and malice which we
sometimes hug now to our hearts, must fall off
us like loathsome, outworn rags, and be trampled
under our feet with disgust and shame. We
never sink our souls in gross and unholy pleasures now, but we are befouling them with mire
which hereafter we shall wash away with rivers
of tears. We never utter a cruel or slanderous
word, or hurt a child or a brute, but we are
making a wound in our hearts which will smart
long, long, after our victim has forgotten its
pain. Nay, we never miss an opportunity of
giving innocent pleasure, or of helping another
soul on the path to God, but we are taking away
17*




198         Doomed to be Saved.
from ourselves forever what might have been a
happy memory, and leaving in its place a remorse. A French cynic (who could not have
known what friendship meant) advises us to
"live with our friends as if they might one day
become our enemies." A good Englishman
reversed the maxim, and bade us " live with our
enemies as if they might one day become our
friends." My fellow-theists, it is not for us a
matter of chance that our enemies may one day
become our friends, but of firm faith that they
will one day do so; that, as Mahomet said,
"the blessed shall sit beside one another, and
all grudges shall be taken away out of their
hearts."  Why, even the approach of holy
death heals our miserable quarrels now, and
softens our bitterest animosity. When we have
crossed the dark river, and climbed but a little
way towards the city of God beyond, every
thing resembling hatred and jealousy and malice
and spite will have died out of our souls.
Only where their baleful fires have burned,
there must long remain a black spot charred
and blistering.
And as to God: when we come a little more
to know him, a little to understand what love
he bears us, how he fulfils all our dreams of
what the highest, the most lovable, and ador



Doomed to be Saved.         199
able can be, that which our own hearts from
their depths spontaneously love and adore, —
when, I say, we come to know somewhat more
of all this, how shall we look back on our hardness and our ingratitude? The tears of an
unworthy son upon a mother's grave must be
less bitter than ours. God will forgive us; but
when shall we be able to forgive ourselves?
These are, in our faith, the certainties of the
future. We are sure that we must repent every
sin, and rise out of every weakness, till we
become, at last, meet to be called the sons and
daughters of the Lord Almighty. Assuredly
the conviction that such things are in store
should not leave us passive now, any more than
it could be indifferent to the man who had sold
himself to the Fiend that he was irrevocably
destined to perdition. At the bottom of our
hearts, I think, there is, even at our worst and
weakest, a wish to be good, a dumb longing to
be brave, upright, truthful, sober, deserving of
our own esteem. Perhaps our ideal is not very
high; we do not hunger and thirst after any
very exalted and self-denying righteousness;
but, at least, we wish we were better than we
are. The German poet Schiller says, that no
man ever loves evil for evil's sake, as he may
love good for goodness' sake. He only chooses




200         Doomed to be Saved.
evil, because, contingently, it includes what is
agreeable, or saves what is disagreeable. This
is the lowest platform on which, I believe, we
ever stand permanently, though now and then
some of us may be able to understand all too
well what the wretch did whom we have been
considering, who gave himself up to the powers
of darkness, or, as St. Paul says, determined to
"work all iniquity with greediness."  There
are some of us who can look back to such black
eclipses of all the better life in us, when deliberately, and with our eyes open, we resolved to
do some wicked thing, even though we saw
beyond it a long vista of other sins and deceits,
and practically in doing it threw our whole
future into the balance of evil. Looking back
to such days (if ally such there be in our memory), we tremble as in remembering how once,
perchance, we hung helpless over a terrific precipice, till some strong hand lifted us up; or
how-we were sinking in the waters of a fathomless sea, when some plank was thrown to us, to
which we clung, and were saved. Again: there
are some of us who have risen a little above
either of these states, who have long turned
their backs on the dreadful temptations of a
life of resolute sin and self-indulgence, and
who do a little more than vaguely wish to be




Doomed to be Saved.         201
better, or pray (as St. Augustine says he did
in his youth), " Make me holy, but not yet."
They desire to be holy now and at once. They
have learned to hate and loathe their remaiining faults, " the sin which doth so easily beset
them," and to wish, beyond all earthly wishes,
for strength
" To feel, to think, to do,
Only the holy right,
To yield no step in the awful race,
No blow in the fearful fight; "
to be "perfect even as their Father which is in
heaven is perfect."
But whether our desire to be good and noble
be only a feeble and faint aspiration, dimly felt
amid the tumult of life's toil and passion, or
the supreme and conscious longing of our souls,
- in either case, I think the faith that we are
made for such goodness is calculated (if we
could but realize it aright) to carry with it an
immeasurable power to strengthen us, to fan
our little spark of holy ambition into a flame
which might burn on God's own altar. The
Parsees, the disciples of Zoroaster, have, among
their prayers in the Zendavesta, the direction
that every believer should say every morning,
as he fastens his girdle, "Douzakh (hell) will




202         Doomed to be Saved.
be destroyed at the resurrection; and Ormuzd
(the Lord of good) shall reign over all forever."  Not amiss, I think, was their ritual
devised, to make the first thought of each opening day one of moral encouragement, and of
hope assured in the final victory of light over
darkness, virtue over vice, and joy over sorrow
and pain. I do not say that good men have
not been ready to lead a forlorn hope, and fight
the good fight, even in a world they believed
doomed to perdition, with the terror before
their eyes, that even they themselves might become, as St. Paul said of himself, perhaps "a
castaway." But, beyond all doubt, it is a very
different thing to wage that awful and relentless war with inward and outward evil, if we
can but see, like Constantine's Conquering
Legion, far away in the heavens the signals of
victory. To look round on our fellow-men,
the worst and weakest, - or, what is far harder
to understand, the basest,- and believe with
firm assurance, that they are one day to be
worthy of all the love and honor we can give
them, - this is to enable us to love and labor
for them now, and to have patience, as God
has patience, with the weight of clay which
overlays so heavily their little seed of good.
And still more, to look into our own souls, and




Doomed to be Saved.        203
trust that one day we shall be pure, one day all
the vileness there shall be burnt out, one day
we shall live in that upper air of noble feelings
and high thoughts, into which, now and then,
we have just risen in some hour of prayer, to
sink again in shameful failure to the dust,-to
trust that all this is in store for us, is to lift us
up out of the slough of our despond, and renew
our strength like the eagle's. I suppose there
are not many of us who have advanced many
steps along that brief way which leads from
the cradle to the grave, without having sad
reason to feel weary and disgusted with themselves, and their futile efforts to amend.  As
the old hymn of Charles Wesley says they
have cried a hundred times, "This only once
forgive," and then they have sinned again, till
at last the power of feeling any thing like acute
repentance has passed away, and they have
ceased to hope very much that they will ever
grow better in this world. There is nothing in
all life so sad as this November of the soul.
The scorching suns of summer passion, the April
showers of youthful remorse, would be infinitely
better than this colorless, dim, moral life, so chill,
so unhopeful. But, even for this, the faith in
the eternal love of God is the return of spring.
Brothers and sisters, if you have felt this dead



204         Doomed to be Saved.
ness fall on you, remember that it has no place,
no reason, in our creed. We may be cold and
dull and unrepenting; we may know     even
the horrible experience that we have greatly
failed, greatly sinned, and yet have no tear of
anguish, no heartfelt throb of remorse, to give
to our shameful past: yet this is all our misery,
and deadness of heart, not God's withdrawal.
We cannot help ourselves. But our Father in
heaven, he who'desires our righteousness more
than we ever desire it, whose " will is our salvation," - he can help us, he will help us. We
have learned our own weakness: now is the
time to learn his almighty strength. It is not
for us to despair of growing, not merely pure,
but good, not merely good, but holy. God has
made us for that very thing; and what God
intends, that assuredly will at last be done.
He is not wearied of us: it is we who are
weary of our vain and vacillating selves. I
cannot use the accustomed phrase, that "he
will forgive us if we pray." He is always forgiving. He stands by every hour, watching all
our poor struggles, with pity and love ineffable,
longing - yes! I believe we may dare to say it
-longing for our return, that he may bless us
once more with the consciousness of his love,
the sense of re-union with his holiness, the




Doomed to be Saved.         205
infinite, immeasurable, awful joy of giving ourselves to be his in soul and body on earth, - his
to do his holy will in worlds beyond the grave,
forever and forever.
Father, blessed  Father!   Take  us thus
back! From all our wanderings, our coldness,
our miserable guilt and rebellion, our baseness
and our sin, redeem us, O God! Father, we
love thee, -only a little now; but we shall
love thee hereafter wholly and perfectly. Take
our hearts, and mould them  to thyself. We
give them to thee. That which thou desirest
for us, even the same do we desire. Fulfil thy
blessed purposes in us. As thou hast made us
to be pure and good, so burn thou out of our
souls all our sinfulness. As thou hast made us
to be strong and holy, so do thou strengthen us
with might by thy Spirit in the inner man.
Show us all the depth of the evil, the sensuality, the bitterness of heart, the coldness towards
thee in which we have lived, and the glory
and beauty and blessing of the life of love to
thee and to our fellows, which it is in our
power yet to live. Lift us out of the pit, out
of the mire and clay, and set our feet upon a
rock, and order all our goings. We are thine,
0 Father and Mother of the world! we are
thine - save us! We know that thou wilt
save!                             8








THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL
SENTIMENT;
OR,
HETEROPATHY, AVERSION, AND SYMPATHY.








THE   EVOLUTION      OF  THE    SOCIAL
SENTIMENT.
THERE is, perhaps, no human emotion which
may not be described as infectious or epidemic, quite as justly as idiopathic or endemic.
We " catch" cheerfulness or depression, courage
or terror, love or hatred, cruelty or pity, from a
gay or a mournful, a brave or a cowardly, an
affectionate or malicious, a brutal or tenderhearted associate, fully as often as such feelings
are generated in our own souls by the incidents
of our personal experience.  In the case of
individuals of cold and weak temperaments, it
may even be doubted whether they would ever
hate, were not the poisoned shafts of an enemy's
looks to convey the venom to their veins; nor
love, did not the kiss of a lover kindle the
unlighted fuel in their hearts. The sight of
heroic daring stirs the blood of the poltroon
to bravery, and the sound of a single scream
18*                     209




210  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
of alarm conveys to whole armies the contagion
of panic fear. Among the horrors of sieges
and revolutions, the worst atrocities are usually
committed by men and women, hitherto harmless, who suddenly exhibit the tiger passions
of assassins and petroleuses, maddened with the
infection of cruelty and slaughter. Sympathy,
then, is not, properly speaking, one kind of
emotion, but a spring in human nature whence
every emotion may, in turn, be drawn, like the
manifold liquids from a conjurer's bottle. In
the following pages I shall, however, endeavor
to trace its development only in the limited
sense of that emotion to which we commonly
give the name of sympathy par excellence;
namely, the sentiment of pain which we experience on witnessing the pain of another person,
and of pleasure in his pleasure, irrespective
of any anticipated results, present or future,
touching our personal interests. It has been
hitherto assumed universally (so far as I am
aware) that this precise emotion of sympathetic
pain and pleasure has been felt in all ages by
mankind; and that, allowance being made for
warmer and colder temperaments, and for the
intervention of stronger or weaker moral reenforcements, we might take it for granted that
every man, woman, and child, savage and civ



The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.      211
ilized, has always felt, and will always feel,
reflected pain in pain, and pleasure in pleasure.1
It is the aim of the present paper to urge
certain reasons for reconsidering this popular
opinion, and for treating the emotion of sympathy as a sentiment having a natural history,
and being normally progressive through various
and very diverse phases; differing in all men,
not solely according to their temperaments or
moral self-control, but, still more emphatically,
according to the stage of genuine civilization
which they may have attained. It is superfluous to remark that this inquiry is an important one, and must, if successfully conducted2
serve to throw no small light on the whole
subject of the social affections. Here, in the
electric commotion caused by the actual spectacle of vivid pain or pleasure, we must needs
find the best marked among all the multifarious
psychological phenomena which result from the
1 Mr. Bain says (The Emotions and the Will, p. 113) that
compassion has been manifested in every age of the world,
and that "never has the destitute been utterly forsaken."
Also (p. 210) that " the foundations of sympathy and imitation
are the same;" and that, though "the power of interpreting
emotional expression is acquired," some of the manifestations
of feeling do instinctively excite the same kind of emotion
in others, the principal instances occurring under the tender
emotion. The moistened eye, and the sob, wail, or whine of
grief, by a pre-established connection or coincidence, are at
once signs and exciting causes of the same feeling."




212  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
collision of human souls. All our benevolence
is, in truth, only the extension of such instant
and vehement sympathy with actually witnessed
pain or pleasure, into the remoter and less
ascertained conditions of our fellow-creatures'
sufferings and enjoyments: all our cruelty is
only the perpetuation and exacerbation of the
converse sentiment.  As a flash of lightning
is to latent electricity, such is the rapid and
vivid emotion struck out in us by the sight
of another's agony or ecstasy, compared with
our calm, habitual social sentiments. Hitherto,
little attention has been paid to such emotions,
because (as above remarked) it has been assumed that they exhibit uniform phenomena;
and that if a man be so far elevated above a
senseless clod as to feel any thing at the sight
of another's pain, that which he feels is always
sympathetic pain; and, if he feel any thing at
sight of pleasure, it is pleasure. So deeply,
indeed, is this delusion rooted in'our minds,
that it is almost impossible, at the first effort,
to dissever the idea of such sympathy from our
conception of human nature in its rudest stage,
much more to divide it from the sentiment of
love, or avoid confounding the lack of it with
personal hatred. With those whom we love
(it is taken for granted) we must sympathize




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 213
intensely, and with the rest of mankind in
lesser measure, unless some special bar of antipathy intervene. But a little reflection will
show that this is far from holding good as
universally true.  There is such a thing as
love which is wholly a love of complacency,
without admixture of benevolence; which seeks
its own gratification, and is perfectly callous
to the pains and joys of its object. And there
is often absolute absence of sympathy between
man and man, when no personal hatred exists
to interfere with its expansion. The explanation
of the facts must be found, if at all, by disentangling the roots of egotism and altruism
(now so closely interwoven, but in their origin
so far apart) at the very nexus of immediate
sympathy, where one human heart reflects back
in vivid emotion the emotion of another.
The first question which concerns us is: Does
the description of sympathy, as above given, as
the common sentiment of men and women at
our stage of civilization, apply properly to the
spontaneous sentiments of children and savages?
Does their emotion at the sight of pain or pleasure take the same form as ours? and does it
prompt them to similar actions? There are
grounds, I believe, for denying that it does any
thing of the kind, and for surmising that the




214  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
emotion felt at such stages, at the sight of pain,
is more nearly allied to anger and irritation than
to tenderness and pity, and the emotion felt at
the sight of pleasure, more akin to displeasure
than to reflected enjoyment.
Before endeavoring to interpret the sentiments of savages in these matters, we shall
do well to cast a preliminary glance at the
behavior of the lower animals, concerning
which we know somewhat more, and are less
liable to be misled.  Without assuming that
the feelings of brutes supply, in a general way,
any direct evidence regarding those of even the
most degraded tribes of men, they may justly
be held to afford useful indication of them in
the case of those actions wherein brute and
savage obviously coincide, while the. sentiments
of civilized humanity fail to supply any explation.
Of all the facts of natural history, none is
better ascertained than the painful one that
almost all kinds of animals have a propensity
to destroy their sick and aged or wounded companions. The hound which has fallen off his
bench, the wolf caught in a trap, the superannuated rook or robin, in truth, nearly all
known creatures, wild or domesticated, undergo
involuntary "euthanasia " from the teeth, bills,




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 215
or claws of their hitherto friendly associates.
It may be said to be the law of creation, that
such destruction of the sick and aged should
take place, -a law whose general beneficence,
as curtailing the slow torments of hunger and
decay, has properly been adduced by natural
theologians to console us for its seeming repulsiveness and severity.  The sight of another
animal of its kind in agony appears to act on
the brute as an incentive to destructive rage.
He is vehemently excited, rushes at the sufferer,
bellowing, barking, or screeching wildly, and
commonly gores, bites, or pecks it till it dies.
The decay of its aged companion, though it
affects the animal less violently than its agony,
stirs, somehow, the same instinct, which is the
precise converse of helpful pity; and, if the
species be gregarious, a whole flock or herd will
often join to extinguish the last spark of expiring life in one of their own band. There are, of
course, exceptions to this rule, especially among
domesticated animals, which sometimes acquire
gentler habits, and at one stage of advance
merely forsake their sick companions, and at
another actually help and befriend them. The
broad fact, however, on which I desire to insist
at this moment, is, that, at the sight of pain, animals generally feel an impulse to destroy rather




216  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
than to help,- a passion more nearly resembling
anger than tenderness. This emotion (to avoid
continual circumlocution) will be indicated in
the following pages by the term which seems
most nearly to describe its chief characteristic;
namely, heteropathy.  It is the converse, of
"sympathy," as we understand that feeling;
and it differs from "antipathy " as anger differs from hatred; heteropathy being the sudden
and (possibly) transient emotion, and antipathy
implying permanent dislike, with a certain combination of disgust.
The sight of the pleasure of another animal
does not seem generally to convey more pleasure to the brute than the sight of another's
pain inspires it with pity.' As a rule, the beast
displays, under such circumstances, emotions
ludicrously resembling the exhibitions of human
envy, jealousy, and dudgeon. Only will the
friendly dog testify delight at his comrade's
release from his chain, or the generous horse
display satisfaction when his yoke-mate is turned
out in the same field with him to graze.
Keeping these facts of animal life in view, we
are surely justified in interpreting the murderous practices in vogue, to the present day, among
many savage tribes (and formerly common all
over the world) as monumental institutions, pre



The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.     217
serving still the evidence of the early sway of
the same passion of heteropathy in the human
race in its lowest stage of development. The
half-brutal Fuegian, who kills and eats his infirm
old grandfather, differs in no perceptible way, as
regards his action, from the young robin which
cruelly pecks to death the robin two generations
older than himself. An equally widespread and
similar impulse may fairly be assumed to account
for actions so nearly identical in barbarian and
in bird.   The only appreciable difference is,
that, as regards the savage, it would seem that
custom (which must have originally sprung out
of an instinct, or, at least, have been in harmony
with it) has so long been stereotyped, that the
act of human parricide is generally performed
with unruffled calmness of demeanor, and even
with some display of tenderness towards the
father or mother, who is buried alive in Polynesia as kindly as he or she would have been
put to bed by an affectionate son or daughter
in England.1
1 Sir J. Lubbock (Origin of Civilization, p. 248) quotes
from Fiji and the Fijians an instance in which Mr. Hunt
was invited by a young man to attend his mother's funeral.
Mr. Hunt joined the procession, and was surprised to see no
corpse; when the young man pointed out his mother, who
was walking along with them as gay and lively, and apparently as much pleased, as anybody present. To Mr. Hunt's
remonstrance, the young man only replied, that "she was
19




218   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
The same dispassionateness in the performance of the dreadful act seems, indeed, to have
prevailed so far back as historical records extend, and we cannot (as it were) actually catch
the brutal heteropathy in the fact of murder.
Herodotus says the Masagete used in his time
to kill, boil, and eat their superannuated relations, holding such to be the happiest kind of
death.' JElian describes the Sardinians as killing their fathers with clubs as an honorable
release from the distresses of age. The Wends,
even after the introduction of Christianity, are
accused of cannibal practices of the like kind 
and (Mr. Tylor adds) there still existed in
Sweden, in many churches, so late as 1600,
certain ancient clubs, "known as Itta-klubbor,
or family-clubs, wherewith, in old days, the aged
and hopelessly sick were solemnly killed by
their kinsfolk."
their mother, and her sons ought to put her to death, now
she had lived long enough." Eventually the old woman was
ceremoniously strangled.
1 See an article on Primitive Society, by E. Tylor: Contemporary Review, April, 1873. Mr. Tylor traces the custom to
the necessities of wanderinstribes, and says, that, after there
is no longer the excuse of necessity, the practice may still go
on, partly from the humane intent of putting an end to lingering misery, but perhaps more through the survival of a custom inherited from harder and ruder times. Necessity may
explain desertion, but surely hardly murder and cannibalism.




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 219
Nevertheless, taking into consideration the
law pervading the brute creation, and (as we
shall presently see) the yet perceptible destructive impulse in the children of civilized regions,
there seems to be ground for attributing the
remote origin of all such practices, however
tenderly performed within historic times, to the
fierce instinct of the earliest savage, whom the
sight of pain and helplessness excited just as it
excites the bird or beast. In the wild animal,
it still acts simply and unimpaired: in the
man, even in his lowest present condition, it has
been stereotyped into a custom.
Nor is it by any means only in the case of
aged parents, that the heteropathy of the savage betrays itself. No similar custom of deliberate murder of the infirm  has had room  to
grow up in the case of wives, who are, of course,
usually younger than their husbands; and we
do not therefore hear of a regular system of
strangling them, when permanently diseased or
incapacitated. They are only starved, beaten,
and overtaxed with toil, till they expire in the
way, unhappily, not unfamiliarly known to English coroners' juries as "Death from natural
causes, accelerated by want of food, and harsh
treatment." But, if heteropathy acts only indirectly on sickly wives, it exhibits itself in full




220   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
force on puling and superfluous infants. Custom
among numberless savages, and even among
nations so far advanced in civilization as the
ancient Greeks and modern Chinese, has regularly established child-murder precisely in those
cases in which the helplessness threatens to prove
permanent, and which, consequently, leave the
destructive sentiment full play, though they
would call forth the most passionate instincts
of pity and protection     among ourselves.     A
puny and deformed boy is, in the ruder state of
society, an unendurable object to his parents,
who, without troubling themselves about Spartan principles concerning the general interests
of the community, silence his pitiful baby-wails
at once and forever. Needless to add, no mercy
can be expected for a daughter born where
women are (to use Mr. Greg's phrase) "redundant." She is exposed or drowned, with less
pity than a humane Englishman feels for a fly
in his milk-jug.'
1 See the Marquis de Beauvoir's hideous account of an
evening walk outside the walls of Canton, with scores of
dead and dying infants lying beside the path. A recent
official Chinese Ukase on the subject of infanticide, translated in the correspondence of the Times, sufficiently corroborates these statements, and shows also, happily, some desire
on the part of the government to put a stop to the practice.
It is issued by the provincial treasurer of Hupei, who begins
by quoting stock examples from Chinese history of the piety




The _Evolution of the Social Sentiment.       221
Of the feelings of savages towards their sick
and wounded companions, we rarely hear any
of daughters, and proceeds to ask how it comes to pass, since,
in the present day, girls are doubtless equally devoted, that
"the female infant is looked upon as an enemy from the
moment of its birth, and no sooner enters the world than it is
consigned to the nearest pool of water? Certainly, there are
parents who entertain an affection for their female infants,
and rear them up; but such number scarcely twenty or thirty
per cent. The reasons are, either (1) that the child is thrown
away in disgust because the parents have too many children
already, or (2) that it is drowned from sheer chagrin at having begotten none but females, or, lastly, in the fear that the
poverty of the family will make it difficult to devote the milk
to ier own child, when the mother might otherwise hire herself out as a wet-nurse. Now, all these are the most stupid
of reasons. All that those have to do who are unable, through
poverty, to feed their children, is to send them to the Foundling Hospital, where they will be reared up until they become
women and wives, and where they will always be sure of
enjoying a natural lifetime. With regard to the question of
means or no means of bringing up a family, why, the bare
necessaries of life for such children do not cost much. There
are cases enough of poor lads not being able to find a wife all
their lives long; but the treasurer has yet to hear of a poor
girl who cannot find a husband, so that there is even less
cause for anxiety on that score. But there is another way of
looking at it. Heaven's retribution is sure; and cases are
common, where repeated female births have followed those
when the infants have been drowned; that is, man loves to
slay what heaven loves to beget, and those perish who set
themselves against heaven, as those die who take human life.
Also they are haunted by the wraiths of the murdered children, and thus not only fail to hasten the birth of a male
child, but run a risk of making victims of themselves by
their behavior. The late governor, hearing that this wicked
custom was rife in Hupei, set forth the law, some time ago, in
19*




222   The Evolution of the Social Sentinent.
anecdotes.' I have failed to meet one illustrative of pity or tenderness. Their emotions on
witnessing   the pleasures, feastings, and marriages of others, seem usually to partake of the
character of restless and envious disquietude,
visible in dogs when their companions are petted,
or possessed of a supernumerary bone.
Passing now from the brute and the savage,
we must inquire whether any faint trace of
severe prohibitory proclamations: notwithstanding this, many
poor districts and out-of-the-way places will not allow themselves to see what is right, but obstinately cling to their old
delusion. Hia Chien-yin, a graduate from  Kianghia, and
others, have lately petitioned that a proclamation be issued
once more, prohibiting this practice in strong terms. Wherefore you are now required and requested to acquaint yourselves all, that, male and female infants being of your own
flesh and blood, you may be visited by some monstrous
calamity, if you rear only the male, and drown the female
children. If these exhortations are looked upon any more
as mere formal words; and if any people with conscious
wickednesss neglect to turn over a new leaf, they will be punished.
"Beware and obey! Beware!"
1 Dr. Johnson loq.: "Pity is not natural to man. Children
are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired
and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have
uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without
pity; for we have not pity, unless we wish to relieve them.
WVhen I aml on my way to dine with a friend, and, finding it
late, have bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend
when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the
aniumals are put to pain; but I do not wish him to desist. No,
sir, I wish him to drive on." -MAIN'S BOSWELL, p. 120.




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 223
heteropathy yet lingers amongst ourselves. Let
us take a young child, the offspring of a cultivated English gentleman and tender-hearted
English lady, and observe what are the emotions
it exhibits when it sees its baby-brother receive
an injury, and cry aloud in pain. That child's
sentiments are, we cannot doubt, considerably
modified from those of its barbarian ancestors,'"TWhen wild in woods the noble savage ran,"
just as the instincts of the kitten of a domestic
cat, or puppy of a lap-dog, differ from those of
the cub of a cat-o'-mountain, or the whelp of a
wolf. Even yet, however, an impartial study
may leave us room to hesitate before we "count
the gray barbarian" so very far "lower than
the Christian child," as that no signs of savage
impulse shall now and then betray the old leaven
in the curled darling of the British nursery. If
narrowly watched, at least one child out of two
or three will be seen to be very abnormally
excited by the sight of his brother's pain. He
will appear much as if subjected to an electric
shock; and his behavior will be found to partake,
in an unaccountable way, of all the characteristics of anger and annoyance against the sufferer.
There is no softness or tenderness in the looks
which he casts at his companion; nor will he,




224   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
usually, spontaneously make the slightest effort
to help or comfort him by the caresses which
he is wont to lavish on him to excess at other
moments. On the contrary, a disposition will
generally be manifested to add, by a good hard
blow, or sharp vicious scratch, to the woe of his
unfortunate friend.  There may be- indeed,
there will usually occur- a burst of tears like
a thunder-shower; but the character of this
weeping-fit is that of an explosion of irritation
and disgust, rather than of pity or fellow-feeling. A gentle and affectionate little girl of
three years old has been seen by the writer to
exhibit these emotions of heteropathy as distinctly as any angry bull or cannibal savage.
The child's baby-sister of two years old fell off
the lofty bed on which both were amicably
playing, and, of course, set up a wail of fright
and pain on the floor. Instantly the elder child
let herself slip down on the opposite side, ran
round the bed, and pounced on the poor little
one on the floor, whom she proceeded incontinently to belabor violently with both hands,
before rescue could arrive. Of course, eventually both parties joined in a roar: but the baby's
was a wail of pain and terror; the elder child's,
a tempest of indignation. Mothers and nurses,
on being strictly interrogated, will generally




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 225
confess to having witnessed similar unmistakable symptoms of heteropathy still lurking in the
sweetest-tempered  children.  The sight of
the pain-distorted features of their friends, or
the moans of an invalid, often call forth very
ugly emotions; and, though many tender-natured
babies show trouble at the tears of their elders,
even they are generally more excited than
depressed when they chance to witness any
solemn scene or demonstrative grief.    Fond
mothers naturally explain all such disagreeable
exhibitions as resulting from the inability of
innocent little children to understand pain and
sorrow. But the fact is, that they do, to a
certain extent, understand what they see; but
the exalted emotion of reflected sympathy is
yet lacking, and, in place of it, there are traces
of the merely animal and savage instinct. Of
course, the infantine displays of anger and irritation are instantly checked in civilized homes;
and the imitative faculty is enlisted, during its
earliest and most vigorous period, on the side
of compassion, which is often enough foolishly
misapplied and exaggerated, till, by the time the
little girl is four or five years old, she is so far
trained as to endure paroxysms of woe for the
misadventures of her doll deprived of an eye,
or exposed to the martyrdom of St. Lawrence




226   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
before the nursery fire. The "hereditary transmission of psychical habits" has also obviously,
in many cases, resulted in the inheritance of
genuine sympathy, even from the cradle. The
old heteropathy has been, strictly speaking,
"bred out."
In a similar though less marked manner, the
sight of another person's pleasure produces, in
the childish and yet uncultured mind, something
much more like displeasure than reflex happiness. Apart from the sense of injustice in the
distribution of toys, food, or caresses (of course
a fertile source of infantile jealousy), there is
an actual irritation at the spectacle of another's
enjoyment, and a disposition to detract from it,
-to destroy the toy, or spoil the food, or disturb the caresses,-forming the most perfect
antithesis to the reflected delight in, and desire
to enhance, another's pleasure, which constitute
the sympathy of adult life. Of course, here,
also, education generally steps in to check the
display, if not to eradicate the sentiment, of
envy, which, as La Rochefoucauld says, is the
only one of all human passions in which no one
takes pride, and which, therefore, its most abject victims soon learn carefully to cloak. But
enough of it is betrayed in every schoolroom
and playground to corroborate the assertion




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 227
that our earliest emotion is not pleasure in
another's pleasure, any more than pain in
another's pain.
May we stop here?     Does true sympathy
invariably fill the breasts of all grown-up men
and women in a civilized land, so as to leave no
room for heteropathy, either in its form of irritation at pain, or disgust at pleasure? Alas! it
is to be feared that a stern self-scrutiny would
permit few of us to boast that there are no
impulses resembling these left in our nature to
testify to their ancient sway. There are not
many men whom the tears of a woman, or the
wail of an infant, do not irritate, and who have
no need of self-control to avoid giving expression to anger at such sights or sounds. To many
more, and even to some women, the spectacle of
disease and feebleness is naturally so repugnant,
that the effort to render help must always be
stimulated by some potent affection, interest, or
sense of duty,- a fact, we may parenthetically
observe, which merits the serious attention of
that "Noodledom" which Sydney Smith says
is "never tired of repeating, that the proper
sphere of woman is the sick-room," and assumes
that every human female is a heaven-made
nurse.
Among the lower classes of society, the emo



228  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
tion of heteropathy unmistakably often finds
its terrible vent in the violence of husbands to
wives, and of parents, step-parents, and schoolmasters, to children.  Carefully scanning the
police reports, it will be seen that the rage of
the criminal (usually half drunk, and guided by
instinct alone) is excited by the precise objects
which would wring his heart with pity, had he
attained the stage of genuine sympathy. The
group of shivering and starving children and
weeping wife is the sad sight, which, greeting
the eyes of the husband and father reeling home
from the gin-shop, somehow kindles fury in his
breast. If the baby cry in its cradle, he stamps
on it: if his wife wring her hands in despair, and
implore him to give her bread for their children,
he fells her with his fist, or perhaps (as in a
recent notorious case) holds her on the fire till
she is burned past recovery. Again: as regards
the no less horrible crime of cruelty practised by
both men and women (especially as step-parents) upon children, it may be always observed,
that from the moment in which an unfortunate
little creature has fallen behind its brothers and
sisters in physical or mental strength, or received
an unjustly severe punishment, from thenceforth
its weakness and sobs, its crouching and timid
demeanor, and at last its attenuated frame and




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 229
joyless young face (the very sights which almost
break a compassionate heart to behold), prove
only provocations to its natural guardians to
fresh outrage and chastisement.  The feebler
and more miserable the child grows, the more
malignant is the heteropathy of its persecutors,
till the neighbors (often so criminally inert!)
wonder "what has come to them " to behave so
barbarously. The truth is, that here, in the yet
lingering shades of the old savage passion,
we find the explanation of a familiar but most
hideous mystery in our nature, -the fact that
cruelty grows by what it feeds on; that, the
more a tyrant causes his victim to suffer, the
more he hates him, and revels in the sight of his
anguish. Beside the deep-seated sting of selfreproach, which has been generally supposed to
goad the cruel man to hate those whom he has
injured (just as self-complacency makes the philanthropist love the object of his beneficence),
the cruel person is always lashed by his own
heteropathy to hate his victim exactly in proportion to his sufferings. The boor who has,
perhaps almost unconsciously, struck some
wretched woman who bears his burdens, grows
savage if he see her bleed or faint, and repeats
the blow with redoubled violence, till the moment comes in which he suddenly recognizes
20




230   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
that the object of his rage can suffer no more,
when his passion instantly     collapses, and he
seems to waken out of a dream.          Just in a
parallel way, in the higher walks of life, moral
cruelty develops itself in proportion as the victim betrays the anguish caused by cutting words
and unkind acts, and receives its check only
when a real or feigned indifference shields the
suffering heart from further wounds.
If we go yet a step further, and note the emotions raised in the breast of men of the ruder sort
at the sight of the pain and death of animals,
there can be little doubt that the existence of
thoroughly savage heteropathy may often be
traced among the cruelties of slaughter-houses,
whale and seal fisheries, bull-fights and dogfights, and even among many field-sports of a
better kind.
The rudimentary form of reflex emotion, where
it concerns pleasure, is somewhat more difficult
to trace than where it meets with pain. The
envy 1 candidly exhibited by children, animals,
1 The Chinese, to justify the sentiment, have framed the
ingenious theory, that there exists only a fixed quantity of
happiness for mankind to partake, and that, consequently,
when A is happy, B is authorized to consider himself defrauded. The late amiable and gifted statesman, Cavaliere
Massimo d'Azeglio, who had singularly favorable opportunities for comparing English and Italian public life, remarked
to the writer, that invidia unhappily pervaded Italian poli



The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.       231
and savages, as before remarked, is carefully
veiled in civilized and adult life; but undoubtedly it prevails everywhere to an extent sadly
inimical to the existence of genuine reflected
pleasure.   For reasons to be hereafter stated,
however, it would appear that the development of true sympathy with pleasure precedes
chronologically that of similar sympathy with
pain.
Starting now from the position, which I hope
may have been sufficiently established, that the
earliest reflected  emotion   is not sympathetic
pain with pain, nor yet pleasure with pleasure,
but heteropathic resentment towards pain, and
displeasure towards pleasure, our next task is
to attempt to define the stages by which these
crude and cruel emotions pass into the tender
and beneficent sentiment.     That this transition
is not only exceedingly slow, but also altogether
irregular, is obvious at first sight. There are
tics to a degree almost inconceivable to an Englishman.
Even a success, he said, such as a battle gained, or a powerful
speech made in the Chamber, was a source of danger to a
minister, owing to the enmity it excited, even among his own
partisans. In France, the immense success of the insuranceoffices is attributed to the value of their plaques, placed prominently on a house as a protection against malicious arson.
And in Normandy, of very recent years, the inhabitants of
several districts have adopted the use of tiles, instead of
thatch, avowedly to save themselves from the dangers arising
from the envy of neighbors and relatives.




232   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
two things to be accomplished simultaneously, -
the sentiment itself must alter its character from
cruel to kind; and secondly, having become kind,
it must extend its influence, according to Pope's
beautiful simile, in ever-widening circles,
" As a small pebble stirs some peaceful lake."
Practically, we find that the sentiment is always
unequally developed in character, and also extended in an erratic and unaccountable manner,
not at all in symmetric circles, but in irregular
polygons, with which no geometry of the affections can deal. Nay, there would appear to be
almost insuperable difficulties in the way of a
simultaneous development in warmth and in
expanse of sympathy.   He who feels passionately for his friends rarely embraces the wider
range of social and national interests; and he
who extends his philanthropy to whole classes
and continents too often proves incapable of
that strong individual love of which the poet
could boast,
" Which, like an indivisible glory, lay
On both our souls, and dwelt in us
As we did dwell in it," -
the most beautiful sentiment in human nature,




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.   233
and the most blessed joy, next to the joy of
divine love, in human life.1
How the destructive and cruel instincts began
of old to modify themselves is naturally a very
obscure problem, on which even Mr. Bagehot's
ingenious and valuable speculations regarding
the early crystallization of society can throw
little light. The process of amelioration must
have advanced considerably, even before a
polity, in any sense, can have existed. From
the first, the human mother, like the mother
bird and brute, no doubt felt "compassion for
the son of her womb," even though her pity
lamentably failed to prevent her concurrence in
infanticide in the cases most calling for that
compassion.   From  the tenderness of mothers
must have radiated, as from a focus, the protective instincts in each family; the father
sharing them  in a secondary degree.    In the
earliest savage state, except for such parental
love, those affections defined by the schoolmen
as the complacent, as distinguished from the
benevolent, must have had it all their own way.
The man loved the persons who ministered to
I That it is not impossible, though singularly rare, for a
man to unite the character of an ardent philanthropist with
that of a most affectionate husband, father and friend, will be
readily conceded by the many who mourn the recent death
of Matthew Davenport Hill.
20*




234  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
his pleasure, not those who called on him for
self-sacrifice. Still, even through such wholly
selfish love, we must suppose him to have begun
to realize in his dim imagination the pain he
witnessed in a beloved person, and, having once
figured it as his own, to have regarded the
sufferer with softened feelings. Possibly, in
some cases, this newly-born emotion may at once
have taken the shape of helpful sympathy. The
"brave " who saw his companion wounded may
have carried him off the field, plucked out the
spear-head from his side, or quenched his burning thirst with water. More often, and as a
general rule, however, it may be suspected that
a long interval has taken place after the destructive instinct is checked before the protective one arises; and in this interval the emotion
exhibited is that which I shall class as the
second in the development of the feelings;
namely, aversion.
Pursuing our method of seeking illustrations
from the animal world, we find that several of
the gentler brutes, and such as have seemed to
receive some influence from the companionship
of civilized man, very often display this aversion to their sick and suffering companions.
They forsake and shun them, instead of goring,
or tearing them to pieces. Among such species,




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 235
the diseased creature itself is so well aware of
the instincts of its kind, that, without waiting
to be "sent to Coventry," it shrinks into some
out-of-the-way corner to hide its misery from
their unfeeling eyes, though, in the very same
distress, it will seek out a human friend, and
deliberately call his attention to its sad state,
obviously with full confidence that he will
gladly afford relief.
Just in the same way, young children very
often testify aversion to grown people of mournful aspect, or who bear the traces of suffering
on their features. As a general rule, they shrink
from the sight of pain, and run from it to hide
their faces in their mothers' lap. A little girl
brought to visit a lady whom she had been
accustomed to see strong and active, but who
had become a cripple, burst into a passion of
tears at the sight of her crutches, and could not
be persuaded to approach or look at her again.
Perhaps few of us, even in after-life, could boast
that we have wholly outgrown this phase of
feeling, and that we invariably experience the
impulse of the Samaritan, and not that of the
Levite or the priest, when any specially deplorable spectacle lies by the side of our way. Certainly the pleasure-loving nations of the south
of Europe have by no means arrived at such a




236  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
stage of progress, but habitually abandon even
the house wherein father or mother, wife,
brother, or child, is lying in life's last piteous
struggle, aided only by the muttered prayers of
the priest at the bed-foot, and without a loving
hand to wipe the death-sweat from the brow, or
a human breast on which to rest the fainting
head. That the childish fears of Italians concerning infection from such diseases as consumption has something to do with this shameful
cowardice (prevalent under all circumstances,
and in every class, from the highest to the lowest, throughout the peninsula) may be probable.
And that the monopoly of religious consolation
by the Romish priesthood, and their jealousy of
all lay interference with the position into which
they thrust themselves between each soul and
its Maker, has encouraged and sanctioned it, till
it has become an indisputable custom, there can
be little doubt. Nevertheless, we have assuredly
here, among one of the most gifted and warmhearted of nations, an illustration, on the largest
scale, of the fact I am endeavoring to bring forward; namely, that aversion to the suffering and
dying is an emotion having a place in the historical development of human feeling, no less
marked than the heteropathy which preceded
it.




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 237
If my theory of development be correct, this
sentiment of aversion must, at a certain stage
of progress, have been the prevailing one; and
perhaps I shall do no injustice to Mr. Gladstone's dearly-loved Homeric Greeks, if I surmise that they had approximately reached that
era, and stood, in the matter of sentiment, about
halfway between the prehistoric savage and
the English gentleman. Among the former,
Philoctetes would have been speared or stoned
to death. Had he lived in our time, and served
on those same shores in British ranks, he would
have been tenderly conveyed to a hospital; and
a band of high-born ladies from his native land
would have traversed the seas to nurse him.
The actual comrades of Philoctetes took, or
(what comes to the same thing) are represented
by their poets as taking, neither one course nor
the other. They felt aversion to their miserable companion in his horrible suffering, and
accordingly banished him to Lemnos, where
even Sophocles is content to represent him
howling over his anguish and desertion as quite
in the natural order of things.
Throughout the whole millennium before the
birth of Christ, we may dimly discern among
the nations of East and West the struggle which
was going forward. If aversion were probably




238   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
the predominant sentiment towards distress,
sympathy was beginning to work freely, and
heteropathy still remained  as a stupendous
power.    The most ancient literature - the
Rig-Veda, the Zendavesta, and the Hebrew
Scriptures —reaches back to no period before
sympathy was in full exercise, and had received
the solemn sanction of religion. Among the
Hebrews (or perhaps, in the special case, we
must say the Chaldaeans), the sense of sympathy
with pain and misfortune reigned, at all events,
as early as the days of Job, whose friends,
unlike those of Philoctetes, flocked ostensibly
to mourn with him, albeit their sympathy was
injudiciously expressed, and bears some tokens
of that disposition to add moral to physical suffering, which is a refined form of heteropathy.
It took several centuries more before Euripides,
the most sentimental of the Greeks, could go so
far as to say,"'Tis unbecoming not to shed a tear
Over the wretched. He, too, is devoid
Of virtue who abounds in wealth, yet scruples,
Through sordid avarice, to relieve his wants." 1
And, on the other hand, Hebrews and heathens
alike believed that the opposite sentiment of
1 Antiope.




The Evobition of the Social Sentiment. 239
heteropathy towards the sufferings of enemies
was divinely sanctioned, and that, in a word,
the principle to be acted upon was, "Thou
shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy."
Few modern readers can have failed to remark
the extraordinary share which those "enemies,"
against whom it was lawful to pray, seem to
take in the concerns of the Psalmists, and
perhaps to have wondered whether the thoughts
of any men of similar piety and exalted feeling
in these days are ever occupied in the like
way.
Among the Gentile nations, no subjects of art
seem to have pleased the Assyrians and Egyptians better than the impalings and flayings of
captives, -cruelties which, had they been committed by a modern army, would certainly not
have been reproduced in painting or sculpture.
A great revolution in feeling must have occurred between the ages when Sennacherib and
Rameses desired to be immortalized in connection with such atrocities, and that when Marcus
Aurelius chose that his magnificent equestrian
statue on the Capitoline Hill should represent
him in the act of protecting his captives from
the violence of his Legions.
Not only art, but the very language of the
ancient world, preserves the traces of the cruel




210  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
heteropathy of old, as the rocks the fossil teeth
of the saurians,
" Which tare each other in their slime."
It shocks us to imagine the disciple of Socrates,
"whose benevolence," as Xenophon wonderingly remarks, " even extended to all mankind,"
wandering amid the groves of the Academy
discussing all the loftiest themes of human
thought, and at the same time talking incidentally of EtXaipscpxaxic as of an every-day and
familiar passion. Yet this was the case even in
"sacred Athens," where
" Near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood," -
an altar which Demonax said would need to be
overthrown, were the cruel Roman games to be
introduced into the city. Between "rejoicing
in the misfortunes of others," and enjoying a
gladiatorial show, there was not much to choose
in the way of sympathetic emotion.
Passing from Greece to Rome, we find the
whole population, at the close of the republic,
and the era of the Caesars, mad with enthusiasm
for the exhibitions, held in every town in the
empire, of men killing one another by scores,




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 241
or thrown to be devoured by beasts. Marvellous is the story that the very same populace which clamored for these circenses as for
bread, filled the theatre with shouts of applause, when Terence first gave expression to
that sense of the claims of all human beings to
sympathy, which has since played so large a
part in the history of our race: -
" Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."
Something within those stony Roman breasts
echoed, like Memnon's statue, to the kindling
rays of the rising sun; but we should deceive
ourselves widely, if we imagined that any thing
resembling our sense of the claims of human
brotherhood was then, or for ages afterwards,
commonly understood. The precept of Sextius
the Pythagorean (preserved by Stobaeus) —
"Count yourself the care-taker of all men
under God " -is almost an anachronism  still,
if we place the author in the Augustan age,
and critically'incredible at the earlier date when
it was formerly supposed to have been written.
The current feeling of the contemporaries of
Cato and Cicero, Tacitus and Pliny, received
no shock from the most hideous cruelties hourly
practised on slaves and captives of war. Nor
did there then exist in Europe a single hospital
21




242  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
for the sick, or asylum for the destitute, the
blind, or the insane; the first institution of the
kind known in history being a hospital, built
in the fifth century, in Jerusalem, for monks
driven mad by asceticism; and one of the next
earliest, a foundling hospital opened in Milan
in 789. Organized cruelty was in full force;
but organized charity was yet unknown. And
the wealthy Herodes Atticus, the proto-philanthropist, found no better way to display his
beneficence than by building the splendid theatre whose ruins still crumble in the shadow of
the Athenian Acropolis.
And here we fall on the natural explanation
of a fact mentioned a few pages ago. The
emotion of pleasure in another's pleasure,
though usually fainter than the parallel sympathy with pain, seems to have been historically the soonest developed,- at all events,
among the sunny-spirited nations of the South,
with whom classic history is concerned. The
Greeks and Romans "rejoiced with those who
did rejoice " much sooner and more readily
than they " wept with those who wept."  "Vae
victis!" the vulture-shriek of heteropathy,
echoes through the night of time, across the
arenas where slaughtered gladiators, and Christians mangled by the lions, made the "glory




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 243
of a Roman holiday." But even that hideous
triumph may be interpreted as, in some sort, the
expression of sympathy felt for the successful
swordsman, or for the ravenous wild beast.
The pain (if any could be said to exist) of beholMing so pitiful a sight as that which the
statue of the Dying Gladiator recalls, or the
still worse horror of watching a tiger's carnival, was lost to the fierce Roman heart in the
joy of triumph with the victor. Is all this
utterly inconceivable to us? The bull-fights
of Spain exhibit to the present day precisely
analogous phenomena.    The spectacle of a
miserable horse gored to death, and dragged
along, leaving his entrails strewed across the
arena, has been witnessed scores of times with
supreme indifference by men and women, noble
and imperial, engrossed by sympathetic delight
in the skill of the toreador, or even in the
courage of the poor maddened bull, whose dying agony afforded the next instant's pleasure.
Even in our own field-sports, whence cruelty
has been eliminated to the uttermost, the most
tender-hearted of fox-hunters and fowlers tell
us that they sympathize so much with the
hounds, that they have no time to feel for the
fox; and share so keenly the pleasure of their
pointers in a day on the moors, that the brief




244  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
death-pangs of the grouse are unnoticed. In
the earlier ages, it would seem as if pleasure in
the pleasure of others, particularly in the pleasure of victory, always outran pain in the pain
of the vanquished. It asked the deeper sentiment of the " dark and true and tender North,"
the tenderness breathed all through Christianity
from the spirit of its Founder, perchance even
the accumulated experience of suffering, ploughing deep through generations into the race, as
a single experience ploughs up, and makes soft
the individual heart, - it needed all these to
enable men to feel other men's pain as their
own.
Be it also borne in mind, that sympathy with
pleasure, usually demanding of us far less sacrifice than sympathy with pain (indeed generally
demanding no sacrifice at all), obtains its way,
necessarily, sooner than the sentiment which
must rise high enough to compel self-sacrifice
before it becomes manifest.  The proverbial
readiness of Englishmen to espouse the weaker
cause implies more stringent, as well as nobler
emotion, than the spaniel-like readiness of slavish races to attack the beaten, and side with the
strong.  Of course, such heroism, like every
other good deed, brings its reward in a fresh
sense of sympathy towards those who have




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 245
been protected. The roots of the tree of human love are nourished by the fallen leaves of
kind actions which sprung from its heart, and
have long dropped and been forgotten.
While the slow progress above described was
going on, a singular limitation may be observed
among those to whom sympathy was extended.
Among the indubitable results of recent ethnological research is the discovery, that in early
times, and to this day among savages, such
affectionate sentiments and notions of moral
obligation as are yet developed are entirely
confined to the tribe. Beyond the tribe, robbery,
plunder, rape, and assassination, are never understood to be offences, and are frequently considered as meritorious, much as tiger-shooting
is deemed laudable and public-spirited among
ourselves. There is a line of circumvallation,
outside of which kindly feeling does not extend, and the moral obligations which concern
such feeling are consequently not imagined to
apply. Within the line, there is brotherhood,
and certain recognized rules of action, rising,
by degrees, from the mere prohibition of perfidy, murder, and adultery, to the inculcation
of truth and helpfulness, extending to the very
borders of communism. Outside the line, all
the while, the " Gentile," the " Barbarian," the
21*




246  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
man of alien blood, is not merely less considered
(as is the case between ourselves and foreigners), but has actually no status at all, either as
regards feeling or duty.  The step over this
barrier of race, when it begins to be taken, is
an enormous stride; and we may see how it
was felt as such even by the writers of the New
Testament. This subject, however, is far too
large to be here treated otherwise than by
briefest indication. No doubt the union of
the known world in one empire in the Augustan age helped to give birth to the great idea
of a common humanity, with universal claims
to sympathy, which, as I have remarked, at
that time first arose. The simile of the body
and its members occurred alike to St. Paul and
to Cicero,' to express the mutual suffering of
men in the woes of their kind; and from
thenceforth the enthusiasm of humanity may
be said to have been kindled, though as yet but
a spark.
But, from the hour that the idea of a common
humanity with universal claims dawned on the
minds of men, the question, "Who is human?"
appears to have arisen; just as the Pharisee,
when commanded to "love his neighbor,"
asked, "Who is my neighbor?"    From that
1 De Off. iii. 5.




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 247
distant date, till the day (not yet a decade ago)
when the Supreme Court of the United States
decreed that " a negro was not a man under the
terms of the Constitution," there has been a
ceaseless effort to shut out inferior and inimical
races from the title which was felt to carry
with it the claims of brotherhood. In the prehistoric and earliest historic times, the basis
was laid for a great many of the prejudices
which survive even yet. When the tall, fair
races invaded Europe, and drove the short and
dark-haired ones into remote mountains and
caves, then began the legends of the giants
and the dwarfs; each regarding the other as
non-human, and fit objects of hatred, and all
manner of perfidy and injury. To the tall race,
their predecessors were Pygmies and Gnomes,
engaged in mysterious arts of metallurgy in the
bowels of the hills. To the short race, their
lusty conquerors were Monsters, Cyclopes, Giants, ever ready to slay them with clubs, and,
perchance, devour them limb by limb. Wonderful is it to reflect that the stories embodying
these primeval passions of fear and hatred
have actually borne down to us in their course,
through the traditions of thousands of years,
so much of their original sentiment, that every
child amongst us to this hour entertains the




248  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
belief that it is quite right and proper to play
perfidious tricks on a dwarf; and that the sanguinary achievements of Jack the Giant-killer, Jack
of the Bean-Stalk, and Tom Thumb, against the
most unoffending giants, were altogether laudable and glorious! Which of our readers (we
beg to ask the question with due seriousness)
can, even in adult years, lay his hand on his
heart, and say he should feel any moral or sentimental objection to murdering a " Giant " in
cold blood, or running a red-hot stake into his
solitary eye? As to Ogres, the case is worse.
If those archaeologists be.right, who say that
the word is the same as Hogres, Hongres, Hungarians, Huns, we have here, in the full daylight
of history, a peculiarly noble European race,
actually transformed by the imagination of their
neighbors into such preternaturally horrible
monsters, that even our uncharitable feelings
towards Giants fade into mildness beside our
animosity towards an Ogre.
As our own ancestors felt towards the earlier
races of Europe, as the old Vedic Aryans felt
to the Dasyus (their dark-skinned enemies), as
the Mazdiesnans of Zoroaster felt to the Touranians, so, it would seem, existing savage tribes
still feel to races far apart from their own in
blood, but having neighboring habitations.




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.   249
Among numerous anecdotes illustrative of such
sentiments, none are more horrible than those
which tell of the hatred of the red men for the
Esquimaux. A case is recorded where a tribe
of the former travelled two or three hundred
miles over the snow for the sole purpose of destroying a village of the inoffensive Esquimaux,
with whom they had no quarrel, and who possessed no property worth their robbery. As a
dog kills a rat, so do such races destroy each
other, under an impulse of pure hatred, which,
perhaps, had its origin in the heteropathy of
conquering generations ages before.  Probably,
in its earlier stages, every nation now existing
has thus had its detested " Canaanite " dwelling on the borders of the land, and credited
with every inhuman vice and crime.'
Parallel, and nearly contemporaneously, with
the idea of a common humanity, arose the idea
of a common Christianity, forming the bond
of still more   sacred  mutual sympathy.     It
would be to rewrite the history of the last
eighteen centuries to record how this new im1 "The almost physical loathing which a primitive comnmunity feels for men of widely different manners from its
own, usually expresses itself by describing them as monsters,
such as giants, or even (as is almost always the case in Oriental mythology) as demons. The Cyclopes is Homer's type of
an alien." -MAINE'S Ancient Law, p. 125.




250  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
pulse has drawn together the hearts of men in
twofold fashion. Inwardly, the deeper spiritual
life which then was awakened, and with it the
peculiarly softening influence of penitence, must
have effected much; while the apotheosis of suffering, in the ever-recurrent emblem of the cross,
cannot have failed (as Mr. Lecky eloquently describes it) to have trained to sentiments
of compassion the rough races who substituted
it for the images of Thor and W'oden, or of
Mars and Zeus. Outwardly, a welding no less
obvious has been effected by the organization
of a " Christendom," begun among all the tender associations of the little band in the "upper
chamber," and continued through ages, "when
the disciples had all things in common," and in
those wherein they endured together the Ten
Persecutions, and finally completed in the era
rwhen antagonism  with Islam  united all the
Christian nations in the Crusades. A similar,
though perhaps less forcible, influence of the
outward kind was meanwhile effected outside
the Christian camp, among the nations which
accepted the creed of Mahomet, whose levelling
tendency (like that of Buddhism) has probably
scarcely less aided the growth of mutual sympathies among its disciples than the presentation
of a common object of worship, and the direct




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 251
inculcation of mercy and beneficence. As the
present condition of India unhappily exemplifies,
caste is, of all barriers, the most insurmountable
to the sympathies of mankind. All the great
religions of the East, however, and pre-eminently
Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, have contributed
importantly to the nourishment of the sympathetic affections, by stamping them with
approval, and condemning any manifestation of
the opposite sentiments. When men in each
nation have risen so high as to recognize the
benevolence of God, they have always embodied
that truth in creeds, wherein God is represented
as commanding men to be benevolent; and
these crystallized creeds have acted with compact and persistent force on the future development of the benevolent affections.  In each
case, we must needs account, in the first place,
outside of conscious or recognized religious
influences, and in the region of the secret
divine education of the race, for the development of those social sentiments, which, as all
ethnology proves, are not in the earliest stage
understood to have any connection with the
worship of the unseen powers.
Returning to the history of such feelings in
Christendom, we find, that, just as the title of
"human " was refused to inimical races as




2; 2  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
soon as a common humanity was understood to
convey the right to sympathy, so the claim of
Christian brotherhood was still more jealously
refused to all outside the pale of the Catholic
Church.   Pity for Jews, Turks, Infidels, or
Heretics, there was little or none during all the
ages wherein that great Church maintained its
unity unbroken. To torture the Jew, to slay
the Saracen, and to burn the Heretic, were
actions not only laudable (as the primitive
savage thought it laudable to slay the enemies
of his tribe), but religiously obligatory. The
Church had taken the place of the tribe; and
the feelings it inspired and sanctioned were
even more vivil, alike for good and for evil.
At last the Reformation came, and with it
fresh questionings as to whom the fold of
Christian brotherhood should include.   The
Protestants - themselves outside the pale of
Roman fraternity   found Quakers, Socinians,
and Anabaptists, to exclude from their own,
and, still farther off, a hundred thousand hapless
witches and wizards to thrust beyond the limits
even of humanity. At last the fires of hate
and fear died down; and, for a century and a
half, true sympathy has been permitted to grow
up amongst us comparatively unchecked. The
result is, that the sense of Christian brother



The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 253
hood has perhaps more force amongst us than
ever before, while the enthusiasm of humanity
(extending far, and experienced intensely, altogether beyond the bounds of the churches) has
risen to the height when a passion becomes selfconscious, and receives baptism, evermore to
take its place among the recognized sentiments
of our race. If a barrier to perfect sympathy
among men be now anywhere left standing, we
acknowledge unanimously that it is a blot on
our civilization, and, so far from being in accordance with our religion, is in defiance thereof.
From  destructive heteropathy to negative
aversion, and thence to positive and helpful
sympathy, - such has been the progress in the
character of the emotion I have now endeavored
to trace from the dawn of history till the present
time.  From  the tribe to the nation, to the
homan race, to the whole sentient creation, -
such has been the progress in extension of that
sympathy as it gradually developed itself. Neither line of progress is yet nearly completed.
Much heteropathy still lingers amongst us.
Aversion to the suffering and miserable is even
yet a common sentiment; and our sympathy,
such as it is, might be far warmer, and better
sustained. Nor is the lateral expansion of our
fellow-feeling any way uniform, or co-extensive
22




254  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
with our knowledge.  There must, of course,
from the limitations of our natures, be always
a more vivid emotion raised by a neighboring
than by a remote catastrophe.  None but IHe
who is alike near to all can sympathize with all
alike.  But making every allowance for the
inevitable partialities of nationality and neighborhood, and the comparatively easy comprehension of the joys and sorrows of persons of our
own age, race, and class, it would seem that there
is yet great room for further and more equable
development. Along every plane on which
our feelings run, they as yet come short. In
the first place, even as regards local and national
extension, the just proportion between the near
and the remote, the concerns of our countrymen
and those of others, is very far from being
represented by the various degrees of interest
manifested by the British public wlhen it reads
of the burning of a warehouse in London, cr
the conflagration of a city in America; of a
boat upset on the Isis, or of the suffocation of
the whole crew of a Chinese junk; of a breeze
off the Goodwins, or of a hurricane in Bengal;
of a scarcity of water in a Kentish village, or
of the depopulation of whole provinces by
famine in Persia.
Secondly, it is not only geographically and




The Evo!lution of the Social Sentiment. 255
laterally that our sympathies fail in extension,
but also, and much more emphatically, perpendicularly (if we may so express it), through
the various strata of society. Our class-sympathies (especially at both ends of the scale)
are as strong as our national sympathies, and,
more than they, need to be widened. The
high-born Englishman feels more akin to the
German, Italian, or Russian noble than to the
small tradesman or peasant of his own country;
and the rise of the perilous International affords
singular proof how far the working-classes are
beginning to feel their cosmopolitan class-sympathies override their patriotism. A great deal,
however, has been done during this century,
on the other hand, towards the breaking-down
of the barriers which limited the more tender
emotions to different ranks. Free and cordial
association is far more common everywhere;
and the failure to sympathize outside of a man's
own class is now (as it ought to be) more often
noticeable among the uneducated or half-educated than the cultured.
The literature of two generations past recalls
the yet recent period when any thing like
"sentiment" was supposed to be the exclusive
attribute of well-born and well-mannered people,
and when no novelist would have dreamed of




256  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
asking for sympathy in the woes of any L" common person."  There were gentlemen, indeed,
of whom "Tremaine" was the archetype, and
ladies who lived on air and AEolian harps; and
there were also beggars and shepherdesses; but
of the intermediate classes of cotton-spinners,
clerks, bakers, ironmongers, bricklayers, needlewomen, and housemaids, it had never entered
into anybody's head, in the pre-Dickens age,
that any thing affecting could be written. Even
Shakspeare himself had looked, like a born
aristocrat, not unkindly, but somewhat jestingly, at such subjects; and though we cannot
doubt, that, in real life, there must have been
far more of mutual sympathy than books betray, it is tolerably certain there was infinitely
less readiness to feel for vulgar sorrows, and
rejoice in homely joys, than, thank God! is
now to be found amongst us. The writers who
have helped us to this tenderer feeling for
human nature under its less refined formswriters such as Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell and
Mrs. Stowe -deserve even more honor than
those who, like Miss Bremer and d'Azeglio and
George Sand and Richter, have aided us to
sympathize with the inner life of other nations.
There yet remain to be noticed other directions in which our sympathies extend them



The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 257
selves very irregularly. As a general rule, the
tenderest of all feelings are those between
persons of opposite sexes; and the differences
which exist, so far from diminishing sympathy,
probably often enhance it. Nevertheless, the
position of women in the East, and even in
Europe, offers irrefragable evidence, that, with
all their lavish affection, men have not, on the
whole, been able to sympathize with women
as with one another. They have been ready
enough to indulge their pleasure-loving propensities, their vanity, and their indolence; but
those nobler aspirations after instruction and
usefulness, which many of them must always
have shown, -aspirations which men remark
with the most ardent and helpful sympathy
when displayed by boys, - have rarely touched
them in women. No man will give his son a
stone when he asks for bread; but thousands
of men have given their daughters diamonds
when they prayed for books, and coiled the serpents of dissipation and vanity round their
necks, when they needed the wholesome food
of beneficent employment.
On the other hand, though women cannot be
accused of any general want of sympathy with
men, yet they, too, bestow it often in a weak
and unworthy manner, rejoicing in their lower
22*




258  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
pleasures, and suffering with their lower pains,
but having little fellow-feeling with their loftier aims, or regrets for their sadder failures.
" Rosamond Vincy" would have doubtless shed
abundant tears over " Lydgate's" misfortune,
had he broken his arm. She had not a sigh to
give to his shattered aspirations.
And yet, again, besides the imperfect sympathy of men and women for each other, there is,
very commonly, failure in the sympathy of both
for children. With all the fondness of parents
and relatives, numberless poor little creatures
pass through the springtime of life exposed to
very nipping winds, so far as their feelings are
concerned, though perhaps all the time mentally and physically precociously forced in a
hot-bed of high culture. Because their pains
are mere childish pains, we find it hard to pity
them; and their little pleasures, because they
are so simple, seem only to deserve from us a
patronizing smile, or the warning " not to be
foolish and excited," which often quenches the
joyous little spirit most effectually. But, as
St. Augustine truly says, the boy's sufferings,
while they last, are quite as real as those of the
man: indeed, few of us have troubles much
worse, even now, than punishment and heavy
tasks. And as to the pleasures of those young




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 259
years when all earth seemed paradise, and
every sense was an inlet of fresh delight, —
may we not vainly look round for cause for
equal sympathy in the happiness of an adult
companion, such as we may find in that of the
child playing in the meadow with its cowslip
ball, or shouting with ecstasy as its kite soars
into the blue summer heaven-? Hateful is it
to reflect, that, to many a world-worn heart
amongst us, the spectacle of such pure joy,
instead of awakening that sense of "pleasure
in pleasure," which we flatter ourselves is our
habitual sentiment, not seldom calls up, on the
contrary, an ugly emotion, much more partaking of the character of heteropathy, and
provoking us to check the exuberance of the
child's delight by some harsh word or peremptory prohibition.
One more observation, and this part of my
subject may close. Not only do our sympathies require to be more equally extended as
regards nations, classes, sexes, and ages; but
there is sore need that they should spread outside the human race, among the tribes. of sentient creatures who lie beneath us and at our
mercy. The great ideas of a common humanity and a common Christianity, which were at
first such noble extensions of family and na



260  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
tional sympathies, have long acted as limitations
thereof. To this hour, in all Romish countries,
the sneer, "You talk as if the brute were a
Christian," or the simple statement, "Non e
Cristiano," is understood to dispose finally of a
remonstrance against overloading a horse, skinning a goat alive, or plucking the quills of a
living fowl.  The present benevolent pope
answered, a few years ago, the request to found
a society for prevention of cruelty in Rome, by
the formal response (officially delivered through
Lord Odo Russell), "that such an association
could not be sanctioned by the Holy See, being
founded on a theological error; to wit, that
Christians owed any duties to animals." Similarly, the limitation of sympathy to humanity
caused English moralists of the last century to
argue deliberately, that the evil of cruelty to
the lower creatures lay solely in the fact that it
injured the finer feelings - the humanity — of
the men who were guilty of it. Even to this
hour, it is not rare to hear in cultivated society
the fiendish practice of vivisection condemned
or excused by reference solely to the hardening
of the sentiments of young surgeons, or the
benefits which may remotely accrue to some
hypothetical human sufferer, the cause of whose




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.       261
disease may, just possibly, be elucidated thereby.1
Surveying the position in which we now
stand, after reviewing the long progress of the
ages, there is much at which to rejoice for the
present, much more to hope for the future. The
human heart seems more tender than it has been
heretofore; and, if so, the gain is one to which
all the triumphs of science and art are small in
comparison. Our sympathies are yet very imperfect, and very unequally distributed. To one
of us, physical pain appeals most forcibly; to
another, want; to another, ignorance.     Some of
us feel for the sorrows of the aged; some for the
1 "The horrors of visisection, often so wantonly and so
needlessly practised" (the anatomia vivorum which the heathen Celsus reproved as too inhuman to be perpetrated),
" the prolonged and atrocious tortures sometimes inflicted in
order to procure some gastronomic delicacy, are so far removed
from the public gaze, that they exercise little influence on the
characters of men. Yet no humane man can reflect on them
without a shudder. To bring these things within the range
of ethics, to create the notion of duties towards the animal
world, has been, so far as Christian countries are concerned,
one of the peculiar merits of the last century, and, for the
most part, of Protestant nations. Mahometans and Brahmins
have in this sphere considerably surpassed the Christians;
and Spain and Italy, in which Catholicism has most deeply
planted its roots, are even now, probably, beyond all other
countries, those in which inhumanity to animals is most
wanton and most unrebuked."-EUROPEAN MORALS, vol
ii. p. 187.




262  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
helplessness of infancy. One can weep with the
mourner; another can joy with the happy.
Mental doubts and anguish touch minds which
have known their agony; and the aspirations
after knowledge and beauty, those which have
felt their noble thirst. Some of us feel intensely
for human troubles; and others, again, are full
of compassion for the harmless brutes, and feel
keenly the' Sorrow for the horse o'erdriven,
And love in which the dog has part."
But all these various hues of the same gentle
sentiment have their natural explanation in the
experience or the idiosyncrasy of those who
display them; and if they act only as special
stimulants to activity, and not as limitations of
it, they are innocent and even beneficial. Such
as they are, also, these inequalities in the distribution of our sympathies tend constantly to
reduce themselves to a minimum, seeing that,
in every direction, one tender emotion leads
imperceptibly to another. We cannot help the
child without helping the parent, nor educate
the mind without feeding the body, nor in any
way cultivate the habit of noting and relieving
the wants of others without causing the full
tide of our outflowing charity to rise beyond




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 263
any bounds which we may at first have assigned
to it.
In point of strength, we cannot doubt that in
our time, iri spite of the supposed materialism
and selfishness of the age,1 sympathy has acquired in thousands of generous hearts a very
high development indeed. It affords the mainspring of life to a whole army of philanthropists, statesmen, clergymen, sisters of charity,
and many more of whom the world never hears.
Did the laws of nature permit one person to
take the physical pains of another, there would
be a constant struggle as to which should bear
each wound, each deformity, and each disease.
Especially among women, in whom this spirit of
loving self-sacrifice is commonly predominant,
there would be found at an hour's call a hundred Arrias to tell every shrinking Paetus that
"death did not pain," a thousand Alcestes to
descend to the grave in the stead of every
selfish Admetus.   Nay, it may be doubted
whether, after a while, the hospitals of the land
would contain a single inmate (save, perchance,
a few forsaken old women) of those originally
1 Mr. Bain " approaches the consideration " of that "large
region of human feeling," the "tender emotion," by remarking, "This is pre-eminently a glandular emotion. In it, the
muscular diffusion is secondary," &c. - TE EMOTIONS, &C.,
p. 94.




264   The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
sent there as patients; but every man would
go forth, bailed out, willingly and joyfully, by
mother, sister, wife, or child, remaining to suffer
in his stead. Of course, there are special obstacles, as well as special aids, under the new forms
of modern life, to the growth and diffusion of
sympathy. If literature and steam locomotion,
and cheap and rapid postage, and telegraphy,
assist immensely to diffuse and to sustain the
sympathies of mankind, on the other hand, the
vehement struggles for existence and for wealth,
and the haste and bustle of our lives, tend
almost equally to check and blunt them. If
we only compare the amount of feeling which
any one of us readily gives to the illness, ruin,
or death of a neighbor in the country, and that
which we find time to spare to the same misfortunes of another, equally well known and
liked, in London, we shall obtain some measure
of the influence of the increased rapidity of
social circulation on the affections. More difficult is it to estimate the cruel results of the
competition for professional advancement, and
for " quick returns and large profits," out of
which come such offences as the adulterations
of food and medicine, the unnatural and portentous extension of the liquor-traffic, and the
frightful recklessness of life displayed in the em



The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 265
ployment of unseaworthy ships. These things
are more shocking to the moral sense than the
savage atrocities of half-barbarous times, being
done, at the instigation of meaner passions, by
men far more accountable for their actions.
But, though Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Carlyle treat
them as the genuine "signs of the times," I am
inclined to believe that a better test of our state
may be found in the widespread horror and
disgust which they have created, and the preponderance, far beyond that of any former age,
of public deeds springing unmistakably from
the purest enthusiasm of humanity. There are
few, I think, who, on calm reflection, will hesitate to admit that there exist less of the antisocial passions, and more of the humane and
benevolent ones, now in the world than at any
known period of past history.
Beyond all that we have yet attained, we
may dimly discern the progress yet to be, and
welcome for happier generations the time when
a divine and universal sympathy will do its
perfect work. Even now there are few of us
but must have felt how variable are our powers
to feel with others; how, for long periods, our
hearts seem shut up in our own interests and
pains; and how, again, they seem to open, we
23




266  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
know not why, to a sense of the suffering of a
friend, a child, a bird, or brute, so keen that it
seems a revelation, and every other sorrow and
pain we know of acquires new meaning in our
eyes, and pierces us as a thorn in our own
breasts. There are hours wherein we spontaneously long to do any thing, or suffer any thing,
which should mitigate the woes we have suddenly learned to perceive. And, again, there
are times when the happiness of others is similarly near and dear to us, and we feel capable
of sacrificing all our own joys to secure for
them felicity here, and beatitude hereafter.
These oscillations of our emotions must surely
point to a time in the future growth of humanity wherein that which is now rare shall be
frequent, and that which is only occasional shall
be habitual. As the whole history of the past
shows the gradual dropping-away of the crude
and cruel emotions of heteropathy and aversion,
and the development of sympathy from its first
small seed in the family till it has become the
great tree of life which we behold, so, without
indulging in Utopian dreams of human perfection, we may reasonably anticipate that the long
progress will not stop at that precise step where
we find it, but extend yet further indefinitely.
As the men of old felt in rare hours of tender



The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 267
ness amid their ceaseless struggles, when "the
earth was full of violence and cruel habitations," so the cultured amongst us feel habitually now. And as we feel in our best and
tenderest moments, so men in ages to come will
likewise feel habitually.
Such gradual rising of the temperature of
human sympathy, when it shall take place, will
necessarily call into existence a whole new flora
of kindly deeds and customs to cover the
ground of life. Economists are forever looking
to improved external organizations to better the
conditions of all classes, and these have doubtless their significance and use. But what would
be the introduction of the wisest, justest, most
perfect political and social organizations which
could be planned, compared to the elevation,
even by a single degree, of the sense of universal brotherhood, and of the kindly sympathies
of man with man? Already we begin to feel
that acts of beneficence are scarcely lawful, save
when they come as from brother to brother,
from the heart of the giver to the hand of the
receiver. In the time to come, it is not too
much to hope that there will be far less than
now of such ungenerous generosity as finds
vent in such phrases as, " I have done my duty
by him, and now I wash my hands of him;"




268  The Evolution of the Social Sentiment.
"I have done my part, and, if he rot, I care
not." Less need even may there be for the
deep-sighted Buddhist precept, " If a man cannot feel in charity with another, let him resolve
on doing him a kindness, and then he will feel
kindly."
And, finally, there seems faintly revealed
above the mists wherein we.dwell, the lofty
summits of an emotion transcending all that
our race yet has experienced,- a sympathy
which shall shine on the joys, and melt with the
sorrows, not only of the lovely, but of the unlovely, and thus make man at last " perfect as
his Father in heaven, who makes his sun to
rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth
rain on the just and on the unjust." For eighteen centuries those words have rung in the
ears of men; but who can boast he has fathomed their meaning, or conceived any plan of
life which could give them practical realization?
To do this thoroughly, to feel such genuine
sympathy for the stupid, the mean-minded, the
vicious, as to enable us to make for them the
same sacrifices we should readily make for a
beloved friend, - this is to reach that zenith of
goodness which the world has idealized in
Christ, but towards which scarcely an approxiration has been practically made, even by the
best of Christians.




The Evolution of the Social Sentiment. 269
What will mortal life be when men come to
feel thus? It will be already the fulfilment of
the best promise of heaven; for " he that liveth
in love liveth in God, and God in him."
Mankind will then be joined as in one great
insurance against want and woe; and no misfortune will be unbearable to one, because it
will be shared by all. So many hearts will
rejoice with every innocent joy, that men will
live as in a room brightened all round with
mirrors reflecting every light. So many hands
will stretch forth to alleviate every pain, and
remove every burden, and supply every want,
that, in the sweet sense of that kindly human
love, even the heaviest sorrow will melt away
like snow in the sunshine of spring
Even our poor sympathies, such as they are
now, are the source of all our purest joys.
Pain and pleasure alike undergo a Rosicrucian
transformation from lead to gold, when they
pass through the alembic of another's soul;
and while the dreariest hell would be entire
self-inwrapment, so the sweetest heaven would
be to feel as God feels for every creature he
has made. When we have advanced a little
nearer to such divine sympathy, then it is obvious, also, that we shall be more capable of the
supreme joy of divine love, and no longer find




270  The Evolution of thle Social Sentiment.
the harmony of communion forever broken by
the discords of earth. He who will teach us
how truly to love the unlovely, will lead us
into the land where our sun shall no more go
down.
Such is, I believe, the great hope of the
human race. It does not lie in the "progress
of the intellect," or in the conquest of fresh
powers over the realms of nature; not in the
improvement of laws, or the more harmonious
adjustment of the relations of classes and
states; not in the glories of art, or the triumphs
of science. All these things may, and doubtless
will, adorn the better and happier ages of the
future. But that which will truly constitute
the blessedness of man will be the gradual
dying-out of his tiger passions, his cruelty and
his selfishness, and the growth within him of
the godlike faculty of love and self-sacrifice;
the development of that holiest sympathy
wherein all souls shall blend at last, like the
tints of the rainbow which the Seer beheld
around the great white throne on high.