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 GL arear SEE 
 
 BiMLoOehseshot 
 In after days 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 _ httos://archive.org/details/inafterdaysthougOOunse 
 
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 
THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 W. D. HOWELLS, HENRY JAMES, JOHN 
 BIGELOW, THOMAS WENTWORTH 
 HIGGINSON, HENRY M. ALDEN 
 WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON 
 GUGLIELMO FERRERO 
 JULIA WARD HOWE 
 ELIZABETH STUART 
 PHELPS 
 
 WITH PORTRAITS 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 MCMX 
 
Copyright, 1910, by Harrger & BRoTHERS 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Published February, rgto 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
CHAP. 
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A CounsEL oF ConsoLATION . 3 
 Wituram Dean Howe tts 
 aE GRRAT LOR Bly ance nMhTG 
 
 ELizABETH Stuart PHELPS 
 Is THERE ExXIsTENCE AFTER 
 
 LO AEE oii hen iy kann VNU ioi hates 
 Joun BicELow 
 DEVON OV CHEVIVELE.. eiiiay a gay OL 
 
 Jutta Warp Hower 
 THE OTHER SIDE OF MorRTALITY 107 
 
 H. M.”ALpEen 
 TED TURE DEB. SOUR Tos a 
 THomas WENTWoRTH HIGGINSON 
 (Pe RHUTURE OVATE A ollie 155 
 Witiiam Hanna THomson, M. D. 
 Rae Line Array VAS itr 
 GUGLIELMO FERRERO 
 
 Is THERE A Lire AFTER DEATH? 199 
 Henry” JAMES 
 
I lustrations 
 
 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS . . . . .. Frontispiece 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS . . . .Facingp. 17 
 Be NEUE EOM 1 hay Meet Wu aii mo walls ene hh 43 
 BEE nace LO WE sh (py came Mei ce ty ts BO 
 MUR LLL SR ALDEN ik psd ts vege ice bTOs 
 Ps END WORTH HIGGINSON 40700501193 
 CLES MANNA STHOMSON yi UM yen fa) Vrie 
 Ba EMOADERRERO Ted). aura EN Pe Oy ge 
 
 66 
 HENRY JAMES 2.0%.) :, LAE od: 197 
 
In after days when grasses high 
 O’er-top the stone where I shall lie, 
 Though ill or well the world adjust 
 My slender claim to honored dust, 
 L shall not question or reply. 
 
 I shall not see the morning sky; 
 LT shall not hear the night-wind sigh; 
 I shall be mute, as all men must 
 
 In after days! 
 
 But yet, now living, jain were I 
 That some one then should testify, 
 Saying—‘ He held his pen in trust 
 To Art, not serving shame or lust.” 
 Will none?—T hen let my memory dte 
 In after days! 
 
 —From “Poems on Several Occasions,’’ by, Austin Dobson. 
 
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A Counsel of Consolation 
 
 William Bean Howells 
 
Su After Days 
 
 I 
 A QGounsel of Consolation 
 
 Nai you can say from your think- 
 ing will avail with the newly bereaved, 
 but anything you say from your knowing 
 and believing and feeling will be precious. 
 They want your pity, your compassion, your 
 sympathy; and though there never was a 
 death which did not seem to accumu- 
 late upon the mourners incidents of pecul- 
 iar anguish, yet if you can match these 
 from your own experience they will be hum- 
 bly grateful. Some chance word of yours, 
 the least considered or directed, shall find 
 them in their sorrow and help them beyond 
 your utmost hope. In our doubt of this we 
 3 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 shrink from trying to help, lest we rather 
 hurt, but I think there could not be a greater 
 mistake. Nature, which includes death as 
 maternally as birth, has within it the yearning 
 for companionship in grief as in joy. For 
 the bereaved the world has been emptied 
 of what seems to have been the supreme 
 good, and the void aches for any form of 
 kindness with which friendship can help 
 fll it. 
 
 I keep saying the same thing differently 
 over to justify myself in offering a sugges- 
 tion which will shock the witnesses of sorrow 
 rather than the sorrowers themselves. My 
 prime counsel to these would be to trust 
 not only to eternity, but also to time, for 
 consolation, and to trust time first, for time 
 is here and now, and eternity is hence and 
 of the future. This counsel does not imply 
 forgetting; to grief, which is of love, that 
 is impossible; but it is well to realize from 
 the universal human experience that the 
 agony of to-morrow will not be the agony 
 of to-day; the sharpness will have been dulled 
 a little, and a morrow will come when the 
 lacerating edge will be rounded so that you 
 
 4 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 shall not feel it except as a stress that will 
 no longer tear your heart, and then no stress, 
 but a valued consciousness. You shall even 
 wish to feel it; there will be a sweetness in 
 it which you would not forego, but would 
 keep with you for life. 
 
 I cannot truly speak to the stricken from 
 the absolute faith which some others can 
 speak from. I am of those who patiently 
 wait for the fulfilment of the hopes which 
 Christianity has worded from the Greek 
 philosophers rather than from the Hebrew 
 prophets. Once I asked my father, a man 
 whose whole life was informally but deeply 
 religious, whether he kept the vivid interest 
 in his doctrine which he once had. He was 
 an old man, and he answered me, “ Youth 
 is the time to believe, age is the time to 
 trust.’ Now I am myself an old man, and 
 more than ever | feel the wisdom of this 
 saying. There are many things that I doubt, 
 but few that I deny; where I cannot believe, 
 there I often trust; and as all faith is mys- 
 tical, I would have the bereaved trust their 
 mystical experiences for much truth which 
 they cannot afhrm. In their darkness it will 
 
 5 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 be strange if there are no gleams of that 
 outer light which wraps our whole ignorance 
 of this life. These will penetrate it some- 
 times in what seem preternatural experi- 
 ences of the waking hours, and sometimes 
 in visions of the night, which I would have 
 the sorrower at least passively accept, or not 
 positively refuse. Others can say that such 
 visions, such dreams, are figments of the 
 overwrought brain, but no one whose de- 
 spair they have brightened will reject them. 
 Whether they are natural or supernatural, 
 they are precious; whether they are the 
 effect of causes quite within ourselves, or are 
 intimations to us from the source of all life 
 that death too shall have an end somewhere, 
 somehow, they are to be cherished and kept 
 in the heart, and not cast out of it as idle 
 and futile. ‘They may be the kaleidoscopic 
 adjustment of our jarred and shattered being; 
 they may be prismal rays of celestial light: 
 who shall say from knowledge? What they 
 oftenest involve is that reunion with the 
 absent which the whole soul yearns and 
 grieves for. Once more, while they last, we 
 have our lost again; we clasp them and hold 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 them to our hearts; we talk with them, face 
 to face, and they tell us— 
 
 “What and where they be.” 
 
 When such dreams fade they leave us not 
 so all disconsolate, and while their glamour 
 lasts our darkened world is illumined from 
 their radiant world. So it seems, and their 
 elamour shall never wholly pass unless we 
 will it, and misprize them. If we speak of 
 them too freely they dim sooner; the effort 
 to fix them in words is fatal to them, but 
 if we keep them hushed in the secret of our 
 abiding sorrow when it is no longer agony, 
 they will remain a lasting comfort. In the 
 hour of “sharpest pathos,” I would say: 
 Seek the help that offers itself to your seek- 
 ing from those sources of healing which all 
 the generations of Christianity have known. 
 Go to your Bible, which, perhaps from your 
 long estrangement, will have grown newly 
 potent and significant; go to Plato for the 
 converse which Socrates held with his weep- 
 ing disciples when in the face of death he 
 hailed the eternal life; go to the nobler poets, 
 or to any poet in his nobler mood. It is not 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 at random that I speak here of ‘Tennyson’s 
 Two Voices and certain passages of In 
 Memoriam. The very look and sound of 
 the words had healing in them. I do not 
 say that they were of the same quality of 
 comfort as the affirmations of unquestion- 
 ing faith; but often in the hour of grief the 
 fabric of religion, which the whole of life has 
 built up, crashes into the dust of death, 
 which in its turn seems to resume the whole 
 of life. [am speaking mainly to those whom 
 this ruin befalls, and who cannot accept the 
 assurance of others’ faith. These cannot 
 dwell even upon the words of divine or 
 apostolic promise and continue to find in 
 them the hope and assurance which they 
 once gave. Then nature must trust to 
 nature, to dreams and visions, to the exalted 
 poems, and take what comfort it can in them. 
 
 Nature encompasses otherwise the whole 
 of being, and she brings the anodyne, the 
 narcotic, the nepenthe, in which the bereft 
 are presently reprieved of their agony. ‘The 
 house of mourning 1s in these transports the 
 house of mirth; the time to weep is also the 
 
 time to laugh. Amid their sobs a wild gayety 
 8 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 suddenly bursts from the mourners as if it 
 burst upon them; it passes, and then the 
 burdened heart relieves itself again in tears. 
 I would not have the mourners strive to re- 
 press these outbursts, as something unworthy 
 and unfit. They are the effect of nature 
 offering escape from otherwise intolerable 
 pain, and beginning in the very presence of 
 death the consolation which time will com- 
 plete. Often they come through the unin- 
 vited remembrance of something quaint or 
 droll in the character of the dead, and so 
 far from involving slight or irreverence they 
 imply the share of the absent in the transport 
 of that moment for which the living deny 
 death. For that moment the dead are with 
 us again in the fond and familiar intimacy 
 _ of custom not then sensibly broken forever; 
 they are more tenderly dear because they 
 seem to return among us in the intimacy of 
 love and home. 
 
 These reliefs I urge the more because they 
 are from within ourselves, and I would not 
 have any one reject them, the most mystical 
 of them, for the reason that they are from 
 within us. If “the light is within you,” it is 
 
 9 
 
Ou After Days 
 
 not the light for your guidance alone, but the 
 light for your solace also. For those whose 
 faith is broken by the blow dealt, or is weak 
 from long disuse, here is comfort from which 
 it would be folly to turn. Doubtless the su- 
 preme comfort can come, waiting the effect 
 of time, only from the authority of revela- 
 tion, by the mouth of the priest, or by the 
 mouth of some strongly believing friend. It 
 will not matter what church the priest is of, 
 ‘+ will not matter how poor and ignorant and 
 humble the friend is; it is enough if either 
 be sincere. There is help for the bereaved 
 from the church, perhaps because the church 
 has been the help of so many in so many 
 ages; it is strengthened for its office by the 
 beaten and broken helplessness of the myri- 
 ads who have turned sorrowing to it; their 
 tears and cries have consecrated it as they 
 have consecrated the written Word. But so 
 is there help from the living faith incarnate 
 in some believer who takes the groping hand 
 in the strong grasp of his confident trust and 
 leads the way. 
 
 There is relief, there is help, there is even 
 hope in the testimony, which will come from 
 
 10 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 all sides, to the kindnesses that the dead did 
 when living, and I would have the mourners 
 give the freest access to this testimony. It 
 will have been a life so hard and sterile as 
 to be all but impossible if some deed of 
 beneficence has not fallen from it in its way 
 through the world, and such a life there will 
 be few or none to grieve for when it is ex- 
 tinct. All other lives will have left the re- 
 membrance of good actions forgotten by the 
 doer, but not forgotten by those they were 
 done to. ‘These will gladly come with their 
 remembrance, and there can be nothing 
 sweeter to the sorrowing than such a proof 
 that their dead are worthy of their grief. 
 If there is to their grief any high or any 
 humble, as indeed there should not be, in a 
 time rapt from the world and the pride of 
 life, then the last shall be first with them, 
 and the lowliest whom their lost one has 
 made his friend shall be the welcomest. No 
 such friend should be kept from them by a 
 foolish decorum; he has a right to tell them, 
 and it is the right of the dead that he should 
 tell them of the goodness he has experienced. 
 
 1 suppose that we have all sometimes 
 
 2 II 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 shrunk from speaking or writing a word of 
 compassion to the mourners in the house of 
 death, but this is from a false and mistaken 
 forbearance, I think. We know that we shall 
 write inadequately, awkwardly, foolishly, per- 
 haps; but we ought to know that the grati- 
 tude of the bereaved will supply our defects. 
 They wish to dwell upon every aspect of his 
 vanished life in the sight of those who knew 
 him, or only saw him, even. They instinc- 
 tively long to keep his “loved idea” before 
 their eyes as it is reflected in the eyes of 
 others, and I believe those would err who 
 should try to distract them from their grief, 
 at least in the first days of it. Let them 
 abandon themselves to it; do not seek to 
 part them from it; if any chance does so, 
 they will feel lifelong that they have not 
 grieved their heartbreak out, that they have 
 somehow been robbed of the sorrow which 
 is one of the most precious experiences of 
 love. Again, in all this, there is something 
 mystical, and we cannot follow anguish in 
 the ways by which it best assuages itself. 
 
 I would have those who grieve keep close 
 and fast every association with the dead; 
 
 12 
 
Ou After Days 
 
 soon enough such memories will pale and 
 fade away. I would have them think of the 
 faults of those who are gone, the foibles, the 
 frailties, which in every human being help 
 to make up his sum, and endear him equally 
 with his virtues. If there is a world beyond 
 this, these will go with him to it, and be- 
 come the stuff of his regeneration and re- 
 demption. I would have the mourners re- 
 call hours of gladness, of merriment, spent 
 with the dead, and live over with them in 
 a joyous comradery, joyous, if only for a 
 fleeting instant, the times which time cannot 
 bring again. It may be that there 1s— 
 
 “Nessun maggior dolore 
 Che il ricordarsi del tempo felice 
 Nella miseria.” 
 
 But though it is— 
 
 “Truth the poet sings 
 That a sorrow’s crown of sorrows is remembering 
 
 happier things,” 
 
 yet if we empty memory of all but the gloomy 
 and piteous experiences of the past we in- 
 vite despair and madness. It zs a great 
 spe id 
 
In After Days 
 
 anguish to recall the happy time in wretch- 
 edness, but it is also a great help, a ereat 
 defence. Except rarely, except improbably, 
 sorrow does not kill, for sorrow is something 
 nobler than mere brooding upon irreparable 
 loss; that indeed may kill, or, worse yet, 
 craze. Sorrow is patient, sorrow is even 
 cheerful, and willing to give itself to the 
 trouble, the affliction of others. It is eager 
 to share another grief in which it will lose 
 itself, and if there is a counsel of consolation 
 which I would offer above all the rest to the 
 mourner it would be to seek out in the very 
 ecstasy of pathos some instance of affliction 
 and minister to it. 
 
 Religion will help, reason will help, love 
 will help, but only time will truly bring re- 
 lief. It will seem a hard saying, in the black 
 hour from which there is no visible issue, to 
 declare from the universal human experience 
 that there will yet be the full light of the 
 common day in the house of mourning; it 
 will seem profanation, almost, it will seem 
 sacrilege. Yet it is true; and the light of 
 the common day is the very light of heaven. 
 The time will come when you shall not in- 
 
 14 
 
Su After Days 
 
 Se Se 
 deed forget your dead, but when they shall 
 be helpfully, not hurtfully, with you. The 
 passion, the wild, headlong, hopeless passion 
 for reunion with them, will have resolved 
 itself into a patience in which they will al- 
 ways be present, and responsive to your 
 thought, which, whenever it strays from your 
 work or your play, will seem to find them 
 quietly grateful for it. You will not forget. 
 You may no longer see the mystical beauty, the 
 sublimity of the dead face, but out of the far- 
 ther past the living eyes will look, and now and 
 then, among the myriad faces, infinitely unlike 
 one another, there will chance a face from 
 which an evanescent semblance will flash a 
 radiance into the place where her face, his face, 
 is in your heart and restore it to your vision. 
 
 Is it a freak of fleeting fancy, is it an 
 effect of the eternal truth? ‘Tell us, tell 
 us,’ sorrow implores, “‘shall we see that face 
 again, and see it always? If a man die, 
 shall he live again?’ ‘There is no answer 
 in science or experience, only the voice 
 of One who taught as if with authority, 
 “If it were not so I would have told you.” 
 
 I would have the mourners grieve all their 
 
 15 
 
In After Days 
 
 sorrow out, and not stay from dwelling on 
 their loss; without fully realizing this, they 
 cannot begin to retrieve it. “Keep before 
 you,’ I would conjure them, “the vision of 
 the face, the form, you shall see no more on 
 earth, and let it pass only of itself, hoping, 
 longing for its return when it fades away. 
 But do not frame this image from the mem- 
 ories of the dead in their hours of sickness, 
 or even in the hours after pain when they take 
 on the majesty and beauty of eternal peace. 
 Those hours are but as instants in the long 
 tale of the years that went before. Return 
 in your tenderness, turn again in your de- 
 spair, to the records of those happier years, 
 and reconstruct from them the truer likeness 
 of your beloved. See him gay and glad, full 
 of life and purpose, of work and play, of jest 
 and earnest, such as he veritably was, and 
 do not wrong him by the presentment of his 
 suffering or its mortal surcease. Make him 
 your own again, by putting this out of your 
 thoughts, and inviting into them the sem- 
 blance of him when his life was the habit of 
 your own, and he was most himself in some 
 
 fortunate, some joyous moment.” 
 16 
 
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 5 4) wh oy (ars rae Ne Se 
 
 is ' rhs , Pts Che mit hla 
 recat eek ae RES AN pees 
 ina ' en en | at 2 5 > i . iy Mids ~ & 
 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS 
 
Che Great Hope 
 Elizabeth Sinart Phelps 
 
I] 
 Che Great Hnpe 
 
 “rT“HE setting of a great hope is like the 
 setting of the sun.” 
 
 The familiar words of one who was ac- 
 quainted with grief, and who held its solemn 
 charter of expression, recur to you as an 
 event hitherto unmet. Your own event has 
 transposed as it has transformed every other. 
 Feeling and fact pass under the most relent- 
 less autocracy in the world—the government 
 of sorrow. You know your first great be- 
 reavement. 
 
 To say that it stuns you is to use the only 
 verb that expresses the opening effect of 
 your personal tragedy. Many of the words 
 which anguish has chosen for its outcry from 
 the beginning of pain to the end of peace 
 cannot be replaced. We may chafe under 
 their familiarity, and call them time-worn, 
 
 1D 
 
Jn After Bays 
 
 but we can never call them time-dishonored. 
 The most averse of us will find them on our 
 lips, or in our hearts, in the great crises of 
 life. ‘This is one of such words. You are 
 stunned, we say, by what has befallen you. 
 At first, you do not even ache under it. 
 Your subterranean consciousness perceives 
 the fact, but of its relation to your capacity 
 for suffering you know, at the beginning, no 
 more than you do of the literature of Mars. 
 
 The instinct of all hurt animals is much 
 the same. You crawl to some mercifully 
 desolate spot. As the key snaps in your 
 door a deeply imbedded nerve in you seems 
 to start with it. This is the nerve of the 
 conscious pang. 
 
 Outside the window there is silent space. 
 There are hills and sky. There is light, and 
 the diminution of light, and the formation of 
 shadow in places where light was. Stupidly 
 semi-conscious of familiar outlines, and yield- 
 ing to the eternal human impulse to seek the 
 horizon, you turn half-blind eyes to the 
 gleaming west. The sun is going down. 
 Color masses against color, like tints never 
 seen before upon a shrinking palette. You 
 
 20 
 
Jn After Bays 
 
 do not recognize the familiar, daily incident. 
 It whirls before you like the movement of 
 earthquake or volcano or flood—something 
 unnatural and incredible; there is a moment 
 when it seems to be preposterous. ‘This is 
 followed by a sense of fear which, it occurs 
 to you, will in some form last forever. The 
 sun has dipped, has dwindled, has blurred, 
 has swung into a solemn twilight, has plunged 
 to an impenetrable night—the first upon a 
 new-closed grave. Into this strait and nar- 
 row darkness you enter as your dead has 
 entered—you are almost as separate, you 
 are almost as alone. At first you are still. 
 For a time you are as cold. 
 
 Sensation returns not like that after par- 
 alysis, tingling slowly, but like that after cer- 
 tain concussions, with sudden smart. All the 
 aching forces of the universe seem to have 
 crashed upon you. It is as if you had be- 
 come the central nerve of pain. The hap- 
 less self-concentration of a first grief pos- 
 sesses you; nor, in the healthier conditions 
 of a slowly acquired peace will you recall it 
 with anything but honest pity, such as you 
 
 21 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 would feel for another’s woe or error, or for 
 inexperience in any form. Time teaches. 
 The recurring seasons lift. The daily routine 
 sustains. “The hours are too strong for 
 you.” A sane philosophy—or even a live 
 religion, if you are so fortunate as to have 
 one—comes to your relief, if not altogether 
 to your rescue. When you have found that 
 you can bear your misery as the rest of the 
 race have borne theirs before you—when you 
 discover that you need not curse God and 
 die, because your personal happiness is 
 counted out of the system of things—then 
 you are ready to confront your fate and ask 
 it questions. If these are the questions of 
 the rack to the inquisition, call them by their 
 dark names; for nothing is gained by ignor- 
 ing the first blasphemies of grief. Admit 
 them, if they exist. Endure, if so it be, as 
 vigorously as you suffer. Writhe, since you 
 must. Curse, if you would. Anything is 
 better than a paralytic despair. Be true, 
 even to your manias, in the process of healing. 
 Sanity never comes of self-deception. It 
 comes of candor, as much as it comes of 
 struggle. ‘The unreason of a great grief 
 22 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 passes into the mental health of acceptance 
 by a beautiful and subtle process in which 
 God and the soul work together—the soul 
 never knowing how, but conscious sometime, 
 in some way, in part or in full, of a Power 
 not itself, that makes for comfort. 
 
 I know of but two things in the experience 
 of a real bereavement which cannot be borne; 
 and I do not hesitate to say that it is asking 
 too much of any sensitive human spirit to 
 demand that they should be borne—at least, 
 without the throes and blows of a rebellion 
 which may be as creditable to a broken heart 
 as what we call resignation; ‘or may, in fact, 
 in the end, lead to that strong condition 
 which we are apt to dismiss from our respect 
 as a pious and feeble fallacy; until we our- 
 selves have experienced it. 
 
 He is a fortunate mourner who finds his 
 sorrow unhaunted by spectres darker than 
 itself. Remorse is the one worst, the one 
 intolerable element in affliction. Blessed be- 
 yond his own knowledge is he who finds him- 
 self companioned only by gentle memories of 
 his dead: he to whom the acutest pangs pos- 
 
 23 
 
Jn After Dayz 
 
 sible to grief are strangers: he whose love for 
 the living, like the love of the New Testa- 
 ment definition, was ‘“‘kind,’ while it had 
 the opportunity. 
 
 There is no more pitiable being in the 
 world than a man who, really loving, or real- 
 ly believing that he loved, yet inflicted upon 
 the living—perhaps in the fire of anger, or 
 perhaps in the froth of thoughtlessness— 
 that for which he cannot ask the pardon 
 of the dead. The hurt may have been slight, 
 if you choose to call it so, but it takes on a 
 mortal character in the retrospect. There 
 was a duel of natures or a war of words; 
 there was an hour stained with red which 
 has dyed the memory through and through; 
 they who loved became as they who hated— 
 and wounds slashed where caresses had been; 
 and perhaps the dead forget, but the living, 
 God pity him! remembers. 
 
 The slow surprise of dear incredulous eyes; 
 the sudden shocked sense of inconceivable 
 pain—the mute reproach—the silence more 
 surcharged than any outcry—these return 
 and recur like the films in a limited and 
 monotonous biograph. The memory sits 
 
 24 
 
Su After Days 
 
 bound hand and foot before moments which 
 a man would give his life to forget. But, in 
 proportion as he is a man, he does not forget. 
 It does not matter very much that he may 
 not have been altogether to blame, that his 
 friend was, or was believed to be partly at 
 fault, for now the only thing he does forget 
 is that the loved and vanished was ever in 
 the wrong. It is not the faults of the dead 
 that we recall; it is our own. It is not our 
 own lovable traits that we dwell upon; but 
 theirs. ‘‘I have come to think of you,” said 
 an aging man to a friend, “‘as never forget- 
 ting, and always forgiving.” It is good to 
 be given words like these while we can hear 
 them. For the hour comes when there 1s 
 nothing left for us to do but listen; when the 
 whole being becomes one exquisite ear, like 
 the curved body of Burne-Jones’ Eurydice in 
 hell, entreating the eternal silence for articu- 
 lation which does not come. The powerful 
 and discordant Carlyle will be remembered 
 no longer for his great history than he will 
 be for his cry over the grave of the wife 
 whose life he bruised while he had her: 
 “Blind and deaf that we are: oh, think, 
 
 25 
 
Ou After Days 
 
 if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till 
 Death sweeps down the paltry dust-clouds, 
 and idle dissonances of the moment.” 
 
 “Oh, why do we delay so much till Death 
 makes it impossible ?” 
 
 “Oh, my Dearest, my Dearest, that can- 
 not now know how dear!’ 
 
 Of all the thrilling incidents told us by the 
 evangelist who moved Boston last winter, one 
 will longest pursue us. 
 
 A Maine fisherman lost his little girl in a 
 fog. He left the child upon an island rock 
 while he went to fish, and, fishing, forgot her. 
 The tide was rising. With the tide came the 
 fog. When at last he found his way back to 
 the spot where he had left the little thing she 
 had been swept away. To this day it is said 
 that the disordered father reiterates these 
 hapless words: 
 
 “If T had only stayed where I could hear 
 her cry!” 
 
 Piteous the truth, but, like all truths, to 
 be faced! The fogs of life crawl subtly be- 
 tween those who love, and tides rise, and 
 waves drown while we are having a pleasant 
 time, and capable of forgetting. Then we 
 
 26 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 row back—desperately, out of our reckoning, 
 and calling all the way. A little remember- 
 ing, a little fidelity, a little steadiness or kind- 
 ness would have made the dreadful differ- 
 ence. Perhaps it is better to know this too 
 late than never to know it at all; but in the 
 bitter education of life there can be no crueler 
 knowledge. If I had only stayed near 
 enough to hear her cry! .. . If I had only 
 kept close enough to hear him call! These 
 are the self-reproaches which no self-delusion 
 can silence. Nothing is so hard to bear as 
 that which could have been prevented. 
 
 After our first bereavement, who dares any 
 longer drift beyond the range of drowning 
 cries? In an utter sense, at a solemn cost, 
 we learn to stand by those we love. 
 
 It would be a waste of the emotional force 
 to dwell upon the element of remorse in be- 
 reavement, if it did not carry its own con- 
 soling quality with it—and this, I think, in 
 a peculiar way it does. Nothing is so sure 
 as that love forgives. Although we love, we 
 may hurt. In proportion as we are beloved, 
 we shall be forgiven. What if we did harass 
 him to the quick for whom we mourn? What 
 
 | 3 ah 
 
Su After Days 
 
 if we did wound her to the death for whom 
 we grieve? In all the world of life or death, 
 he would be the first—she would be the swift- 
 est—to forget. It may be well “to have it 
 out” with our haunted memories once for 
 all, and trust the dearest dead, as we should 
 have trusted the dear living to comfort us 
 for the very wrong that we wrought upon 
 themselves. 
 
 It may be that no one else can do this. 
 It may be that no one else would. He will, 
 whose life you damaged. She will, whose 
 heart you broke. Love will, because it is 
 love. ‘There is no such thing as‘an unfor- 
 giving spirit, if that spirit loves. Death does 
 not make our beloved less trustworthy, less 
 tender, or less true. Who shall say that the 
 process of passing from this life to the other 
 does not make them more so? In their way, 
 they may develop under the separation as 
 much as we do. In their consciousness, as 
 in our own, the energies of love may intensify 
 through parting. It is impossible to put a 
 limit to the power of the dead—or the will of 
 the dead—to forget that they were ever 
 grieved or harmed. 
 
 28 
 
Su After Days 
 
 One of the supreme passages in all litera- 
 ture is De Quincey’s apostrophe to the Bishop 
 of Beauvais, who sentenced Joan of Arc. 
 Ever since, a child in my father’s study, I 
 first heard him read it while I sat listening 
 “‘with a wild surmise,’ the words have il- 
 luminated for me, like no others outside of 
 Holy Writ, the nature of forgiveness; per- 
 haps the nature of a living and therefore 
 growing spirit: 
 
 ““My lord, have you no counsel? ‘Counsel 
 I have none; in heaven above, or on earth 
 beneath, counsellor there is none now that 
 would take a brief from me.’ .. . Who is that 
 cometh from Domrémey?. . . who is she that 
 cometh with blackened flesh from walking 
 the furnaces of Rouen? ‘This is she, the 
 shepherd girl, counsellor that had none for 
 herself, whom I choose, bishop, for yours. 
 She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord’s 
 brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead 
 for you; yes, bishop, she—when heaven and 
 earth are silent.” 
 
 The only other unbearable thing that I 
 know in the endurance of bereavement is the 
 29 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 apparent finality of it. Any temporary sepa- 
 ration between the living can be borne. 
 Which soul of us is not man enough to ac- 
 cept our share of the universal doom, if it is 
 not to be a permanent one? Who could not 
 spare his beloved patiently, if he must, for a 
 little while? Who could not wait for the 
 touch of the vanished hand if, in the width 
 of the spaces or the gulfs of the mysteries, it 
 is groping anywhere for ours? He was right 
 whose half-inspired, half-narcotized vision 
 selected the sound of “‘everlasting farewells” 
 as the epitome of human despair. Love 
 claims in proportion to its intensity, and all 
 genuine love defies the grave as a man fight- 
 ing for his life defies his assailant. I incline 
 to go so far as to say that, if we do not clasp 
 our dead again beyond the barriers of their 
 mystical silence, it is our own fault. 
 
 It all comes, in the end, perhaps, to a mat- 
 ter of feeling—profound and high-minded 
 feeling. ‘The intellectual argument for per- 
 sonal immortality is quite strong enough to 
 cover the case. But it may not be supple 
 enough, and the case may outrun it. By 
 as much as love is greater than reason, there 
 
 30 
 
Qn After Days 
 
 remains the larger argument for the ever- 
 lasting life. There are souls born doubters, 
 as there are bodies born cripples, and there 
 will always be a certain proportion of minds 
 to which the sublimest promise of the Chris- 
 tian faith is not sympatica, and therefore not 
 comprehensible. One may look upon skeptics 
 of the sneering and irremediable type as 
 spiritual defectives. Honest they may be— 
 pitiable they certainly are. One would go 
 any length of sympathy with their misfort- 
 une; but one cannot mistake deformity for 
 health and beauty. Unbelief is not an en- 
 viable thing; there is nothing grand or noble 
 about it. Nothing can be more erroneous 
 than to take it as a sign of intellectual su- 
 periority. This is a common mistake of 
 those who are either half-read, or half-felt 
 in the study of spiritual questions. 
 
 It is probable that there have been more 
 words written to prove or disprove the doc- 
 trine of personal immortality than have cen- 
 tred upon any other subject of human 
 thought—it is certain that there has been 
 more thought expended upon it. Probably 
 
 31 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 all intelligent people have their own favorite 
 method of approaching the question. To 
 my own mind the intellectual argument— 
 not philosophically, but simply speaking— 
 may be summed in some such form as this: 
 
 Life is a consequence, looking for a cause. 
 The Creator is either a system of things or 
 an individual force. In any case, He has 
 eventuated in a world of individuals. ‘These 
 feel, on the whole, more than they think, 
 and suffer, on the whole, more than they 
 enjoy. 
 
 The preponderance of misery over happi- 
 ness in the human race is so tragic that it 
 constitutes the darkest mystery of creation. 
 There is no solution of this mystery except 
 in some form of reimbursement to the suf- 
 fering. (This may not be theological, but it 
 is logical, and I am not at all afraid to say 
 it.) ‘The creating force is either good or evil, 
 kind or cruel, and must act accordingly. The 
 hypothesis of a malevolent Deity is intel- 
 lectually perfectly coherent; but morally it 
 is sO monstrous that it must be counted out 
 of any cursory consideration like this. If we 
 are in the control of benevolent power, we 
 
 32 
 
Ju After Bays 
 
 are entitled to expect benevolent treatment. 
 If God is good, He will be kind. 
 
 If God is kind, He could not make a world 
 of woe like this one, and stop there—it is 
 not that He would not, or should not—He 
 could not. It would be the reductio ad ab- 
 surdam of philosophy. It 1s perfectly con- 
 ceivable that He might create a suffering 
 world, for beneficent ends of His own, partly 
 apparent even to us, even now and here— 
 but only partly apparent. It ts as incon- 
 ceivable that He should pack this planet with 
 the agonies that it holds, if these are the be- 
 ginning and end of the story, as it is that He 
 should permit the sins and manias of the 
 race, if there is never to be given an oppor- 
 tunity to evolve into moral sanity. 
 
 One may say it with reverence none the 
 less profound for the courage of the words, 
 that the character of Godhead itself is on 
 trial in the history of this unfortunate world. 
 Life is scarcely more than an experiment in 
 vivisection, if death is the end of personality. 
 
 Personality exists in proportion to power, 
 and, of all personal forces, love, in this sys- 
 tem of things, is the supreme agent. It is 
 
 33 
 
Su After Days 
 
 not sufficiently understood that love is its 
 own god; capable of deciding for itself the 
 question of immortality. As a man feels, so 
 he is. As we love, so we are to be. It is to 
 an appalling or a blessed extent for you to 
 decree the nature of your future. If you love 
 greatly, if you love utterly, if you love nobly— 
 what power in the universe can decide that 
 your love shall cease to be? I can conceive 
 of none. It rests with yourself whether you 
 shall love so highly that no low, material 
 accident, like physical death, can slay your 
 love. As long as love lives, it has the claims 
 of an energy upon its source. It is easy for 
 us to perceive that God is power. It is a 
 slow lesson for us to understand that God 
 is love. Perhaps it took the Christian 
 Scriptures to give us the splendid epi- 
 eram. 
 
 Love, for most of us in this life, is at 
 once a sad and glorious thing. We come to 
 the brow of the grave with a little struggling 
 shape of human happiness in our arms, and 
 drop it there—buried alive. Still warm, 
 breathing yet, palpitating to our lips, it slips 
 under the earth, and cries after us as it slides 
 
 34 
 
In After Days 
 
 away: “I have not died. Save me! Save 
 me, that I live again!” 
 
 Too often, it should be remembered, we 
 are the slayers of our own buried feeling. He 
 who cannot love strongly, he who cannot love 
 steadily, may live beyond death—we do not 
 say that weak feeling, like weak thought, may 
 not have its fair chance—but he who does not 
 love sufficiently to insist upon another life, if 
 only for love’s sake, may have missed his 
 ablest advocate for personal immortality. 
 
 Fidelity is the most uncertain of human 
 traits. In this, dogs, are clearly the superiors 
 of men. ‘The terrier to whom a monument 
 is erected in Scotland because he slept upon 
 his master’s grave every night, in all weathers, 
 for twelve years, surpassed most mourners 
 of the master race, in loyalty and in grief. 
 If great and permanent love is, in itself, a 
 prophecy of immortality—I anticipate the 
 question—yes. The dog deserved another 
 life, and I have no personal difficulty in sup- 
 posing that he may have it, if any of us do. 
 
 In the background of all thoughtful souls 
 lurks one question which most of us evade, 
 
 35 
 
In After Days 
 
 but which none of us escape. The weakness 
 of human feeling, the uncertain power to hold 
 ourselves to “the highest when we see it,” is 
 not so apparent or so perplexing in any other 
 relation as in that between man and woman. 
 Marriage is an attempt to fix this relation in 
 its noblest form: but a noble spirit may fail 
 in realizing the endeavor. The man who has 
 loved his living wife devotedly may recoin 
 the gold of feeling, “‘no matter whose the 
 print, image, and superscription once” it 
 “bore.” Human loneliness is the most in- 
 exorable power this side of death, and all 
 but the royal allegiances go down before it. 
 In youth we are severe upon this affectional 
 errancy. All young lovers believe in the 
 eternity of love—their own, and that of others. 
 In middle life and age we grow tolerant of 
 far feebler weakness than that involved in the 
 temporal quality of affection. Many a man’s 
 heart has ached its way through the experi- 
 ence of love and ties not his first, without 
 coming to any ease in the direction of a future 
 life. The perplexity is too fine for him— 
 perhaps too sad. Fine it will always be, and 
 sad it must remain. What is to become of 
 36 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 the cross-currents of feeling in the world to 
 be? How adjust, in the new life, relations 
 that are unadjustable here? Where shall we 
 put the later love? How shall we face the 
 old? What is there to be expected but an 
 emotional and even an intellectual confusion 
 which may deprive what we call heaven of 
 one of its chief elements of peace or even 
 comfort ? 
 
 Only one thing seems to me possible to say 
 —whatever we may think or feel—upon this 
 matter. When we consider the adaptability 
 of our affections here, we may infer some- 
 thing of their amenability to unknown condi- 
 tions hereafter. We love, or think we love; 
 yet we love, or think we love again. Never- 
 theless, there must exist the supreme feeling, 
 or the composite ideal of feelings. Who shall 
 gather this blossom of being? And how 
 shall it be sown and grown? Jesus Christ 
 spoke a wonderful and mystical word upon 
 this matter. Pondering upon it, as every 
 one must who has speculated much upon the 
 future life, I have come to this conclusion: 
 When we consider what time does for us, 
 what growth does for us, what character does, 
 
 37 
 
In After Days 
 
 and experience, in this world—it is not neces- 
 sary to fret ourselves about the affectional 
 dénouements of the next. 
 
 Take the single fact of human friendship. 
 What capacities in it! What evolutions from 
 it! What revelations, what atonements, what 
 prophecies! He who has found a friend, or 
 proved one, may be for that reason farther 
 on the way toward the life everlasting than 
 he supposes. 
 
 But he who loves nobly and is nobly be- 
 loved has stepped already across the invisi- 
 ble and magical border. Who knows but 
 that love in another world may partake of 
 some of the firmer qualities of friendship in 
 this one? While still it may not lose its 
 own essence, exquisite and ineffable, its wan- 
 dering soul which goes clamoring here for 
 immortality like an orphaned child for a 
 home. 
 
 But the mourner at the new grave does 
 not concern himself with the impermanence 
 of human feeling. He is not troubled lest 
 he should cease to love. He is busied only 
 with trying to bear his power of loving. Yes- 
 
 38 
 
 ie ee ee ee ee 
 
On After Days 
 
 terday, to-day, and forever, his need of his 
 dead seems to him the supreme fact of life. 
 As he kneels in the grass to plant flowers 
 above dust too precious to be neglected, he 1s 
 planting solemn and exacting hopes in his 
 nature; these have deep roots, and, like other 
 rooted things, they will blossom if they are 
 cherished. 
 
 Because he loves and grieves, he believes 
 in the life everlasting—and, so long as he 
 loves, and believes, he has reason to expect 
 it. Somewhere, somehow—his idea of the 
 where or the how is vague, but so is mist, 
 and like amber mist at the setting of a slant 
 sun, this clings to him—at some time, and 
 for some reason, he dreams that he shall 
 clasp the dear dead thing that he has laid 
 away. Let him dream, and bless God that 
 he can. 
 
 If it were but a vision of the darkness, who 
 would awaken him? For there is no fact on 
 this earth so actual as that dream. ‘There is 
 no argument so powerful as that hope. There 
 is no philosophy so blessed as that belief. 
 Nay, more than this—I would rather believe 
 that I should find my lost and loved again, 
 
 39 
 
In After Days 
 
 and be mistaken about it, if that were pos- 
 sible, than to believe that the grave were the 
 end of hope and faith, of happiness and com- 
 fort, of love and loyalty; and then learn, 
 after all, that these precious things would 
 live as long as I live, and last as long 
 as I love; and that the spirits of my dead 
 would turn to me in the end, the patient, 
 hurt faces of the loving and the slighted. 
 Whether it be a truth or a soul, that 
 which we value must be cherished to be 
 held. 
 
 Love (as I have elsewhere said, if I may 
 be allowed to say again) is not a sketch, but 
 a serial story; it runs on past this life “to be 
 continued”’ in the next; or else there should 
 have been no story at all. Better to live and 
 die blank and bleak of heart, than to ex- 
 perience the ecstasies and agonies of any real 
 affection, and stand quivering to see death 
 cut the chapters off midway and forever. The 
 Author of the greatest tale told in all the uni- 
 verse is an Artist; and He will complete His 
 work. ‘This is our reasonable hope, and, if 
 it were not, we who live by it, and would die 
 for it, are of all men most miserable. Pos- 
 
 40 
 
Qu After Bays 
 
 sessing it, we should be, of all, the hap- 
 piest. 
 
 If death is treated as an incident—separa- 
 tion as an episode—reunion as a prospect— 
 grief can be borne as a momentary interrup- 
 tion to an eternal joy. 
 
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JOHN BIGELOW 
 
Is Chere 
 Existence After Death? 
 
 John Bigelow 
 
III 
 
 Qs There Existence After Death? 
 
 I 
 
 LAWYER would naturally say, in an- 
 
 swer to this question, that the burden 
 of proof lies upon those who deny the con- 
 tinuity of life. He might then ask what the 
 contestant means by Death. If told, “the 
 change undergone when our soul or spirit 
 is separated from our bodies,” as we are 
 bound to presume he would, he may fairly be 
 answered that such separation no more signi- 
 fies a termination of life than the falling of 
 the leaves in winter connotes the death of the 
 trees. The material body is only a transi- 
 tory abode of Life; no more Life itself than 
 the garments with which we clothe it; than 
 a stove crammed with burning coals is any 
 
 45 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 part of the heat which the coals assist in 
 generating and the stove in radiating. 
 
 All the constituents of a man on this 
 planet are Material or Spiritual; what of us 
 is not material is spiritual, and what is not 
 spiritual is material. But matter has no 
 element or attribute capable either of pro- 
 ducing or of maintaining life. Though some 
 motion of all the atoms of all matter is a 
 consequence or incident of every variation of 
 temperature; though this variation is inces- 
 sant; though chemical and polar variation 
 is also incessant; though the diurnal and 
 annual motions of the earth are perpetu- 
 ally changing the position of every atom 
 of our planet—yet no atom or multiple of 
 atoms has a power of its own either to initi- 
 ate or to suspend motion. Hence matter 
 cannot be fatigued. If it could be, it could 
 and would waste, shrink in bulk, and finally 
 perish. But the scales of the chemist have 
 effectually disposed of the delusions so long 
 entertained of the destructibility of matter. 
 The conception of its diminution or anni- 
 hilation is now as absurd as would be the 
 
 conception of its birth from nothing, 
 46 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 When, therefore, what is commonly called 
 Death separates the Soul from Body, Spirit 
 from Matter, and “this corruptible puts on 
 incorruption,” matter does not part with a 
 single attribute or quality necessary to its 
 perpetuity or integrity. It continues as be- 
 fore to undergo changes in obedience to 
 forces which do not belong to it and over 
 which ‘t has no control whatever. It continues 
 incapable of diminishing or of increasing 
 itself, whatever may be the process or force to 
 - which it may be subjected. 
 
 In parting with my body, therefore, | shall 
 merely have parted with a transient imple- 
 ment as destitute of life as a spade or a 
 plough, or Franklin’s kite, by which he 
 dragged the lightning from the heavens, 
 though not a spark of the lightning was in 
 the kite itself. 
 
 As the matter of which our body is com- 
 posed is without any initiative; utterly life- 
 less; does not die; cannot be killed; cannot 
 even diminish;—where is the life of which 
 the body was for so long a faithful and obe- 
 dient servant, it being no longer a part or 
 tenant of the body? It must be somewhere. 
 
 47 
 
Gn After Days 
 
 It cannot have gone with the body into 
 loam, for loam, of course, has no more life 
 than the body from which it is dissolved. 
 As the Life never was a part of the loam, and 
 therefore could not have gone with the body 
 into loam, it must be presumed to be, what 
 it was before the separation, a spiritual sub- 
 stance or entity, and to have passed on into 
 the state or existence in which enfranchised 
 spirits must be presumed to have been gath- 
 ered from time immemorial. 
 
 It 
 
 Man’s incarnation was necessary to qualify 
 him to profit by the educational opportuni- 
 ties of what we call his earthly life and en- 
 vironment. But as in this our earthly en- 
 vironment or kindergarten, our children are 
 left by the parents at school only for so long 
 a time as they think may prove most advan- 
 tageous to them, so are we detained by or 
 discharged from our carnal bonds when we 
 have received from them all that we are likely 
 to receive to our advantage, or perhaps also 
 
 48 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 when temptations greater than we might 
 prove able to successfully contend with 
 threaten us. 
 
 But such separated Life is not visible to 
 the natural eyes of the terrestrial man, 
 Neither is it ever actually visible to him in 
 the flesh. The natural eye only sees in any 
 man what is spiritual in him as reflected from 
 his features, gestures, language, and behavior. 
 These, however, are all only spiritual im- 
 pressions, as purely such even while in the 
 flesh as they will be when separated from it, 
 however much more accurate they may be 
 presumed to become when the observed shall 
 be relieved from the many worldly tempta- 
 tions to appear other than what they are. 
 Everything we love and everything we hate, 
 every virtue and every vice, is spiritual and 
 only spiritual. Every man may become more 
 or less charitable or selfish, liberal or avari- 
 cious, loyal or treacherous, just or unjust, 
 but neither the one nor the other has ever 
 been or can ever become more or less than 
 the precise spiritual quantities their names 
 imply. Whenever we undertake to describe 
 another person, the only characteristics that 
 
 49 
 
Gn After Bays 
 
 we remember and feel are those which when 
 reduced to their ultimate ratio inspire us with 
 more or less of esteem or of the reverse, 
 —all purely spiritual impressions. Hence the 
 Christian, in what is known as the Dominical 
 prayer, does not say to God, “Be Thou 
 hallowed,” which would seem most natural, 
 but “Hallowed be Thy Name” (and all 
 through the Bible, praise and service are of- 
 fered to God’s name, not directly to Him), 
 for the obvious reason that it would be a 
 mockery to pray for the sanctification of the 
 Infinite, whom we can never hope fully to 
 comprehend, and of whose attributes our es- 
 timates are liable to change every year— 
 nay, every day—of our lives. We can only 
 pray without profanity that the Name, which 
 represents to each of us only what he actually 
 does know or thinks he knows of God, may 
 be sanctified or hallowed, that and nothing 
 more. I'he Name changes to our eyes in 
 
 value in perfect correspondence with the in- _ 
 
 crease or the decrease of our knowledge of 
 
 God. So it does also with that of all our 
 
 fellow-creatures. Hence, however devout we 
 
 may be, it is possible that, though the Almighty 
 50 
 
 ee 
 Ce eee ae 
 
 ; 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 is unchangeable, we may never pray twice 
 to precisely the same God. 
 
 III 
 
 All of life consists of what we love and of 
 what we do not love. ‘There are no hopes, 
 aspirations, ambitions, or interests animat- 
 ing the heart of man which do not resolve 
 themselves into one or both of these cate- 
 gories. Whatever, therefore, we do is done 
 in obedience to our Will, which represents 
 what we most love or do not love, or what we 
 are compelled by circumstances for the time 
 being to most love or not love. Yet both 
 Love and Will are purely spiritual causes. 
 Whatever is done at their behest by the in- 
 carnate man are only effects. Matter, the 
 slave of man, we have seen, is itself im- 
 mortal. Could anything be more prepos- 
 terous than to assume that this Master 
 dies at the grave and the Slave lives on for- 
 ever! 
 
 But it may be said that matter is immortal 
 only as matter and on this planet or planets 
 
 AY 
 
Su After Days 
 
 like this. How does it follow that the Spirit 
 which has deserted its containment, or has 
 been deserted by it, has survived? 
 
 The proper answer to this question is sim- 
 ply to state what that Spirit loved or hated. 
 Do we love any or all of what are commonly 
 regarded as virtues—temperance, patience, 
 truth, justice, benevolence, charity, modesty, 
 humility—or do we more affect the opposites 
 of some or all of these virtues? If either, 
 they are our life and they are all spiritual. 
 As none of these virtues or their opposite 
 vices can ever be less virtues and vices, of 
 course, therefore, they are immortal. All of 
 us may become more or less temperate, chari- 
 table, humble, or truthful, but temperance, 
 charity, humility, and truthfulness can never 
 become more or less virtues. 
 
 Once, some fifty years ago, I woke from 
 a deep sleep with so fresh a recollection of a 
 dream, the quality of which had never be- 
 fore entered my mind so far as I could 
 recollect, and which was so vivid that I was 
 able when I arose to go to my library and 
 record it in my diary. It is not inappropri- 
 ate, I think, to insert here: 
 
 52 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 “The human mind can conceive of no time 
 when 2+2 began to be 4 or will cease to be 4. 
 It never could have been nor can it ever be other- 
 wise. 
 
 “God is infinite truth. The above result is 
 necessarily a part of God, because it is a neces- 
 sary part of infinite truth. To suppose a power 
 of denying that 2+2 make 4 is to suppose a 
 power of denying all truth, which is not sup- 
 posable.” 
 
 In other words, God is a state or Com- 
 position of all the qualities necessary to 
 perfection, and which, like a mathematical 
 axiom, never could be more or less at any 
 time. 
 
 IV 
 
 There are several other questions which 
 should be answered before there will be any 
 occasion for the believer in a future existence 
 to take the witness-stand. 
 
 Ours is the only species of the animal 
 kingdom that is never satisfied with what at 
 any moment it is, has been, or has done. Its 
 
 53 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 successes are regarded practically as but steps 
 to a higher plane. We are always struggling 
 to accumulate power; whether in the form 
 of health, of strength, of knowledge, of ex- 
 perience, of skill, of wealth, of popular es- 
 teem or influence. The passion to better 
 our state or position, to accumulate more of 
 something that we value, is an emotion which 
 distinguishes us more than any other species 
 of the animal kingdom, and animates us to 
 the very close of our earthly life. To this 
 passion Shakespeare puts into the mouth of 
 Hamlet this masterly expression: 
 
 “What is a man 
 If his chief good and market of his time 
 Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. 
 Sure, he that made us with such large dis- 
 course, 
 Looking before and after, gave us not 
 That capability and godlike reason 
 To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be 
 Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
 Of thinking too precisely on the event, 
 A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part 
 wisdom 
 And ever three parts coward, I do not know 
 
 54 
 
Su After Days 
 
 Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do’; 
 
 Sith I have cause and will and strength and 
 means 
 
 To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.” 
 
 What pretext or excuse can be made for the 
 creation of a planet—not to say an incal- 
 culable number of planets—and_ stocking 
 ours with creatures whose environment is 
 specially calculated to fit them to become 
 purer, wiser, and better than they ever do 
 become while incarnate, and yet who are 
 always impelled by desires which result in 
 more or less successful struggles to become 
 purer, wiser, better, or in some way, at least 
 in their own eyes, more important? Surely 
 such a life,if terminating at the grave, can 
 only be regarded as but a fragment, as only 
 a page of the great volume of a human life, 
 as only the atrium of one of God’s noblest 
 temples. What possible reason can be as- 
 signed for even suspecting that this trend of 
 development should not go on indefinitely, 
 only far more rapidly when separated as it 
 would be from what was never a part of it, 
 what shall have ceased to be even a con- 
 
 55 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 venience to it, and threatens to become an 
 obstruction only avoided by a separation 
 from it? 
 
 Vv 
 
 During the last century physical science 
 made marvellous contributions to man’s pow- 
 er over previously latent forces in nature. 
 One of not the least significant consequences 
 has been to give the captains of industry 
 wealth, rank, and social position such as they 
 had never before enjoyed in any age, in 
 strange contrast with their position when 
 Plato denounced the study of mathematics 
 as beneath the dignity of a philosopher. 
 From the bench of their newly acquired 
 social eminence these scientists have rashly 
 proclaimed that the wise man could accept 
 nothing as true but what could be demon- 
 strated by the unaided human reason. ‘The 
 natural corollary of this dogma is that what 
 the scientists do not know is unworthy of 
 belief. However, it exactly suits that enor- 
 mous proportion of the human family which 
 worship idols made with hands. It also 
 
 56 
 
Su Afier Days 
 
 naturally inspires them with profound respect 
 for the scientist who gives the highest possible 
 sublunary sanction of their worship of idols 
 of silver and gold. What better authority 
 was needed than such fashionable Rationalists 
 as Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and Wallace 
 to countenance the worship of this world for | 
 what there is in it; in putting the Bible 
 away on the upper shelves of the library as 
 “mere literature”; in leaving the Church to 
 such victims of superstition as were not sufh- 
 ciently enlightened to see the absurdity of 
 its pretensions to a divine origin, and devot- 
 ing their Sabbaths to automobile excursions, 
 to games of ball, tennis, or bridge; and finally 
 to the conversion of all churches into lecture- 
 rooms or music-halls? They now had not 
 only scientific but fashionable authority for 
 saying, “Prove to me by inexorable logic that 
 there is a God, that He inspired the Bible, 
 that there is a life beyond the grave, and 
 prove it by the same inexorable logic as New- 
 ton proved the attraction of gravitation, then, 
 perhaps, I will believe in your God, frequent 
 His temple, respect His Sabbath, and pre- 
 pare myself for your imaginary future life. 
 57 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 Till then you can expect nothing of the kind 
 from reasonable creatures.” 
 
 It never occurs to any of these short-sighted 
 Pharisees, wise as they fancy themselves to 
 be, that none of their scientific authorities, 
 however eminent, has ever been able to 
 demonstrate the absolute truth of any one 
 of the sciences they profess, or has ever 
 reached the frontiers of any science whatever. 
 
 Sir Isaac Newton enjoys the reputation 
 of having discovered a law which controls 
 the greatest amount of power or force of 
 which the scientist pretends to have any con- 
 ception. The tradition is that while rest- 
 ing under an apple-tree in his garden an 
 apple fell upon his head. In searching for 
 the reason why the apple had fallen, and 
 why others, becoming detached from the tree, 
 fell also to the ground, while none of them 
 fell upward or sideways, he wisely concluded 
 that they must have obeyed some superior 
 force that made them fall to a lower level 
 rather than in other directions. Lacking 
 knowledge of the real cause of this propen- 
 sity of apples as well as of most other things 
 unsupported to descend, he named the force 
 
 58 
 
Su After Days 
 
 they obeyed Attraction of Gravitation, a 
 phrase or title which had no more meaning 
 than the X Y Z of an algebraic formula. If 
 it signified anything more than a “sound 
 and fury,” it stood in his equation as the 
 representative of some power of which he 
 only knew that it makes things unsupported 
 fall to the level of a lower support. 
 
 Newton had yet to learn that man can 
 only know what has happened and its dert- 
 vates, but never knows, only conjectures, 
 ~ what may happen from what has happened. 
 Newton presumed from what he had ob- 
 served of the habits of apples and other 
 things, that all material things would con- 
 tinue to fall unless supported. This pre- 
 sumption from the orderliness of nature was 
 not science, but Faith. All causes imply the 
 exercise of some Will and all Will is spiritual. 
 All causes, therefore, are spiritual and have 
 to be inferred by the scientist from their re- 
 sulting phenomena. ‘The experience of every 
 creature is illustrated in the answer which 
 Moses received when he said to our Cre- 
 ator, 
 
 “T pray Thee, if I have found grace in 
 
 5 59 
 
Ou After Days 
 
 Thy sight, show me now Thy ways that I 
 may know Thee.’ The Lord replied: 
 
 “Thou canst not see My face: for man 
 shall not see Me and live. Behold, there is a 
 place by Me, and thou shalt stand upon the 
 rock: and it shall come to pass, while My 
 glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a 
 cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with 
 My hand until I have passed by: and I will 
 take away Mine hand: and thou shalt see 
 My back: but My face shall not be seen.” 
 
 In other words, our Creator, the Causa 
 Causans (the Supreme Will), is a spirit and 
 cannot be seen by man while in a state of 
 nature—that is, while in the bonds of the 
 flesh. As the Cause of Causes, the Active in 
 every phenomenon, is spiritual, Moses could 
 see it only after it had passed: in other words, 
 by results. He saw only its back, as the sci- 
 entist sees phenomena and from them in- 
 fers their Causes as best he can. HE SEEs 
 THE REAL OR FINAL CAUSE OF NOTHING. 
 Only the infinite can see or be seen by the 
 infinite. 
 
 The Baron of Verulam was a great philos- 
 opher, and as such he is justly famous, but 
 
 60 
 
Qu After Dayz 
 
 his fame as a philosopher rests entirely upon 
 the popularization of the lesson to which we 
 have referred, and which Moses received 
 while in the cleft of the rock on the Mount, 
 thousands of years ago. Bacon taught men 
 to infer as much as they could of the laws 
 of their Creator from facts observed, from 
 events that had occurred, instead of trying 
 to infer facts from imaginary laws and jejyune 
 presumptions. He taught the scientist to 
 search for wisdom and observation from the 
 results evolved by experiment and observa- 
 tion and to trust no conclusions about the 
 Creator’s work adopted before the Creator 
 had passed by. 
 
 The results of the Science of the Ration- 
 alist at best are but hypotheses, the possible 
 fragments of a truth, but in no sense abso- 
 lute truth. They are vessels of which any 
 man may drink, but none of them are like 
 Joseph’s “cup, with which he divineth,” 
 We infer that the sun that disappears this 
 evening will reappear the following morn- 
 ing, but that is not the conclusion, but only 
 an inference of science. The inference that 
 
 the sun will reappear to-morrow is Faith, 
 61 
 
Sn After Bays 
 
 without which the scientist is as blind as the 
 beast that perisheth, for neither can demon- 
 strate the truth of what is not. That can 
 be rendered even probable only by Faith, 
 which, as the Apostle Paul, with scientific 
 accuracy, said to the Hebrews, “‘is the as- 
 surance of things hoped for; the proving of 
 things not seen. For therein the elders had 
 witness borne to them. By faith we under- 
 stand that the worlds have been framed by 
 the Word of God, so that what is seen hath - 
 not been made out of things which do 
 appear.” 
 
 But Faith is not material, but spiritual, 
 and what advantageth it a man to know 
 what has been, without the faculty of 
 trusting at discretion upon the consecutive 
 relations of events and the probable conse- 
 quences? 
 
 In what respect, then, ought our faith in 
 sunshine to-morrow to differ from our faith 
 in the continuity of life after parting with 
 its earthly garments? We cannot demon- 
 strate, neither can we deny either, while for 
 both there is every probability and for neither 
 any demonstrable improbability. 
 
 62 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 VI 
 
 It is the manifest purpose, end, or function 
 of the scientist to search for and disclose the 
 mysteries of the earth he inhabits and depends 
 upon for his subsistence. As his disclosure of 
 these mysteries increases, what is more natural 
 than that his dominion over spiritual forces 
 should also be more abundantly disclosed to 
 or by him, pari passu? All nations and tribes, 
 whether civilized or savage, recognize in their 
 fellows as virtues charity, honesty, gener- 
 osity, temperance, patience, diligence in one’s 
 calling, obedience to legitimate authority, 
 courage in doing what we think right and 
 just. All these qualities without exception 
 are such as contribute to happiness in this 
 world, and are all parts of every religion, 
 whether Christian or Gentile. The veriest 
 thief, liar, reprobate, or outcast of whatever 
 shade, expects from others nothing more or 
 better than each and all of those virtues and 
 many others. He respects every one who 
 has them, and denounces their absence from 
 every one but himself. But every one of 
 those qualities and every one of their oppo- 
 
 63 
 
Sn After Days 
 
 sites are spiritual. In dropping or shedding 
 his material garments he experiences no sub- 
 stantial change or privation. He remains 
 precisely the same man after his heart has 
 ceased to beat as before. He has experi- 
 enced no change but the removal of the 
 checks to his spontaneity. He may now orat- 
 ify all his dominant desires, appetites, and 
 wishes without the prompt penalties of ex- 
 cess against which, in his earthly life, he was 
 wont to be providentially warned. As he 
 has parted at the grave with nothing which 
 constituted any part or quality of his life, 
 his course of life is not even interrupted. 
 On the contrary, he is presumably far more 
 alive than ever, as his will is emancipated 
 from all earthly restrictions to its gratification. 
 
 These are all logical presumptions from all 
 his earthly experience. ‘To suppose that his 
 life, therefore, terminates at the erave would 
 be not a particle less absurd than to infer 
 from a frost in December that your garden 
 would never yield strawberries again. Hence 
 every Rationalist professes to have less faith 
 than every gardener may be presumed act- 
 ually to possess, 
 
 64 
 
Ou After Days 
 
 Vil 
 
 Who ever experienced a sudden and over- 
 whelming calamity, threatening death or even 
 insupportable humiliation, that did not look 
 up to the power that has been proving itself 
 so much greater than his own, without an 
 instantaneous appeal to it for mercy or help: 
 It is to him a sudden revelation of his 1mpo- 
 tent subordination to a power incalculably 
 superior to his own. When, during our Civil 
 War, the North had a million of men in the 
 field warring with another army only a little 
 less numerous, no one old enough to have 
 been a concerned observer of those times but 
 must have noticed how largely the press, the 
 literature, and the platform eloquence of that 
 crisis reflected a sense of even greater de- 
 pendence upon the goodness and mercy of 
 supernal authority than upon the bravery of 
 our soldiers, the skill of our generals, or the 
 wisdom of our statesmen. Lincoln, in his 
 Gettysburg address, only voiced the Spiritual 
 elevation of the nation because of its trials, 
 as the ebbing and flowing of the ocean tides 
 respond to the revolutions of the moon. 
 
 65 
 
In After Days 
 
 Deplorable and unprecedented as have 
 been the recent dispensations of Providence 
 in the south of Italy, the reports which are 
 coming to us not only from there, but from 
 other sympathetic nations, render it not diffi- 
 cult to believe the assurance they give to not 
 only the Italian survivors, but to the rest of 
 the world, that there is a God that rules, and 
 that man was not created in His or in any 
 image, merely for what he was or could be- 
 come during his brief incarnate life. It is 
 not so much through our blessings as through 
 our trials, our sufferings, and our disappoint- 
 ments, that we feel both the need and the cer- 
 tainty of a God of Love that controls our 
 destinies; that what He creates is never born 
 to die. Cowper, in describing the great 
 Sicilian earthquake of 1783, says: 
 
 “Revelry, and dance, and show 
 Suffer a syncope and solemn pause, 
 While God performs upon the trembling stage 
 Of His own works His dreadful part alone. . 
 His wrath is busy and His frown is fell.” 
 
 Nothing produces upon us a more spirit- 
 
 ualizing influence than imminent danger. 
 66 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 Hence the sailor is one of the most supersti- 
 tious of wage-earners—that is, one of the 
 most religious—according to his lights. It 
 is proverbial that one who goes to sea never 
 knows where he will be buried. The more 
 the sailor learns of the treachery of the sea 
 the more he puts faith in the Ruler of the 
 Seas and in that Ruler’s love and mercy. He 
 faces its most imminent perils with the same 
 composure as any ordinary professional duty. 
 
 The least spiritually minded and, therefore, 
 least religious, are apt to be those who are 
 brought up in luxury, protected by every pos- 
 sible form of human security, with no danger 
 apparently to fear or enemies to contend 
 with. It is not until the Master permits 
 Satan to test them like Job with disease, the 
 desertion of friends, the privation of property 
 or character, that they begin to realize that 
 there is a superior power, a ruling Provi- 
 dence. “When it thundered we _ believed 
 Jove to reign,’ * wrote the most famous of the 
 Latin poets, who died only eight years before 
 Jesus of Nazareth was born. 
 
 1Ccelo tonantem credidimus Jovem Regnare. 
 
 67 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 Who has ever lived long in the world 
 without sharing the aspiration of the Royal 
 Psalmist, 
 
 “Lead me, O Lord, to a Rock that is high- 
 er than [”’? 
 
 Vill 
 
 Though the nature and terms of the prob- 
 lem under discussion imply, if it is not ex- 
 pressed, that it is to be determined by human 
 reason alone, of course the most conclusive 
 testimony as to the existence of life beyond 
 the grave which is to be found in the 
 Word, more commonly known as the Bible, 
 because of its claim to a supernatural origin 
 is excluded; but among the documents in- 
 cluded in all modern editions of the Bible 
 there are some letters which cannot be ex- 
 cluded on that ground, and which afford us 
 about as unassailable testimony to the per- 
 petuity of human life as can be found for 
 any historic event recorded prior to the 
 Christian era. Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, was a 
 contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, and but 
 ten years his senior. When approaching 
 
 68 
 
Su Afier Days 
 
 middle life Paul was converted to an abso- 
 lute faith in the mission of Jesus, of whose 
 doctrines and disciples he had theretofore 
 been the most conspicuous of persecutors. 
 He then became a missionary of the Chris- 
 tian faith to the Gentiles. Our Bible contains 
 several of his letters. In the Fifteenth Chapter 
 of his first letter to the Corinthians he says: 
 
 “Now I make known unto you, brethren, the 
 Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye 
 received, wherein also ye stand, by which also ye 
 are saved. . . . Christ died for our sins, according 
 to the Scriptures, and that He was buried and that 
 He hath been raised on the third day, according to 
 the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, 
 then to the twelve, then he appeared to above five 
 hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part 
 remain until‘now, but some are fallen asleep; then 
 He appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 
 and, last of all, as unto one born out of due time, 
 He appeared to me also, for I am the least of the 
 apostles that am not meet to be called an apostle 
 because I persecuted the Church of God.” 
 
 This statement of the reappearance of 
 Jesus after His crucifixion is as authentic 
 evidence of a future life as any fact accred- 
 
 69 
 
Su After Days 
 
 ited to Plato or to Aristotle or to Thucydides 
 or even to Horace or Plutarch, for of none 
 of these writers any more than of St. Paul 
 have we any autograph manuscript; and yet 
 the young men of all the universities of im- 
 portance are still taught to study such of their 
 writings as have survived them, and to give 
 them the credit of doing their best to tell 
 what at the time they believed and thought 
 and taught. It is more difficult for a rational 
 man to doubt that Paul believed that five 
 hundred people saw Jesus after His resurrec- 
 tion, that the apostles or that he himself saw 
 Him also after His resurrection and for a 
 period, and that He was visible to some of 
 them for more than a month, than it is to 
 doubt that the life of Socrates was terminated 
 by drinking hemlock, or that Plato and 
 Xenophon are responsible authors for that 
 story. All human testimony is liable to be 
 fallible, but if any human testimony is credi- 
 ble, what is more credible than Paul’s testi- 
 mony of the appearance of Jesus to himself 
 and to His disciples after His crucifixion, 
 and what better proof of a future life can be 
 asked or desired? 
 70 
 
Su After Days 
 
 IX 
 
 But there is evidence of the perpetuity of 
 life even more incontestable because many 
 centuries more modern than Paul’s, and 
 proportionately more easy to be authenti- 
 cated. 
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg—quite the most il- 
 lustrious scientist of his generation; whose 
 views not only of human life in this world 
 but in the Great Beyond it is no longer fash- 
 ionable to deride, and whose expositions of 
 the interior or spiritual significance of the 
 Word of God are talked of and accredited 
 now to a constantly increasing extent, and 
 proclaimed in pretty much every written 
 language of every civilized country—in the 
 fourth decade of his life became endowed 
 with a gift of spiritual vision of the same 
 _kind as that which appears to have been 
 vouchsafed to the Hebrew prophets, and 
 especially to the inspired editor of the 
 Apocalypse. He appears to have been di- 
 rected by the Lord to explain with great 
 fulness the interior or spiritual meaning of 
 the Word of God, for which exposition the 
 
 71 
 
Sun After Days 
 
 world had not been prepared at the time He 
 was manifested in the flesh, nor even when 
 the canon of our Bible was determined. In 
 these his moments of super-sensuous life Swe- 
 denborg was permitted to visit the spiritual 
 world where the enfranchised spirits from this 
 terrestrial life are congregated. In the third 
 volume of the Arcana Celestia, the most 
 voluminous of his works, we find the follow- 
 ing statement of an incident which occurred 
 to its author while thus admitted to a personal 
 intercourse with the world of disembodied 
 spirits: 
 
 “Among the Gentiles, however, just as 
 among Christians, there are both the wise 
 and the simple. In order that I might be 
 instructed as to the quality of these, it has 
 been granted me to speak with both wise and 
 simple, sometimes for hours and days. But 
 of the wise there are scarcely any at this day 
 [1750], whereas in ancient times there were 
 many, especially in the Ancient Church, from 
 which wisdom emanated to many nations. 
 In order that I might know of what quality 
 these were, I have been allowed to hold fa- 
 miliar converse with some of them, so that 
 
 72 
 
Su After Days 
 
 the nature of their wisdom and its superiority 
 to that of the present day may be seen from 
 what follows. 
 
 “There was present with me a certain per- 
 son who was formerly among the more wise, 
 and was thereby well known in the learned 
 world. \ conversed with him on various sub- 
 jects, and as I knew that he had been a wise 
 man, I spoke with him concerning wisdom, 
 intelligence, order, the Word, and finally con- 
 cerning the Lord. Concerning wisdom he 
 said that there is no other wisdom than that 
 which is of Life, and that wisdom can be 
 predicted of nothing else. Concerning in- 
 tellizence he said that it was from wisdom. 
 Concerning order he said that it is from the 
 Supreme God, and that to live in that order 
 is to be wise and intelligent. As regards the 
 Word, when I read to him something from 
 the prophecies, he was very greatly delighted, 
 especially from the fact that each of the names 
 and each of the words signified interior things, 
 wondering greatly that the learned of this 
 day are not delighted with such a study. I 
 plainly perceived that the interiors of his 
 thought or mind had been opened, and at 
 
 73 
 
Ju After Bays 
 
 the same time that those of certain Christians 
 who were present had been closed; for ill- 
 will against him prevailed with them, and 
 also unbelief that the Word is of this nature. 
 Nay, when I went on reading the Word, he 
 said that he could not be present, because he 
 perceived it to be too holy for him to endure, 
 so interiorly was he affected. ‘The Christians, 
 on the other hand, said aloud that they could 
 be present; and this was because their in- 
 teriors had been closed, and therefore the 
 holy things did not affect them. At length 
 I talked with him about the Lord; that He 
 was born a man, but was conceived of God; 
 that He had put off the human and had put 
 on the divine; and that it is He who governs 
 the universe. To this he made answer that 
 he knew many things about the Lord, and 
 perceived in his own way that it could not 
 have been done otherwise if the human race 
 was to be saved. Meantime certain wicked 
 Christians injected various difficulties, for 
 which he did not care, saying that it was not 
 surprising, because they had become imbued 
 in the life of the body with unbecoming ideas 
 respecting these things, and that until such 
 74 
 
Su After Days 
 
 ideas were dispersed they could not admit 
 things confirmatory, as could those who are 
 ignorant. This man was a Gentile.” 
 
 In another of Swedenborg’s works en- 
 titled Calo et Inferno (Heaven and Hell) 
 —all his theological works were written in 
 Latin—we find that the Gentile here referred 
 to was Marcus Tullius Cicero, as appears 
 by the following paragraph: 
 
 “292. There are among Gentiles, as among 
 Christians, both wise and simple. That I 
 might be instructed as to their quality, it has 
 been given me to speak with both, sometimes | 
 for hours and days. But at this day there are 
 no such wise ones as in ancient times, especial- 
 ly in the Ancient Church, which was spread 
 through a large part of the Asiatic world, and 
 from which religion emanated to many na- 
 tions. That I might know their quality, it 
 has been granted me to have familiar con- 
 versation with some of these wise men. 
 There was a certain one with me who was 
 among the wiser men of his time, and con- 
 sequently well known in the learned world, 
 with whom I conversed on various subjects: 
 I was given to believe that it was Cicero. 
 
 : 75 
 
Su After Days 
 
 And because I knew that he was a wise man, 
 I conversed with him about wisdom, intelli- 
 gence, order, and the Word.” 
 
 Then follow almost a verbatim repetition 
 of the words quoted above from the Arcana 
 Celestia. It is a fact of incomparable inter- 
 est and importance, when considered in con- 
 nection with this spiritual interview, that 
 Cicero, the reported Gentile, was in his tem- 
 poral life a profound believer in the Unity 
 of the Godhead, in the Divine origin of 
 Life, and in the divine origin of all crea- 
 tive power; and that his standard of morals, 
 as described in his writings, was as high, 
 perhaps higher, than that of most professing 
 Christians of even our own time. The 
 evidences may be found in the imaginary 
 ‘Dream of Scipio,” recorded in his Republica, 
 and in his Tusculanes, and in his De Offcits. 
 The latter was a Latin text-book in the col- 
 lege in which I was educated. 
 
 I can imagine no one who shall have read 
 with a mind open to the reception of truth 
 for truth’s sake, being able to doubt for one 
 moment any one of the facts stated in these 
 paragraphs by Swedenborg, or could be- 
 
 76 
 
Qu After Dayz 
 
 lieve that a man whose life was a model of 
 every virtue, and whose reputation was even 
 more spotless than that of any of the disci- 
 ples of Jesus is reported to have been, could 
 have deliberately not only reported, but have 
 written down in two separate and indepen- 
 dent works at different times, of course, pre- 
 cisely the same account of his conversation 
 with an eminent Roman citizen who had died 
 seventeen centuries at least before he was 
 born. 
 
 I cannot help thinking this the most im- 
 portant evidence the world has outside of the 
 Bible not only of a Future Life, but even of 
 Cicero’s authorship of the Works from which 
 I have quoted as his. 
 
 I must now ask the indulgent reader’s at- 
 tention to extracts from Cicero’s writings, 
 which may serve to explain why Swedenborg 
 found him seventeen centuries later among 
 those Gentile Spirits noted for their wis- 
 dom. 
 
 In the sixty-second year of his age Cicero 
 lost his lovely daughter Tullia, still in her 
 childhood. His affliction was so great in 
 consequence that he abandoned public life 
 
 77 
 
Su After Days 
 
 and devoted himself to philosophical studies 
 at one of his several country homes. At his 
 Tusculan villa he spent five days in discuss- 
 ing with certain of his friends questions to 
 which the bereavement may have given 
 peculiar—may I not add Providential ?—im- 
 portance, such as: 
 
 How to contemn the terrors of death; 
 
 How to support affliction with forti- 
 tude; 
 
 How to submit to the accidents of life; 
 
 How to moderate our passions; and 
 
 How to explain the sufficiency of virtue to 
 make us happy. 
 
 These five conferences he published under 
 the title of Tusculan Disputations. 
 
 The following extracts are sufficient to 
 reveal the rock foundation of Cicero’s faith, 
 both in the perpetuity of Life and the abso- 
 lute Unity of the Godhead, of which Sweden- 
 borg is perhaps in many respects the most 
 veridical of all witnesses. | 
 
 ‘The greatest proof of all is, that Nature 
 herself gives a silent judgment in favor 
 of the immortality of the soul, inasmuch 
 as all are anxious, and that to a great 
 
 78 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 degree, about the things which concern fu- 
 turity— 
 
 ‘One plants what future ages shall enjoy, 
 
 as Statius saith in his Synephebi. What is 
 his object in doing so, except that he is in- 
 terested in posterity? Shall the industrious 
 husbandman, then, plant trees the fruit of 
 which he shall never see? .And shall not 
 the great man found laws, institutions, and 
 a republic? What does the procreation of 
 children imply—and our care to continue 
 our names—and our adoptions—and our 
 scrupulous exactness in drawing up wills— 
 and the inscriptions on monuments, and 
 panegyrics, but that our thoughts run on 
 futurity? There is no doubt but a judg- 
 ment may be formed of nature in general, 
 from looking at each nature in its most per- 
 fect specimens; and what is a more perfect 
 specimen of a man than those who look 
 on themselves as born for the assistance, 
 the protection, and the preservation of oth- 
 Se 
 
 “Hercules has gone to heaven; he would 
 never have gone thither had he not whilst 
 
 79 
 
Su After Days 
 
 amongst men prepared the way himself. 
 These are all of ancient dates, and have be- 
 sides the sanction of universal religions.? 
 “For, if those men now think that they 
 have attained something who have seen the 
 mouth of the Pontus, and those straits which 
 were passed by the ship called Argo, because, 
 
 From Argos she did chosen men convey, 
 Bound to fetch back the golden fleece, their prey; 
 
 or those who have seen the straits of the 
 ocean, 
 
 Where the swift waves divide the neighbouring 
 shores 
 
 Of Europe, and of Afric, 
 
 ‘This paragraph may have suggested to the most 
 illustrious historian of the Imperial Annals of Rome 
 his notable hypothesis, ‘‘Si quis piorum monitus locus,” 
 etc., so happily parodied by the most eminent poet of 
 the Victorian era in the following lines: 
 
 “Yet if, as holiest men have deem’d, there be 
 A land of souls beyond that sable shore 
 To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee 
 And sophist, madly vain of dubious lore, 
 How sweet it were in concert to adore 
 With those who made our mortal labours light, 
 To hear each voice we fear’d to hear no more, 
 Behold each mighty shade reveal’d to sight, 
 The Bactrian, Samian sage, and all who taught the right.” 
 —Childe Harold, ii, 8. 
 80 
 
Sn After Bays 
 
 what kind of sight do you imagine that will 
 be, when the whole earth is laid open to our 
 view ? and that, too, not only in its position, 
 form, and boundaries, nor those parts of it 
 only which are habitable, but those also that 
 lie uncultivated, through the extremities of 
 heat and cold to which they are exposed; 
 for not even now is it with our eyes that we 
 view what we see, for the body itself has no 
 senses; but (as the naturalists, aye, and even 
 the physicians assure us, who have opened 
 our bodies, and examined them), there are 
 certain perforated channels from the seat of 
 the soul to the eyes, ears, and nose; so that 
 frequently, when either prevented by medita- 
 tion, or the force of some bodily disorder, we 
 neither hear nor see, though our eyes and 
 ears are open, and in good condition; so that 
 we may easily apprehend that it is the soul 
 itself which sees and hears, and not those 
 parts which are, as it were, but windows to 
 the soul; by means of which, however, it 
 can perceive nothing, unless it is on the spot, 
 and exerts itself. How shall we account for 
 the fact that by the same power of thinking 
 we comprehend the most different things, 
 81 
 
Su After Days 
 
 as color, taste, heat, smell, and sound? 
 which the Soul could never know by her five 
 messengers, unless everything was referred 
 to her, and she were the sole judge of all. 
 And we shall certainly discover these things 
 in a more clear and perfect degree when the 
 soul is disengaged from the body, and has 
 arrived at that -goal to which nature leads 
 her; for at present, notwithstanding nature 
 has contrived, with the greatest skill, those 
 channels which lead from the body to the 
 soul, yet are they, in some way or other, 
 stopped up with earthy and concrete bodies; 
 but when we shall be nothing but soul, then 
 nothing will interfere to prevent our seeing 
 everything in its real substance, and in its 
 true character!) 
 
 “But there are many who press the. op- 
 posite side of this question, and condemn 
 souls to death, as if they were criminals 
 capitally convicted; nor have they any other 
 reason to allege why the immortality of the 
 soul appears to thern to be incredible, except 
 that they are not able to conceive what sort 
 of thing the soul can be when disentangled 
 from the body; just as if they could really 
 
 82 
 
Su After Days 
 
 form a correct idea as to what sort of thing 
 it is, even when it is in the body; what its 
 form, and size, and abode are; so that were 
 they able to have a full view of all that 1s 
 now hidden from them in a living body, they 
 have no idea whether the soul would be dis- 
 cernable by them, or whether it is of so fine 
 a texture that it would escape their sight. 
 Let those consider this, who say that they 
 are unable to form any idea of the soul with- 
 out the body, and then they will see whether 
 they can form any adequate idea of what it 
 is when it is in the body. For my own part, 
 when I reflect on the nature of the soul, it 
 appears to me a far more perplexing and 
 obscure question to determine what is its 
 character while it is in the body—a place 
 which, as it were, does not belong to it— 
 than to imagine what it is when it leaves it, 
 and has arrived at the free zther, which 1s, 
 if ] may so say, its proper, its own habitation, 
 For unless we are to say that we cannot ap- 
 prehend the character or nature of anything 
 which we have never seen, we certainly may 
 be able to form some notion of God, and of 
 the divine soul when released from the body. 
 
 83 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 Diczarchus, indeed, and Aristoxenus, be- 
 cause it was hard to understand the existence, 
 and substance, and nature of the soul, as- 
 serted that there was no such thing as a soul 
 at all. It is, indeed, the most difficult thing 
 imaginable, to discern the soul by the soul. 
 And this, doubtless, is the meaning of the 
 precept of Apollo, which advises every one to 
 Know Himself. For 1 do not apprehend 
 the meaning of the god to have been, that we 
 should understand our members, our stature, 
 and form; for we are not merely bodies; 
 nor, when I say these things to you, am [| 
 addressing myself to your body: when, 
 therefore, he says, ‘Know Yourself,’ he says 
 this, “Inform yourself of the nature of your 
 soul’; for the body is but a kind of vessel, 
 or receptacle of the soul, and whatever your 
 soul does is your own act. To know the 
 soul, then, unless it had been divine, would 
 not have been a precept of such excellent 
 wisdom, as to be attributed to a god; but 
 even though the soul should not know of 
 what nature itself is, will you say that it 
 does not even perceive that it exists at all, 
 or that it has motion? on which is founded 
 84 
 
Su After Days 
 
 that reason of Plato’s, which is explained by 
 Socrates in the Phadrus, and inserted by 
 me, in my sixth book of the Republic: 
 “<That which is always moved is eternal; 
 but that which gives motion to something 
 else, and is moved itself by some external 
 cause, when that motion ceases, must neces- 
 sarily cease to exist. hat, therefore, alone 
 which is self-moved, because it is never for- 
 saken by itself, can never cease to be moved. 
 Besides, it is the beginning and principle of 
 motion to everything else; but whatever is 
 a principle has no beginning, for all things 
 arise from that principle, and it cannot itself 
 owe its use to anything else; for then it 
 would not be a principle did it proceed from 
 anything else. But if it has no beginning, it 
 never will have any end; for a principle which 
 is once extinguished, cannot itself be restored 
 by anything else, nor can it produce any- 
 thing else from itself; inasmuch as all things 
 must necessarily arise from some first cause. 
 And thus it comes about, that the first prin- 
 ciple of motion must arise from that thing 
 which is itself moved by itself; and that can 
 neither have a beginning nor an end of its 
 
 85 
 
Su After Days 
 
 existence, for otherwise the whole heaven and 
 earth would be overset, and all nature would 
 stand still, and not be able to acquire any 
 force, by the impulse of which it might be 
 first set in motion. Seeing, then, that it is 
 clear, that whatever moves itself is eternal, 
 can there be any doubt that the soul is so? 
 For everything is inanimate which is moved 
 by an external force, which also belongs to 
 itself. For this is the peculiar nature and 
 power of the soul; and if the soul be the only 
 thing in the whole world which has the power 
 of self-motion, then certainly it never had a 
 beginning, and therefore it is eternal.’ ” 
 There are many, perhaps a majority, who 
 do not trouble themselves much with specu- 
 lations about the probability or improbability 
 of a future life. Most people in their youth 
 and early manhood are apt to be so much 
 interested in the present that they can hard- 
 ly be called believers or deniers of a future 
 life; but I think it rarely if ever happens that 
 any person takes up arms against the doctrine 
 of a future life from any lack of testimony, OF, 
 indeed, for any other reason than a more or 
 less morbid attachment to what he regards 
 86 
 
Su After Days 
 
 as the pleasures of the present one. Was it 
 not that pathetic conviction to which Jesus 
 gave utterance in His pictorial way when a 
 certain man said unto Him, “I will follow 
 Thee whithersoever Thou goest”? 
 
 “The foxes have holes, and the birds of 
 the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath 
 not where to lay His head.” Not even in 
 the breast of the disciple who promised so 
 bravely. 
 
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From a photograph, copyright, 1902, by J. E. Purdy, Boston 
 
 JULIA WARD HOWE 
 
Hoyo the Ueil 
 
 Julia Ward Howe 
 
IV 
 Beyond the Weil 
 
 | AM invited to write a paper of some two 
 thousand words on the subject of Im- 
 mortality. I accept this invitation to dis- 
 course in print upon a theme which has long 
 been familiar to me. I believe that some 
 part of me is immortal. I have always so 
 believed. It should be easy to give some 
 account of the why and wherefore of this 
 belief, yet, strange to say, I do not find it 
 so. The effort of many days has only pro- 
 duced a certain set of disjointed statements 
 which, although in no wise contradictory to 
 one another, cannot, with my poor skill, be 
 made to introduce and explain one another. 
 Perhaps the best thing I can attempt will be 
 to examine briefly what I really think about 
 a future life, and, if possible, why I think 
 
 so and not otherwise. 
 7 gl 
 
Su After Days 
 
 To begin, then, with the simple notions of 
 my childhood. I was born in a world in 
 which the belief in a future life was almost 
 unquestioned. ‘The blessedness of heaven 
 and the torment of hell were presented to 
 my infant imagination as the ultimates of 
 my good or ill conduct in every-day life. 
 Like most other children, I believed what I 
 was told, and in general tried to obey the 
 commands of my elders. I loved to hear 
 about the heavenly life, which somehow 
 seemed to furnish the skyscape of my days 
 as they were added in weeks, months, and 
 years. I recall having once made an offering 
 to the God of my childish prayers. The 
 altar was a little stool, the sacrifice some 
 small objects which I supposed to be of value. 
 I remember also refusing to say my prayers 
 to a new nursery assistant, because it did not 
 appear to me fitting to take a stranger into 
 my confidence, a scruple which the authori- 
 ties of the same nursery speedily overruled. 
 
 Wordsworth has said: 
 
 “Heaven lies about us in our infancy, 
 And trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 From God, who is our home.” 
 
 g2 
 
Qu After Days 
 And later, Emerson says of Michel Angelo, 
 
 ‘Himself from God he could not free.” 
 
 _ Even so naturally did my idea of merit in- 
 clude a divine Absolute, whom to please or 
 displease would furnish the tests of good or 
 ill conduct. 
 
 Let us pass over many years of experience, 
 individual, mostly not unusual, and come to 
 where the enlightened intellect of the twen- 
 tieth century finds itself obliged to stand. It - 
 is perforce an age of question, and all thought 
 which penetrates below the surface of things 
 must take this attitude of interrogation, 
 which should be reverent, and which may be 
 insolent. In the first place, this wonder 
 book, the Bible. Is it an exception to all 
 human rules and laws of action? Did the 
 ancient chroniclers do their best to set down 
 the record of Creation and its consequences? 
 Did the psalmist, the prophet, the moralist, 
 each in turn contribute his highest human 
 power of expression and forethought to this 
 marvellous treasure of an Eastern people? 
 Or did the living God of Israel dictate the 
 volume, chapter, and verse to scribes espe- 
 
 93 
 
Su After Days 
 
 cially selected? Once this question would 
 have been held to be impious. Now it 1s in- 
 evitable; and if the Book is a human work 
 its contents must be judged by human stand- 
 ards. 
 
 Supposing this to be so decided, the sys- 
 tems of promise and of threat which men 
 have built upon-it are also without the au- 
 thority of the absolute, and our dreams of 
 an endless future of recompense, painful or 
 pleasurable, for the deeds done in the body, 
 have all the qualities of dreams and none 
 other. 
 
 What then? Have we lost our God? 
 Never for one moment. Unspeakable, He 
 is, the beneficent parent, the terrible, incor- 
 ruptible judge, the champion of the innocent, 
 the accuser of the guilty, refuge, hope, re- 
 deemer, friend; neither palace walls nor 
 prison cells can keep Him out. Every step 
 of our way from the birth hour He has 
 gone with us. Were we at the gallows’ 
 foot, and deservedly, He would leave a sweet 
 drop in the cup of death. He would measure 
 suffering to us, but would forbid despair. 
 The victory of goodness must be complete. 
 
 94 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 The lost sheep must be found—ay, and the 
 lost soul must turn to the way in which the 
 peace of God prevails. We learn the dread- 
 ful danger of those who wander from the 
 right path, but we may also learn the redeem- 
 ing power which recalls and reclaims them. 
 
 So fade our heavens and hells. Christ, if 
 He knew their secrets, did not betray them. 
 On the boundless sea of conjecture we are 
 still afloat, with such mental tools as we pos- 
 sess to guide us, with the skies, the stars, the 
 seasons, seeking a harbor from which no 
 voyager has ever returned. 
 
 So much, the later schemes of thought 
 have taken from us. Shall we ask what they 
 have given us in exchange for what we have 
 lost? 
 
 It seems a little strange that with the ac- 
 cumulated wisdom and power of the ages a 
 farmer’s son of Massachusetts should have 
 been the first clearly to enunciate this im- 
 portant phrase, “The transient and perma- 
 nent in religion.”” We must have known of 
 this distinction all along. In all that we 
 think, and in much that we believe, constant 
 growth and metamorphosis take pleace. Paul 
 
 95 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 says, ““When I was a child, I thought as a 
 child; I believed as a child.’ How full of 
 beauty were these visions of childhood, but 
 also how evanescent, each evolving itself 
 into one more advanced in thought, in under- 
 standing, until the moment in which Love 
 
 “Smote the chord of self, that trembling 
 Passed in music out of sight.” 
 
 Does our acquaintance with this wonder 
 world terminate with the days and years of 
 our age? Shall death forever divide us from 
 all the marvellous story of our spiritual ex- 
 periences of evil seeming for a time to pre- 
 vail, of the blessed eternal good whose con- 
 quest of evil is certain and final? 
 
 Tell us, you stars mysteriously hung to 
 measure the depths of the heavens. ‘Tell us, 
 thou pitiable, shameful way of excess and 
 error, with thy heroic redemption. Let the 
 Jew speak: 
 
 “Whither shall I go from Thy presence? 
 If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there. If 
 J make my bed in hell, behold! Thou art 
 there also.” 
 
 Let the apostle speak: ‘Who shall sep- 
 
 96 
 
In After Days - 
 
 arate us from the love of Christ?” In all 
 these things we are conquerors, through Him 
 that loved us, and loving once, loves ever. 
 
 To me has been granted a somewhat un- 
 usual experience of life. Ninety full years 
 have been measured off to me, their lessons 
 and opportunities unabridged by wasting dis- 
 ease or gnawing poverty. I have enjoyed 
 general good health, comfortable circum- 
 stances, excellent company, and the incite- 
 ments to personal effort which civilized so- 
 ciety offers to its members. For this life and 
 its gifts I am, I hope, devoutly thankful. I 
 came into this world a helpless and ignorant 
 bit of humanity. I have found in it many 
 helps toward the attainment of my full hu- 
 man stature, material, mental, moral. In 
 this slow process of attainment many feat- 
 ures have proved transient. Visions have 
 come and gone. Seasons have bloomed and 
 closed, passions have flamed and faded. 
 Something has never left me. My relation 
 to it has suffered many changes, but it still 
 remains, the foundation of my life, light in 
 darkness, consolation in ill-fortune, guide in 
 uncertainty. 
 
 97 
 
Su After Days 
 
 In the nature of things, I must soon lose 
 sight of this sense of constant metamorphosis 
 whose limits bound our human life. How 
 about this unchanging element? Will it die 
 when I shall be laid in earth? ‘The visible 
 world has no answer to this question. For it, 
 dead is dead, and gone is gone. But a deep 
 spring of life within me says: “Look beyond. 
 Thy days numbered hitherto register a di- 
 vine promise. Thy mortal dissolution leaves 
 this promise unfulfilled, but not abrogated. 
 Thou mayst hope that all that made thy 
 life divine will live for thine immortal 
 part.” 
 
 I have quoted Theodore Parker’s great 
 word, and have made no attempt, so far, to 
 bring into view considerations which may 
 set before us the fundamental distinction ‘be- 
 tween what in human experience passes and 
 what abides. 
 
 In the first place, human life passes, like 
 other life. The splendid blossom, the noble 
 fruit. Inquire into its power and glory after 
 two-thirds of a century have passed over 
 it. You will find weakness in the place of 
 strength, the mournful attar of memory re- 
 
 98 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 placing as it can the fresh fragrance of hope. 
 The bowed form suggests the segment of a 
 mystic circle. ‘The restricted mind turns its 
 tools into toys. “They did not measure the 
 infinite for us. Let us get from their uses 
 such pleasure as we can.” 
 
 Life passes, but the conditions of life do 
 not. Air, food, water, the moral sense, the 
 mathematical problem and its solution. These 
 things wait upon one generation much as 
 they did upon its predecessor. What, too, is 
 this wonderful residuum which refuses to dis- 
 appear when the very features of time seem 
 to succumb to the law of change, and we 
 recognize our world no more? Whence comes 
 this system in which man walks as in an ar- 
 tificial frame, every weight and lever of which 
 must correspond with the outlines of an eter- 
 nal pattern? 
 
 Our spiritual life appears to include three 
 terms in one. They are ever with us, this 
 Past which does not pass, this Future which 
 never arrives. ‘They are part and parcel of 
 this conscious existence which we call Pres- 
 ent. While Past and Future have each their 
 seasons of predominance, both are contained 
 
 99 
 
Jn After Bays 
 
 in the moment which is gone while we say, 
 “It is here.” 
 
 So the Eternal is with us, whether we will 
 or not, and the idea of God is inseparable 
 from the persuasion of immortality; the 
 Being which, perfect in itself, can neither 
 grow nor decline, nor indeed undergo any 
 change whatever. The great Static of the 
 universe, the rationale of the steadfast faith 
 of believing souls, the sense of beauty which 
 justifies our high enjoyments, the sense of 
 proportion which upholds all that we can 
 think about ourselves and our world, the 
 sense of permanence which makes the child 
 in very truth parent to the man, able to solve 
 
 the deepest riddle, the profoundest problem’ 
 
 in all that is. Let us then willingly take the 
 Eternal with us in our flight among the suns 
 and stars. 
 
 Experience 1s our great teacher, and on 
 this point it is wholly wanting. No one on 
 the farther side of the great Divide has been 
 able to inform those on the hither side of 
 what lies beyond. 
 
 Yet our whole life, rightly interpreted, 
 shows us the never-failing mercy of a divine 
 
 100 
 
 EE ee — 
 
 2c -- & Bw, 
 
Su After Days 
 Parent. We may ask, “Whither shall I go 
 
 from Thy presence?” And we may answer, 
 “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me 
 all the days of my eternal life, and I shall 
 dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” 
 
 The anticipation of a life beyond the grave 
 so belongs to our human mastery over the 
 conditions of animal life that it seems to be 
 an integral part of our human endowment. 
 
 We feel something in us that cannot die 
 when blood and brain, muscle and tissue, 
 have reached the brief and uncertain term of 
 their service. For so long, the body can per- 
 form its functions and hold together, but what 
 term is set for the soul? Nothing in its make- 
 up foretokens a limited existence. Its sen- 
 tence would seem to be, “‘Once and always.” 
 
 The promise of a future life is held to have 
 such prominence in Christ’s teaching as to 
 lead Paul to say that the Master “brought 
 life and immortality to light.” How did He 
 do this? By filling the life of to-day with the 
 consciousness of eternal things, of truths and 
 principles which would not change if the 
 whole visible universe were to pass away. 
 
 No one to-day, I think, will maintain that 
 
 101 
 
Sn After Days 
 
 Christ created the hope which He aroused to 
 an activity before undreamed of. The major- 
 ity of the Jews believed in a life after death, 
 as 1s shown by the segregation of the Sad- 
 ducees from the orthodox of the synagogue. 
 The new teaching vindicated the spiritual 
 rights and interests of man. From the depths 
 of his own heart was evolved the conscious- 
 ness of a good that could not die. Man, the 
 creature of a day, has a vested interest in 
 things eternal. The solid principles upon 
 which the social world is organized, the laws 
 of which Sophocles makes Antigone say that 
 “they are not of to-day nor yesterday.” 
 Creatures of a day as we seem, there is that 
 in us which is older than the primeval rocks, 
 than the vAy out of which this earth, our 
 temporary dwelling-place, was made. The 
 reason which placed the stars, the sense of 
 proportion which we recognize in the plan- 
 etary system, finds its correspondence in this 
 brain of ours. We question every feature of 
 what we see, think, and feel. We try every link 
 of the chain and find it sound if we ourselves 
 are sound. ‘This power of remotest question 
 and assent is not of to-day nor yesterday. 
 102 
 
In After Days 
 
 It transcends all bounds of time and space. 
 It weighs the sun, explores the pathway of the 
 stars, and writes, having first carefully read, 
 the history of earth and heaven. It moves 
 in company with the immortals. How much 
 of it is mortal? Only so much as a small 
 strip of earth can cover. These remains are 
 laid away with reverence, having served their 
 time. What has become of the wonderful 
 power which made them alive? It belongs 
 to that in nature which cannot die. 
 
 A babe wept on the borders of the Nile, a 
 foundling, destined for death, but fated to 
 dictate rules of action to the human world. 
 How did this come about? The babe, res- 
 cued and grown to manhood, has come upon 
 something as unchangeable as the law of 
 numbers. 
 
 Oh, baby in the Nile shallows, wiser than 
 the Sphinx; oh, saint in the Athenian prison; 
 oh, discoverer of the second birth, regenerator 
 of mankind—what do you teach us? The 
 eternal hope which lies in God’s eternal good- 
 ness. What is best for thee and me will be. 
 
* 
 ay ost ah 
 
 Pain 
 
 Rs a OY 
 >) AK A ny 
 
 MER wT NA ANAT 
 
 ?) = 
 ya arate pe he Wh 
 
HENRY MILLS ALDEN 
 
Che Other Side of Mortality 
 Geury Mills Alden 
 
y 
 Ghe Other Side of Mlortaliiy 
 
 I 
 
 HEN Tom Appleton, whose wit added 
 
 much to the gayety of Boston and New- 
 port fifty years ago, was told that he was 
 about to die, he said, “‘ How interesting!” 
 
 And really there is nothing so interesting 
 
 as this dying. Not merely to those immedi- 
 ately confronting the great fascination, and 
 many of these have not the wit to see it as 
 that, or to regard it with the degree or kind 
 of imaginative expectancy which the occasion 
 warrants. ‘The loving, who are left behind, 
 may be excused for not looking upon the 
 event in that light at all. The sense of loss 
 blurs their vision, and when grief is assuaged 
 by time the “world beyond”’ seems interest- 
 ing chiefly because so many dear ones have 
 passed thither. 
 
 8 107 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 Putting away the poignancy of separation 
 from our thought of death, and thus becom- 
 ing disinterested as to any purely personal 
 point of view, we are possessed by a larger 
 interest in mortality itself. 
 
 Il 
 
 From its beginning, mortality has been 
 bound up with love. ‘There is no mortality 
 in the inorganic world, none in the lowest 
 order of organisms—the unicellular, in which 
 there is propagation by simple fissure, the 
 continuity never broken. The amceba of to- 
 day is the original amceba. ‘The one half of 
 the cell, thus divided, was indistinguishable 
 from the other. “They were not mates—each 
 was the other. How could the organic world 
 escape this utterly unromantic identity ? 
 
 If the cells could have held counsel to- 
 gether (and who knows what “holding 
 counsel together,’ in ways unknown to us, 
 there may have been) they would have agreed 
 that such existence as they had was in- 
 tolerable, each member of the whole assembly 
 
 108 
 
Su After Days 
 
 isolated and independent, none wanting any- 
 thing of another. They would have had as 
 wild desire for some kind of otherness as if 
 they had been reading Prof. William James’s 
 A Pluralistic Universe. ‘This desire was met 
 by the specialization of sex, and with that 
 came death, as if it were part and parcel of 
 the great romance. 
 
 All that we can think of as interesting in 
 organic existence followed—all the flora and 
 fauna of this world. But every member of 
 this higher order of beings must die; and 
 each individual was made up of organs so 
 mutually interdependent that the chances of 
 death were multiplied. 
 
 We cannot look upon this mortality—thus 
 associated with all the beauty and glory of 
 the earth—as a penalty. It would seem 
 rather to have been supremely desirable. Hu- 
 manity, which would have been impossible 
 but for this higher and more complex or- 
 ganization—in which partition is for the 
 sake of union—shares most largely and deep- 
 ly in its beauty, glory, and romance. Why 
 is it, then, that man alone should protest 
 against the complementary term and look 
 
 109 
 
Su After Mays 
 
 upon death—yjust because of its intimate and 
 inevitable association with love and whatever 
 is lovely—as the supreme irony? However 
 we may account for it—most reasonably, per- 
 haps, because man alone has developed a 
 tragic sense which inclines him to magnify 
 the pathos of his own story—it is certainly 
 not a normal or natural view, not an accept- 
 ance of life upon its own terms. 
 
 Besides, it is a most ungracious attitude. 
 Mortality is chiefly interesting because it 
 belongs to the Kingdom of Grace. ‘The asso- 
 ciation of it with the Realm of Law—or, 
 rather, the kind of conception of that asso- 
 ciation which has generally been entertained 
 —has been the gravest of human mistakes. 
 It is true that we comprehend the law only 
 when we see it as love. But men have not 
 thus comprehended it, and this failure has 
 been most apparent in the kind of connection 
 which they have insisted upon between death 
 and law—as if Nature were punitive and 
 death the abhorred penalty she holds over us, 
 inevitable finally in any case, but also forever 
 impending, All the perverted conceptions 
 that have been entertained of God and Nat- 
 
 110 
 
Su After Days 
 
 ure began with this false idea of death as 
 something terrible—this death which had 
 come into the world before there was any- 
 thing that could be thought of as punishable 
 or as in any way other than it should be, 
 and which, ever since it began to be, had 
 been bound up with natural law as it had 
 been with love in an association as beautiful 
 as it is possible for us to imagine. 
 
 But the more we look upon the world as 
 a continuous creation—a constant becoming 
 —the grace of it all impresses us rather than 
 the law of it, which, after all, is only our 
 mental generalization. Harmony is inherent 
 in creation, where everything is fit in becom- 
 ing at all. This identity of “‘becomingness”’ 
 with “fitness” is registered in our common 
 speech. ‘‘Grace” is a more expressive word 
 than “‘fitness,’’ because it is more intimate 
 to the thought of creative and abounding 
 life. ‘The very fact, then, that mortality is, 
 that it became—in the series of becomings— 
 that it is inevitable in the higher order of 
 organic existence, that it is inseparable from 
 every quality which makes them beautiful or 
 interesting, should not only quell in us any 
 
 III 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 doubts or fears concerning it, but convince 
 us of its grace and bounty. 
 
 The more we ourselves are in the King- 
 dom of Grace—the more we are Christians, 
 following the Master’s own thought and lead- 
 ing—the more gracious and significant will 
 this mortality seem to us. ‘They who live 
 sordid lives, full of greed, envy, and ambi- 
 tion, are hostile to death, which loosens their 
 tenacious grasp of earthly prizes. ‘There is 
 in our loves a nobler kind of avarice which 
 denies to death the full measure of its sweet- 
 ness and worth. But the first word or token 
 of the spiritual life 1s Release—we lose to 
 find. We give up, without the thought of 
 gain for ourselves, just for the sake of others, 
 even “in honor preferring one another.” We 
 do not thus yield because we ought; it 1s a 
 vital and spontaneous altruism. It is by a 
 natural grace—I had almost said politeness 
 —that one generation gives place to another, 
 and the courtesy is more appreciable because 
 it is not sudden, but waits to yield a maturity 
 of service in a gradual and deliberately con- 
 scious descension. This grace of waiting 
 leads to the development of all the domestic 
 
 112 
 
Su After Days 
 
 and social graces—the amenities and sym- 
 pathies which are the heart culture of hu- 
 manity. This culture could never, in any 
 generation, have been so quick and zest- 
 ful save in the face of death, and it could 
 not have attained its present scope and va- 
 riety, forever retaining its freshness, but for 
 its constant renewal and increase with each 
 successive generation. And if we consider 
 the culture of the mind and soul, beyond the 
 range of the affections, prompted by disin- 
 terested curiosity, as summed up in human 
 science, art, and imaginative literature, we 
 see that it could never have had a beginning, 
 any initial impulse, in a race whose continu- 
 ance upon the earth was stable, not broken 
 by mortality and renewed by nativity. What 
 stimulus to growth, what possibilities of ex- 
 pansion, would Imagination have in that level 
 and sterile world ? 
 
 Ill 
 
 Divest man of his mortality, then all that 
 remains to him as an investment loses its 
 value. As a denizen of the earth, he would 
 
 113 
 
Qu After Bays 
 
 be placed in a situation involving the dullest 
 irony, supposing that on such terms he could 
 have life at all, or partnership with the living 
 world about him—really an untenable hy- 
 pothesis, since there is no life we know the 
 other side of which (and that side next and 
 most intimate) is not death, no participation 
 in any life without partaking also of mor- 
 tality. But granted the anomaly, there 1s 
 the irony. Every living thing else 1s part of 
 an ever-changing scene, budding, blossom- 
 ing, fruit-bearing, decaying. ‘The seasons 
 come and go. The meanest seed may die 
 and from its grave have quick ascent and 
 increase. He alone dryly abides; for him 
 no passing, no increment. ‘This is an irony 
 by the side of which that poignant irony 
 which pierces his heart because all that 1s 
 loveliest must die and he too must die, leav- 
 ing behind all that he most loves, is sur- 
 passingly interesting; and indeed he makes 
 the most of its pathos and romance in his 
 art and in his literature. 
 
 The romance of death, while it is so large 
 an element in our appreciation of it, is never 
 quite dissociated from its pathos. 
 
 114 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 The mere body of death has no attraction 
 for us; we instinctively put it away from us 
 and bury it out of sight. Death itself re- 
 pudiates it and refuses to be defined in terms 
 of a corruption which no longer lies next to 
 such life as it has served but which belongs 
 to purely physical forces outside of its king- 
 dom. What life has abandoned death also 
 has left behind. 
 
 As I have said, life has no romance save 
 in the face of death. While we live, the 
 physiological reaction is measured by the ex- 
 tent and quickness of our dying. Sleep, 
 which is at once our undoing and our re- 
 creation, would abortively fall short of its full 
 meaning were it not the image of death; 
 and the dream in like manner lose its subtle 
 complement. ‘The psychical reaction is of 
 ereater moment. ‘The term of life is marked 
 by a limited cycle, enclosing for each of us 
 our individual experience. At every point 
 of advance there is a new horizon. When 
 we reach the end—what then? ‘There could 
 be no greater challenge to the imagination. 
 This is the largest romance death offers. But 
 within the cycle there is at every step the 
 
 115 
 
Jn After Bays 
 
 thanatopsis. History is the record not only 
 of past times, but of a humanity that has 
 passed—an unreturning host, of whom but 
 few in any generation have left so much as 
 their names behind them. But for this pass- 
 ing and the human sense of it there would 
 have been no record at all, and no motive 
 for preservative: art. Sie transit: and be- 
 cause glory was of the transient deed, and 
 beauty of forms that vanish, there was the 
 quick sense of these and the desire to hold 
 them in arrest, as the poet and the sculptor 
 hold them. 
 
 Death has always haunted the poet’s 
 thought, insisting upon its own note, piercing 
 or pensive, in every imaginative creation— 
 against it in bold relief must stand heroism, 
 love, and friendship. In tragedy it was death 
 out of time or precipitated by mysterious fate 
 that heightened the pathetic moment as in the 
 epic it had heightened the heroic. Iphigenia, 
 whose story would seem to intimate that there 
 was in the untimely death of the victim some- 
 thing so sharply sweet to the gods that it 
 turned them from wrath to mercy, was for 
 
 Euripides what Patroclus was for Homer. 
 116 
 
 ee oe 
 
Su After Bays 
 The grief in Shelley’s Adonais, in Milton’s Ly- 
 
 cidas, and in Tennyson’s In Memoriam 1s set 
 against death, thus untimely, in gentler relief. 
 
 Very different from the pathos, mingled 
 with our zsthetic impressions, which we feel 
 in this distant contemplation of death face 
 to face with a life indirectly presented to us 
 in art or literature and in every chapter of 
 human history, is that which we feel in our 
 immediate experience. The poet may ex- 
 press the thought and sentiment of it for us 
 in pertinent phrase and illuminating meta- 
 phor, but not the reality of it; nor can I at- 
 tempt to express that for my readers. 
 
 IV 
 
 This pathos is too deep for tears, and the 
 sombre habiliments of mourning contradict 
 rather than express its true meaning. Black- 
 ness befits the dulness of despair, not the 
 quickness of this grief for loved ones lost. 
 If the angel of death is not here the angel 
 of life, then indeed has his brightness van- 
 ished and we are duped by mortality, No! 
 
 117 
 
Sun After Bays 
 
 Here more than anywhere death is the quick- 
 ener of human hearts, expanding hope, faith, 
 and love beyond all visible limitations. The 
 curtain folding us closely about unfolds to 
 another light, as night unveils the stars. The 
 sharpest grief pierces into this strange 
 brightness. 
 
 Our praise of-mortality therefore halts not 
 because of the keen affliction that has first 
 pierced our hearts, but—to use Isaiah’s phrase 
 —with ‘“‘a sword bathed in heaven.” Here- 
 in, indeed, lies the chief value of mortality, 
 —that, closing one door, it opens another, 
 never leaving life’s thoroughfare for the by- 
 ways of corruption. “Let the dead bury its 
 dead.” Death speaks in the words of the 
 Master, ‘‘Come thou and follow me.” It is 
 not yet our own time to follow, but we hear 
 the voice, and we see in swift vision the 
 
 winged Psyche free of her chrysalis. 
 
 Vv 
 
 Life takes the highway, which never even 
 skirts the tomb. It is the highway of end- 
 118 
 
Su After Days 
 
 less change. It was the way of the physical 
 world before death entered it—that world 
 which seems to us uniform and immutable 
 because its transformations have so vast a 
 scale and scope that the latest of them was 
 earlier than anything we call living. Beyond 
 that, the retrospect is hidden from us. Pos- 
 sibly it was from the beginning a living uni- 
 verse. But now, in our strange partnership 
 with it, we are sensible only of the side turned 
 to us—its dying side—its descent for our 
 rising, and in our fancy we picture to our- 
 selves its long course of decadence before its 
 gracious abeisance to the Cell. Of its as- 
 cending side we know nothing. Perhaps 
 mutation is a truer word for its procession 
 than evolution. Certainly it is a truer word 
 for the procession of what we call life— 
 truest of all for the human soul on its path- 
 way here and hereafter, with Death for its 
 shining leader, whose torch is never inverted. 
 The light of this torch, while it is thrown 
 forward farther than our eyes can see, is also 
 forever turned backward upon our earthly 
 life, by its illumination revealing the glory 
 of that life more and more, from generation 
 
 11g 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 to generation; and the light is more and 
 more the light of love, since Death is forever 
 bound up with Love. 
 
 Hence the growth of a deeper humanism 
 from age to age, through changes in emo- 
 tional and psychical sensibility — changes 
 which cannot be accounted for by natural 
 selection and which involve surprises not 
 precalculable. New interests and new mo- 
 tives emerge, new beauty, new truth, and a 
 new sense of life. The changes are more 
 rapid with every generation because we op- 
 pose less resistance to the current whose 
 pulsations are death, in the falling, and birth 
 in the rising—the systole and diastole. We 
 more willingly let old things pass into new, 
 while we pass with them, yielding to the 
 stream without misgiving. ‘This it is to have 
 faith in life through comprehension of death. 
 
 VI 
 
 Looking beyond the term of individual life, 
 we are thus better prepared to expect a new 
 surprise, of which we seem to catch a radiant 
 
 120 
 
In After Days 
 
 glimpse. It cannot be otherwise than that 
 a marvellous change awaits us, though we 
 know not what it is. 
 
 Some of us who are nearing or have passed 
 the scripturally allotted term have been asked 
 to say in this collection of essays what we 
 think and feel concerning this matter. We 
 may well be supposed to find the theme more 
 interesting—the romance of it more Inviting. 
 For us the land slopes down, with a western 
 exposure, to the Garden of Hesperides whose 
 apples are golden, and we breathe fragrant 
 airs from an unknown sea suggesting the 
 new adventure. But that sea is hidden 
 from us, as from all others, until we fall 
 asleep. 
 
 Our mature experience avails not, except 
 by way of preparation if we have acquired 
 the habit of dying, thus making the most 
 of the life that now is for all of its val- 
 ues —by the closest culture of its whole 
 held. 
 
 Our experience does not enable us to know 
 ourselves—that larger part of us which 
 creatively determines the scope of our powers, 
 the mutations of our sensibility, and the very 
 
 121 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 physiognomy of individual bodies and souls. 
 All this is hidden from us, though it is the 
 eround of our experience in this earthly life. 
 The ground of our mystical partnership with 
 Nature is also hidden, as is the bond of our 
 kinship with all life; yet these are natively 
 our heritage. We have, as natively, a real 
 knowledge of this continuity as something 
 implicit and unbroken. 
 
 But what we know about ourselves or the 
 world outside of us is only that which 1s 
 definable in our consciousness through dis- 
 continuity and disintegration, so that we ex- 
 press judgments or discriminations. ‘To de- 
 fine is to note the limit, the line of cleavage, 
 the contour. We call the words by which 
 we do this ‘“‘terms,” as denoting endings. 
 We know in this explicit way only the boun- 
 daries of things and, of things that pass, the 
 interruption of the current. We bind like 
 things together by a mental process of classi- 
 fication, which is not reintegration, and ar- 
 rive at general concepts. Thus we have 
 formal as distinguished from real knowledge, 
 because we have ‘“‘discourse of reason,” be- 
 cause we have intellects which react upon 
 
 122 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 the phenomena of the world and of our ex- 
 perience, defining them, making inductive 
 and deductive judgments concerning them, 
 reducing them to systems in our minds—all 
 of which we express in our speech. It is a 
 very important kind of knowledge, such as 
 pertains distinctively to human intelligence. 
 It has the same relation to the development 
 of human thought that experimentation has 
 to material and social progress, but a very 
 much larger range. We think about every- 
 thing, and our speculation seems to gain 
 ereater facility when it passes beyond all the 
 data of our observation and experience. Our 
 abstract conceptions, especially when we can 
 express them in words beginning with a 
 capital letter, like “Absolute” and “‘In- 
 finite,” have a kind of tyranny over us. Our 
 philosophical speculation from Plato to our 
 own time, as Professor James has shown in 
 his latest book, is made up mostly of these 
 imposing but empty abstractions. 
 
 This “thin” philosophy, as Professor 
 James expressively calls it, cannot help us 
 to any real sense of our present existence and 
 still less of the life to come. Our thought 
 
 9 123 
 
Su After Days 
 
 about a future life, however ‘‘thin,” when it 
 takes the shape of a theory, has some “‘thick- 
 ness” from the desire for the continuity in 
 that life of the individual consciousness and 
 for conscious reunion with loved ones who 
 have gone before. It would seem strange to 
 us that, in connection with the resurrections 
 recorded in the Gospel, no light should have 
 been thrown upon these points—that, indeed, 
 no questions concerning them seem to have 
 been put to the risen Lazarus by his friends 
 or to the risen Christ by His disciples. But 
 we must remember that then, as during the 
 whole time then past since the beginning of 
 history, there was no margin for curiosity 
 about these things, since everybody knew all 
 about them. ‘There were no questions to be 
 put. Not only was there no doubt, there was 
 absolutely fixed certitude. The geography 
 of the underworld was more accurately 
 known than that of the next province on the 
 earth’s surface. 
 
 The question, “‘If a man die, shall he live 
 again?’ is as old as philosophy itself—but 
 it was not a question with the common, un- 
 speculative people of the ancient world. Now 
 
 124 
 
 EEE 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 everybody thinks, and where there is no doubt 
 as to the main issue there is frequently solici- 
 tude as to this one point—the survival of 
 individual consciousness, the interest in which 
 is heightened by, and for many quite de- 
 pendent upon, the possibility of future 
 reunions of families and friends with full 
 mutual recognition. 
 
 vil 
 
 As to this concern regarding the future 
 restoration of intimacies broken by death, 
 a careful study of the record of any com- 
 munity would show how much more stress 
 very many people put upon it as related to 
 the future than as related to the present 
 life—which does not seem quite consistent. 
 Homes are broken otherwise than by death— 
 forever, in the most natural way, by the 
 marriages of the younger generation for the 
 making of new homes. Separations and 
 divorces break the most intimate of human 
 ties, and those who are widowed in many in- 
 stances marry again. An adopted child often 
 
 125 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 displaces one that has been early lost and, 
 after years of cherishment, would not be 
 given up even for the one that is gone. We 
 do not love because the object is lovable; the 
 object is lovable because we can love. ‘Then, 
 too, we reflect that, though we may have 
 lived before this life, we do not seem to miss 
 anything from past lives; on the contrary, 
 we would stoutly aver that those we most 
 dearly love we have always loved in however 
 many lives have been ours. Still, so strong 
 is the sentiment by which we would cling to 
 our dear ones for all lives to come, even 
 though we call it the avarice of love, that it 
 is painful to discuss it as if it were a ques- 
 tion. The sentiment will persist to the end 
 of human time; and as love grows more and 
 more in the world, excluding hate, and_ is 
 more luminous and significant, being con- 
 stantly lifted to a higher plane of finer feel- 
 ing, so that what is elemental and instinctive 
 in natural ties not only shows leaf and flower 
 rather than root, but takes on psychical 
 veils, it seems more intelligently to demand 
 expansion beyond the limits of the present 
 
 earthly life. 
 
 126 
 
Su After Days 
 Vill 
 
 And it is just this demand for expansion, 
 for fuller development, which prompts the 
 desire for a continuation hereafter of our 
 identical individuality, even if there could 
 be no renewal of earthly associations. ‘Those 
 who have the largest development here have 
 the keenest expectation of the future and 
 would be satisfied with the assurance of just 
 enough reminiscence of this life to establish 
 the sense of continuity. More than that 
 might be distressfully confusing, involving a 
 sacrifice of all the advantages of individuality 
 itself. I would rather give up the reminis- 
 cence altogether than these very appreciable 
 advantages. The Occidental mind does not 
 take kindly to the conception of Nirvana. 
 Nothing could be “thinner” than that. We 
 would rather wait for a new universe—and 
 the wait would not be sensibly as long as 
 that between going to sleep and waking— 
 and have back some sort of bodies, with a 
 comfortable sequestration of our individual 
 souls, and all the beautiful and varied cosmic 
 phenomena about us to which we have been 
 
 127 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 accustomed, than to be suddenly and forever 
 swallowed up in the inane Absolute. If we 
 care so much for recognizable identity we 
 should doubtless, in the new-born universe, 
 have sometimes that sense of familiarity, 
 seeming like a reminiscence, which we are 
 now often surprised into by some especially 
 novel scene or situation. We might really 
 be very much like our old selves and the world 
 about us substantially the same as this, for 
 our study and delight. ‘The Demuurge, it is 
 true, may be Protean, beyond our possible 
 imagining, and the whole investment might 
 be a surprising transformation, even bafHling- 
 ly unanological to anything we know. We 
 might have transformed capacities and facul- 
 ties and not miss old things or any reminders 
 of them. Of course, then as now, we might 
 regard the whole thing as illogical and see 
 how it might have been better fashioned, but 
 it would be new. We may reasonably sup- 
 pose, if our reasoning counts for anything, 
 that each new universe, if not better than its 
 predecessor, would be an advance. ‘There 
 may be a comparative modernity in universes. 
 
 But I am not propounding this as even 
 
 128 
 
Sn After Bays 
 
 a working hypothesis of a future life. For 
 all we know, instead of universes proceeding 
 in tandem, a new universe is now rising syn- 
 chronously with the falling of this one, in- 
 volving as this evolves—as the new year of 
 a tree begins with its exfoliation. We see 
 only the katabolism, the expenditure, the 
 descent. The tension side is hidden from 
 us. But, as to any application to our theme, 
 that also is a theory. I am casting about for 
 any, even plausible, chance of being saved 
 from absorption into the Absolute. 
 
 IX 
 
 What I would fain insist upon is indi- 
 viduality. Continued individuality from one 
 life to another seems to involve a contradic- 
 tion of terms. Formed life—that structural 
 result of habit which we call character, our 
 developed tastes, and our intellectual attain- 
 ments—we can hardly conceive of as carried 
 over into a future existence whose emer- 
 gence is even newer than birth. But most 
 people do so conceive, however unphilosoph- 
 
 129 
 
Jn After Bays 
 
 ical the conception may be; they think of 
 that other life as beginning just where it 
 stops here and going right on from that point. 
 Evidently the Society for Psychical Research 
 rests its whole procedure upon this assump- 
 tion, and if the expectations of most of the 
 members of this society should be satisfac- 
 torily realized in verifiable proofs of this 
 hypothesis, what can the candid philosopher 
 do but accept it? On the other hand, we 
 cannot positively assert that because it is 
 not proven it is therefore untenable. We do 
 not, perhaps, comprehend to what extent 
 our mental fabric is undone in sleep and rises 
 again, renewed by the re-creative ofhce of 
 this same sleep. Is there in death some like 
 miracle of release and restoration, the soul 
 receiving back its proper vesture, wholly 
 fresh and mystically transformed by the very 
 power that wrought the ruinous divestiture ? 
 We do not know—but if it is so, is it neces- 
 sary or of any value to the soul that its rein- 
 vestment should include the complete equip- 
 ment it acquired on earth—of information, 
 technical skill, and practical maxims, along 
 with the trivial curiosity of a gossip? Is 
 130 
 
Qu After Bays 
 
 there no absolution in the great change? 
 Must we think of these souls as_ forever 
 waiting, as we imagine the Martians to be, 
 for the chance of a casual communication 
 with us? 
 
 The conservation of individuality would, 
 with this handicap, seem less desirable. We 
 would have it as light-weighted, at least, as 
 we have it here and now. We value it in 
 the present life for its inviolate insulation, 
 which at the same time shuts us in from 
 distracting interruptions and leaves us open 
 to the larger invisible currents of life. It 1s 
 the essential of perfect accord with other 
 souls. Thus, while it seems a kind of dis- 
 continuity by reason of its sequestration, in- 
 dividuality serves the continuity of life. But 
 it does not make that continuity, which 1s 
 indeed the first premise of all existence. 
 
 We think ourselves as being here and now; 
 it is the way of our thinking—the only way 
 in which we can think at all. By the same 
 formal habit of the mind we think of dying 
 as going elsewhere, and speak of being 
 “launched from time into eternity.” But 
 this phraseology is not applicable to the 
 
 131 
 
Iu After Days 
 
 spirit itself. Distance is not real, but an 
 illusion. The earth never really left the sun. 
 Because of its apparent separation, which 
 emphasizes the bond of union, it becomes 
 the explicit expression of solarity. Eternity 
 is not quantitative; it 1s the quality of this 
 life as truly as it can be of any other. Resur- 
 gence is an essential attribute of life; it 1s 
 not a coming or a going, but a new becoming. 
 
 x 
 
 As mortality was not always, so it may not 
 always be. Before it, was a lower order of 
 life—beyond it, may be some higher order. 
 So said the Master—that in the world to come 
 there is no marrying or giving in marriage; 
 neither shall they die any more. Sex and 
 mortality began together and together they 
 cease. The life without these and beyond 
 these, as we know them, transcends our 
 comprehension. 
 
 We confront the great change not with a 
 theory, but as our most interesting venture. 
 
1 Py 
 car 
 
 rh 
 
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 
 
Che Future Lite 
 Thomas Weutworth Higginson 
 
Vi 
 Che Huture Life 
 
 BENEDICTO BENEDICATUR 
 
 O years! and Age! Farewell; 
 Behold I go, 
 Where I do know 
 
 Infinity to dwell. 
 
 And these mine eyes shall see 
 All times, how they 
 Are lost i’ the Sea 
 
 Of vast Eternity. 
 RoBERT HERRICK. 
 
 hee request to write a paper on the fu- 
 ture life comes to me somewhat un- 
 expectedly, as did once a sudden invitation 
 to say grace at the dinner-table of a lady 
 who had invited me to give a literary lecture 
 to her school, a large and celebrated one in 
 the western part of Massachusetts. It was 
 many years since | had been asked to do 
 such a thing, but there came into my memory 
 
 135 
 
Su After Days 
 
 two words which an American visitor finds 
 so impressive at a certain college dining-hall 
 at Oxford: ‘‘ Benedicto benedicatur” (“‘ Bless- 
 ings to the Blessed One’’). I said this grace, 
 and on sitting down afterward on the right 
 hand of my hostess, I remember to have 
 elanced at her with some slight misgiving, 
 and she looked at me with an expression of 
 radiant delight. ‘Then she said that I could 
 not possibly have said a grace which would 
 have impressed her so much, for she had 
 previously heard it as a guest at an Oxford 
 University table and it seemed to her that 
 she never had heard so much put into two 
 words. She felt it so greatly, indeed, that 
 she took me into the chapel of the institution 
 at morning service, the next day, and after 
 her prayers in the presence of the students 
 were over, she invited me to say something 
 to them, though she knew me to be some- 
 what of a heretic. This was the outcome of 
 a grace learned by myself at Oxford, and I 
 take it as a motto for what I have to say. 
 In the wondrous description given by Plato 
 of the last days of Socrates, the latter’s friend 
 Crito is described as asking him the ques- 
 136 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 tion, since repeated so many million times by 
 others, “‘ How and where shall we bury you ?” 
 Socrates rebukes the phrase instantly. “ Bury 
 me,” he answers, “in any way you please, if 
 you can catch me to bury,” “‘he at the same 
 time smiling and looking gently round upon 
 us,” says Plato, his biographer. “I cannot 
 persuade Crito, my friends,” Socrates adds, 
 “that I am the Socrates who is now convers- 
 ing with you and arranging each part of this 
 discourse; but he obstinately thinks I am 
 that which he shall shortly behold dead, and 
 he wants to know how he shall bury me. 
 But that which I have been arguing to you 
 so long—that when I have drunk this poison 
 I shall be with you no longer, but shall de- 
 part straightway to some happy state of the 
 blessed—this I cannot convince him.” “Say 
 rather, Crito,” he urges, pleadingly, once 
 more—‘‘say, if you love me, Where shall you 
 bury my body? and I will answer you, 
 Bury it in any manner and in any place you 
 please.”’ 
 
 Many centuries have passed since then; 
 sects and sages, faiths and governments, have 
 come and gone. The world is taken captive 
 
 137 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 by a religion unknown to Socrates; yet still 
 through Christendom the words of the great 
 ancient philosopher survive; and with them 
 the words of his faithless questioner linger 
 also, and for one who speaks like Socrates 
 to-day, a thousand even in Christendom speak 
 like Crito. ‘The habitual forms and words 
 of Christendom show this practical faith- 
 lessness to the spiritual life it claims to 
 monopolize. We drape our houses and our 
 persons in gloomy black, beneath its influ- 
 ence; and leave white to the pagan Chinese, 
 and purple and golden hues to the heathen 
 Greeks and Romans. It is centuries since 
 Saint Charies Borromeo strove to substitute 
 for the skeleton and the scythe the golden 
 key of paradise; and yet the skeleton is still 
 the symbol of death, and the scythe of terror. 
 
 I speak as one reared on the vanishing edge, 
 as it were, of the old Calvinistic faith, so as 
 just to miss its gloomy training. My father, 
 though a man of secular pursuits, was the 
 first organizer of the Harvard Theological 
 School, now thoroughly liberalized and al- 
 ways looking in that direction. My mother, 
 though reading more successive volumes of 
 
 138 
 
 — 
 — eee en 
 
Ju Afier Days 
 
 sermons than any one I ever knew, was a 
 liberal Unitarian, said grace at the dinner- 
 table, and held family prayers. We were al- 
 lowed to play games on Sunday evening, but 
 they were cards of what was then called 
 “sacred geography,’ and I learned from 
 them, once for all, that the capital of Da- 
 homey was Abomey, which, indeed, became 
 a saying in the family. I say these things 
 because we are called upon to speak of per- 
 sonal experiences as well as personal opin- 
 ions. 
 
 After these mild beginnings, I may frankly 
 say that I never consciously at any period in 
 my youth technically performed any process 
 called “experiencing religion.”” What I did 
 have the opportunity to appreciate, however, 
 was the society of saints at home and sinners 
 abroad, and, above all, the fact of certain 
 very extraordinary cases of persons, inti- 
 mately known to me, who underwent great 
 and prolonged trials and sorrows without 
 especial religious consolation. I was also 
 born just in time to meet the strong influ- 
 ences of Emerson, Parker, and Garrison. | 
 walked in their paths and have never re- 
 
 ro 139 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 gretted it. All this was somewhat exception- 
 al in those restricted days, whereas I now 
 see around me on every side a generation to 
 whom religion represents something liberal 
 and cheering, not merely technical. ‘This is 
 accompanied, however, by new problems of 
 thought, perhaps harder than any which have 
 preceded them. - Living as I do next door to 
 a Catholic church whose thronged aisles and 
 schools are heartily to be respected, I look 
 over it to the high grounds of the Harvard 
 Observatory, whence has just come to us 
 within a few days the announcement of the 
 discovery of a new-found planet in the solar 
 system, farther off than any previously known, 
 and so far that it will probably never be seen 
 by the naked eye or even through the tele- 
 scope, but only demonstrable through the 
 eyes of abstract science. To the power 
 which creates in the universe such inscru- 
 table wonders what better can one say than 
 “Benedicto benedicatur’”’? 
 
 But the past is one thing, the present is 
 another. Within my memory the early Colo- 
 nial expressions of religion have largely gone 
 out of use, and the changed utterances of the 
 
 140 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 present have taken their place. How largely, 
 for instance, have the old habits of family 
 prayers diminished, or even that of saying 
 erace at private tables. Is this because there 
 is no more need of them? Quite otherwise! 
 Who is there who can go through the sorrows 
 and bereavements of mortal life without days 
 of anxiety and grief, perhaps even nights of 
 tears? These may be periods in which there 
 comes at length into the soul, even if only 
 temporarily, a recognition, not merely of a 
 Deity, but of a God close by, so near as to 
 need no intermediate aid. At such a mo- 
 ment do not all sects and creeds suddenly be- 
 come valueless to us, and personal immor- 
 tality seem as sure as to-morrow’s sunrise ? 
 We have, in the Scripture phrase, gone into 
 the closet and shut the door. At such a 
 moment we do not, it may be, need an uttered 
 word, or if we are to have it, it must be 
 neither technical nor conventional. Some 
 simple poem of Whittier, perhaps, some verse 
 which the hymn-books have. borrowed from 
 him and with a few daring touches have made 
 their own, these give more than any Church 
 ritual can offer, and we turn to a simple book 
 
 141 
 
Su After Days 
 
 like John Woolman’s Journal without caring 
 for Church forms. 
 
 But we are compelled to bear in mind the 
 fact that beyond these personal experiences 
 there is a world of religious imaginings, ex- 
 citements, ordeals, which when once endured 
 are not easily disposed of. More often they 
 remain in the field. We speak of the ex- 
 cesses of spiritualism, for instance, as some- 
 thing gone by. But there lies before me a 
 letter of twelve quarto pages from an edu- 
 cated family in the Far West, some of whom 
 are personally known to me, and whose 
 respective houses are to this day filled 
 with unexplained “sweet bell - sounds,” or 
 ““chimes,’’ as they describe them, sometimes 
 thirty in a single day. These oftentimes 
 chimed so easily with words, that by auto- 
 matic writing, messages from the departed 
 could be taken down and have a coherent 
 meaning. At other times they seemed to 
 ring in approval of some statement that had 
 been made. ‘The bell - ringing is described 
 in one of these curious letters as follows: 
 
 ‘Mother told me of hearing the bell 107 
 times when she was alone. She and I heard 
 
 142 
 
Su After Days 
 
 1 CREED haat ll ic ch a, a RRS 
 it 28 times. Mother, Joseph, & I heard it 
 once. Mary & I heard it twice. The four 
 of us heard the sounds five times. Mother & 
 
 Mary S. .. . heard it once. Mother and 
 Mary T.... heard it seven times. . .. Mother, 
 Mary, & Joseph heard it six times. . . . I 
 
 heard the bell 71 times when I was alone; 42 
 of those sounds were in my room a couple of 
 blocks away”; and so on indefinitely. All 
 this occurred, it will be observed, not to 
 single hearers only, but to groups of differ- 
 ent members of a large family, and all this 
 at different localities, several blocks of houses 
 apart. 
 
 These and similar unexplained phenomena 
 bring happiness to those who believe that they 
 are messages from the spirit world; while 
 to more prosaic minds they seem imagi- 
 nary or uncanny. At any rate, this is one 
 side. Observe, on the other hand, what a 
 change has come over the habits of the cul- 
 tivated mind in its view of the Hebrew and 
 Christian Scriptures. “The general religious 
 world,” says one of the highest scientific au- 
 thorities, Sir Oliver Lodge, President of the 
 University of Birmingham, “has agreed ap- 
 
 143 
 
Sn After Bays 
 
 parently to throw overboard Jonah and the 
 whale, Joshua and the sun, the three Chil- 
 dren and the fiery furnace; it does not seem 
 to take anything in the Book of Judges or 
 the Book of Daniel very seriously; . . . it is 
 willing to relegate to poetry—i.e., to imagi- 
 nation or fiction—such legends as the crea- 
 tion of the world, Adam and his rib, Eve and 
 the apple, Noah and his ark, language and 
 the tower of Babel, Elijah and the chariot 
 of fire, and many others.” But he justly 
 asks “‘if religious people go as far as this, 
 where are they to stop? What, then, do they 
 propose to do with the turning of water into 
 wine, the ejection of devils, the cursing of 
 the fig-tree, the feeding of five thousand, the 
 raising of Lazarus ?’’' to say nothing of won- 
 ders greater still which are evaded even by 
 so liberal a man as Dr. Lyman Abbott. Yet 
 science teaches us more and more unflinch- 
 ingly that there has been no such thing in 
 history as the fall of man, in the accustomed 
 sense, It is tracing him, or claims to be, 
 
 back through a tadpole and fish-like an- 
 
 * Lodge’s Science and Immortality, 13, 14. 
 144 
 
Su After Days 
 
 cestry away to the early beginnings of exist- 
 ence, but it has not been able to trace the 
 origin of any portion of such life from dead 
 matter. Perpetual efforts have been made 
 by the most learned of modern men to reach 
 the beginning of animal life; claims have 
 been made more than once to have abso- 
 lutely created it. In Germany, we are told 
 “inorganic and artificial’ substances have 
 been found to crawl about on glass slides 
 under the action of surface-tension or capil- 
 larity, with an appearance which is said to 
 have deceived even a biologist.”* We are 
 told that there is not such a student but be- 
 lieves that sooner or later the discovery will 
 be made, and that a cell having all the es- 
 - sential functions of life’ will be constructed 
 out of inorganic material. So vast has been 
 the progress of chemistry that within sev- 
 enty years the very word has lost its meaning 
 and has advanced to deeper and more difh- 
 cult properties. Profounder and profounder 
 knowledge carries us far away from many 
 an old tradition, but it still leaves untouched 
 
 1 Lodge’s Science and Immortality, 18. 
 
 145 
 
Su After Days 
 
 the instinct which convinces us that there 
 is a God. ‘The poetic side exists as strongly 
 and keeps as near to us as what is called 
 philosophy. Whittier’s simple phrases carry 
 us no farther than that song sung by Emily 
 Bronté on her death-bed: 
 
 “Though earth and man were gone 
 And suns and universe ceased to be 
 And Thou were left alone, 
 Every existence would exist in Thee.” 
 
 This is matched by the profounder eloquence 
 of Carlyle: | 
 
 “What, then, is man? What, then, is 
 man!” 
 
 ‘He endures but for an hour, and is crush- 
 ed before the moth. Yet in the being and 
 in the working of a faithful man is there al- 
 ready (as all faith from the beginning gives 
 assurance) a something that pertains not to 
 this wild death-element of Time; that tri- 
 umphs over Time, and zs, and will be, when 
 Time shall be no more.” ! 
 
 * Lodge’s Science and Immortality, 161. 
 
 146 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 There lies before me a letter from that 
 faithful friend of truth, Elizabeth Peabody, 
 well-known as the source and founder in 
 America of the kindergarten system. This 
 letter, never before published, seems to me 
 to touch the whole subject of human be- 
 reavement more profoundly than anything 
 else I know. 
 
 “My DEAR ,—I must write to tell you how 
 very much grieved I was to see in the paper to-day 
 (but it was an old one) that you had lost your lit- 
 tle darling in whose advent & welcome all your 
 friends have so rejoiced with you. 
 
 “‘T have sympathized with many parents as only 
 one can who looks on childhood as I do. It is a 
 terrible pang for a parent to have the angel pres- 
 ence withdrawn so soon. But in a Father’s House 
 we know that it is not without its other side— 
 whatever happens—Just now you are I dare say 
 in the mood of Emerson’s wail in the Threnody— 
 Do you know that it was quite at first he poured 
 out that song of woe—& it was not till a year 
 afterward he wrote the rest—from the words ‘The 
 Deep Heart replied’—-This fact gives both parts 
 more meaning—and [I think you will find solace 
 in reading just now the first part & then thinking 
 
 147 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 of the rich consolation & instruction in store for 
 you--You may be more to your race for going 
 down into these mysterious depths. It is death 
 which reveals the infinite sweetness of life ‘with 
 the might of his sunbeams touching the day.’. . . 
 
 “IT believe the mother here [on earth] can bless 
 & develop it if she be true to her motherly love. 
 It is an infinite tie—As the life of the Angel ex- 
 pands, it must look with more and more gratitude 
 upon the loving parents who invoked it from the 
 bosom of God to personal consciousness. 
 
 “But excuse me for making suggestions when 
 God has spoken to you so intimately—‘As a 
 Mother comforts her little one—so I comfort thee’ 
 
 saith the Lord— 
 
 “Your friend, 
 “ Exiz. P. PEAasopy. 
 
 “Concord, Mass— 
 
 “March 20 [1880]” 
 
 Strange indeed it is that the simple belief 
 in immortality, so plain to Socrates and 
 Cicero, should have become confused and 
 bewildered in spite of those later religious 
 teachings which would seem to make it sure. 
 One of the most devoted mothers whom I 
 ever knew, an eminent literary woman, when 
 
 148 
 
Su After Days 
 
 her elder children had died and when her 
 husband, a distinguished army officer, fol- 
 lowed them suddenly, devoted herself ab- 
 sorbingly to her remaining boy, a child of 
 eight or ten, of uncommonly mature char- 
 acter. When he was ill, these two entered 
 into the most solemn pledges with each other 
 that either of them which died first should, 
 if it were possible, speak to the other in some 
 form. ‘The boy died and she listened during 
 her lifetime, but heard nothing. No one can 
 count the number of cases in which the same 
 thing may have been attempted in vain. 
 “Neither philosophy nor science has added 
 in countless ages,” says a brilliant modern 
 writer, “‘a single demonstration of another 
 life, nor faith nor pious supplication brought 
 back one soul to tell us of our heaven.” 
 
 On the other hand, how many noble souls 
 unconsciously predict that heaven before they 
 die? How many experiences we have, as we 
 grow older, even among our own kindred, of 
 lives that may be called heavenly in their 
 very dying. Of a dearly loved cousin of 
 mine, in Virginia, her daughter lately wrote: 
 “On yesterday, at 2.30 P.M., my wonderful 
 
 149 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 mother passed into the beyond. She retained 
 her faculties up to three minutes before 
 death, and the same old seraphic smile, fa- 
 miliar to you, [ know, came over her features 
 and it was all over.” 
 
 Still more striking was the death of a 
 young woman who was engaged to a friend 
 of mine, and who went out of this life with 
 such superb faith in the beyond that the 
 manner of her going is still—after a lapse 
 of many years—an inspiring memory. She - 
 died of consumption, of which dread disease 
 her father, brother, and two sisters had al- 
 ready been the victims. She sat in a great 
 old-fashioned easy-chair, her hand clasped 
 in that of her lover, while her mother and 
 remaining sisters hovered anxiously about, 
 though she herself remained perfectly con- 
 scious and calm. Occasionally her face 
 lighted up with what seemed a radiance 
 from another world, and her eyes shone with 
 a mysterious joy, as if she saw something 
 invisible to the others. From this _half- 
 translated state she would return from time 
 to time to her familiar surroundings, when 
 again the vision would enthrall her; and 
 
 150 
 
Su After Days 
 
 while her face was thus transfigured, the end 
 came. 
 
 The same unconscious testimony lasts 
 after death. Of my own mother, I can say 
 that I never saw her beautiful face so calm 
 and so full of deferred utterance as when | 
 sat alone beside it after death; it was of 
 itself a lesson in immortality—the very lesson 
 implied in that fine saying of Swedenborg 
 that ‘“‘in heaven the angels are advancing 
 continually to the springtime of their youth, 
 so that the oldest angel appears the youngest.” 
 
 I know at least one woman poet who has 
 strengthened my faith and expressed her own 
 by this poem which has already comforted 
 many hearts: 
 
 IN DHE DARIC 
 
 The fields were silent, and the woodland drear; 
 The moon had set, and clouds hid all the stars; 
 And blindly, when a footfall met my ear, 
 I reached across the bars. 
 
 And swift as thought this hand was clasped in thine, 
 Though darkness hung around us and above; 
 Not guided by uncertain fate to mine, 
 
 But by the law of love. 
 151 
 
Jun After Days 
 
 I know not which of us may first go hence 
 And leave the other to be brave alone, 
 Unable to dispel the shadows dense 
 ‘That veil the life unknown; 
 
 But if I linger last, and stretch once more 
 
 A longing hand, when fades this earthly day, 
 Again it will be grasped by thine, before 
 
 My steps can lose the way. 
 
Ms i 
 
 sy 
 
 maj 
 u 
 
 re 
 Ser) 
 
 =F 0 ee 
 a . 
 CF a ‘ 
 
 ee 
 Lead 
 
WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON 
 
Che Future State 
 William Hanna Chomson, A. 2. 
 
Vil 
 Che Future State 
 
 OT unlike one of Fontaine’s fables 1s 
 
 the story of three small ants who, as 
 they gathered on the dry leaf of a tree over- 
 hanging a swiftly flowing river, the leaf 
 loosened and was soon carrying them float- 
 ing on the water. After a brief consultation 
 each of the ants went to inspect one side of 
 the leaf, and the collective report was that no 
 land was to be seen on either side, but only 
 moving water everywhere. Suddenly the leaf 
 turned round and round in a way which the 
 ants could in no wise prevent, for it had 
 fallen into a little whirlpool and alarmed 
 them by getting its hitherto dry surface wet. 
 One of the ants then thought that he could 
 get a wider view than his fellows by ascend- 
 ing the upturned stem of the leaf, and thence 
 see what he could see. He espied a number 
 
 ae 155 
 
Su After Days 
 
 of bubbles on the surface of the water and 
 a large one of bright colors coming in con- 
 tact with the edge of the leaf. Down he 
 sped to take passage on this bubble, only to 
 find that it could not bear the weight of one 
 little ant, but forthwith disappeared and him- 
 self with it. 
 
 Such are we also upon the swiftly passing 
 stream of our life. We scarcely know how 
 we happened to be so placed, nor where the 
 river is to take us; but we do know that the 
 thing which carries us is very frail, and at 
 any time may go under. What by this time 
 we ought to know, also, is that we should 
 not commit ourselves to any bubble of hu- 
 man speculation. Such bubbles float about 
 us in plenty, but after so many of them have 
 been tested, our reason should tell us not to 
 rely on the guesses of our fellows, who at 
 their best cannot see much farther than we 
 can see, but to seek rather to attach ourselves 
 only to historic fact. For whatever has once 
 been historic remains always historic, un- 
 changed by the winds, the currents, and the 
 storms of the centuries. ‘Therefore, the only 
 way to deal with what claims to be historic 
 
 156 
 
Ou After Days 
 
 is not to speculate about it, but to find 
 whether it happened or not. 
 
 Now the Christian religion is nothing un- 
 less it be historical, because, as St. Paul justly 
 says, it is so based on the historical event of 
 the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 that if that Resurrection did not occur, the 
 Christian faith is vain and nothing but the 
 emptiest of delusions. We cannot appre- 
 ciate this truth too deeply, for without the 
 Resurrection, Death is still the Victor, and 
 there can be no Christian religion nor Chris- 
 tian hope. 
 
 But whatever is asserted to be a historical 
 event must be judged by the rules of histor- 
 ical evidence, especially if, as in the case of 
 the Resurrection, a length of time has elapsed 
 since its occurrence. ‘Therefore, that event, 
 above all others, must be supported by the 
 testimony of a number and a variety of wit- 
 nesses. Its effects also on those witnesses 
 should be the same as we would look for on 
 sober persons in our time if a like event hap- 
 pened to them. Then if the event itself was 
 so important that it would vitally affect the 
 history of the world, the subsequent history 
 
 157 
 
Su After Days 
 
 of the world should show it. There is no 
 escaping that conclusion, and we may say 
 here that this is a test which no Christian 
 need fear. For there has been nothing like 
 the belief in the Resurrection for making 
 history, recording both great triumphs and 
 great setbacks for the Church. The un- 
 availing persecutions of the Roman emper- 
 ors, followed as they were by the great dis- 
 aster of the conversion of Constantine, from 
 the evils of which the Church has by no 
 means yet recovered, the mighty struggle of 
 the Crusaders for possession of the Sepul- 
 chre of the Resurrection, and particularly 
 modern Christendom itself, nineteen cen- 
 turies after the Resurrection, bear no resem- 
 blance to speculations or to theories, but are 
 great historic facts, with the Cross and: the 
 Triumph over Death above them all. 
 
 The night before His death, our Lord, 
 while walking to Gethsemane, said to His 
 disciples, ““Apart from Me ye can do noth- 
 ing!’ According to all precedents the separa- 
 tion of death was soon to sunder Him from 
 them as completely as death can part. Soon 
 those disciples themselves all forsook Him 
 
 158 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 and fled. But afterward those same fright- 
 ened men, though seemingly quite apart from 
 Him, calmly faced high priests, governors, 
 and kings, as their Master foretold that 
 they would. They themselves explain what 
 wrought this great change in them—namely, 
 that they had seen their Lord, who had died, 
 alive again. We would be equally changed 
 by such an experience. If a dear friend of 
 ours whom we had seen die, and then buried 
 before our eyes, should appear again to us 
 unmistakably alive, and so converse with us, 
 our whole thought about the next world 
 would be wholly changed. If we were sound 
 and true men this world and everything in 
 it would then sink into insignificance. 
 
 Nor can this story, which was accompanied 
 by such intense personal conviction, be ex- 
 plained away as one of those myths which not 
 infrequently have grown up about a remark- 
 able historical figure. Myths take time to 
 grow, but long before any of the Gospel nar- 
 ratives was composed, St. Paul wrote the 
 chapter xv of I. Corinthians, in which he 
 says that one and another, and then the 
 ‘Twelve, and then above five hundred men, 
 
 #59 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 at once saw the risen Lord, of whom the 
 greater part were still living witnesses when 
 he wrote; and last of all he himself saw and 
 spoke with Jesus, with the result that he 
 was never the same man again, and instead 
 of hating Jesus he lived only for Him until 
 he bowed his head to the axe. 
 
 As a medical man myself, I have long been 
 professionally acquainted with the phenom- 
 ena of illusions and hallucinations. But I 
 have never known them to last with sane 
 persons, and least of all to have such persons 
 risk their lives in asserting them. Illusions 
 and hallucinations change nothing for long. 
 At the most they are but passing gusts of 
 wind and never could deposit the solid strata 
 which history is made of. 
 
 But if we attach ourselves to historic fact, 
 our confidence should increase in proportion 
 as we note to what supreme truths this fact 
 is taking us. And so with the Resurrection 
 as its corner-stone, Personality becomes all 
 in all to Christianity, and thus separates it 
 from all other religions, which connect the 
 future state not so much with personality 
 as with place. Most persons even now try 
 
 160 
 
Sn After Bays 
 
 to picture what sort of place heaven is, and so 
 they have recourse to the imagination, that 
 most earthly of our faculties because it can- 
 not make one of its pictures except out of 
 materials furnished by earthly experience. 
 Hence the essential sameness in all human 
 conceptions of the other world. ‘The old 
 Egyptian depicted an ideal Egypt beyond, 
 with Egyptian good things rewarding the 
 virtuous. [he Greek had his Elysian Fields, 
 and the American Indian his happy hunt- 
 ing-grounds. Mohammed’s paradise, how- 
 ever, gives the fullest details of future bodily 
 delights which would excite the Arab imagina- 
 tion. Having lived during my youth among 
 Mohammedans, I can say that nothing could 
 so destroy everything good in human nature 
 as a desire for the Moslem’s future state. 
 So revolting and purely sensual is it through- 
 out, that we should be thankful that Moses 
 refrained altogether from mentioning the 
 next world to his Hebrews. ‘They are the 
 Shemitic cousins to the Arabs, and if in the 
 formative stage in which they were then, 
 their great lawgiver had given a hint of a 
 future world, inevitably would they have pict- 
 161 
 
In After Days 
 
 ured it to themselves as an eternal abode 
 of animalism. Instead, after the one awe- 
 inspiring lesson of Sinai, that their God is 
 the Holy and Righteous One, a lesson which 
 forever kept them even when most inclined 
 to idolatry, just as it has kept Europeans and 
 Americans since, from ever confounding Je- 
 hovah with the gods of the heathen, Moses 
 then simply enjoined religion as the best 
 thing for this life. 
 
 A great principle appears here, which is 
 that God’s revelations are always conditioned 
 by human receptivity. 
 
 But as the centuries of spiritual education 
 rolled on, devout men had to explain to them- 
 selves why, though Moses’ promise of pres- 
 ent reward to those who lived a righteous life 
 was true as a general principle, it was alto- 
 gether wanting when applied to individuals. 
 In the actual world in which they lived they 
 saw men choosing murder as the chief means 
 for political advancement, and profiting there- 
 by. While such wicked men enjoyed every 
 worldly prosperity, many righteous met with 
 nothing but adversity. It is most instructive 
 to note how often this painful perplexity tried 
 
 162 
 
Su After Days 
 
 the souls of the great psalmists, but also how 
 in every case it finally led them to the con- 
 viction of another world to come. What 
 that world is to be they state in terms as clear 
 and as beautiful as we find in any references 
 to that subject in the New Testament. 
 
 The reader should compare (in the Revised 
 Wersion) Psi sxvisy Psy xviry Ps) xxi) (Ps, 
 XXxvil, 37; Ps. xxi, 23-24. 
 
 In the New Testament, on the other hand, 
 apart from what is related about Christ Him- 
 self in the interval between His Resurrection 
 and His Ascension, there is only one pass- 
 age which gives us any item of information 
 about heaven, and that is in the account of 
 the Transfiguration. From it we learn the 
 precious truth of personal recognition and 
 abiding individuality, because Moses and 
 Elijah were the same persons then that they 
 were when they lived on the earth. 
 
 In the book of Revelation it is impossible 
 for human curiosity to penetrate through its 
 thick veil of metaphor to discern any of the 
 circumstances, as they may be called, of 
 heaven. It begins with a picture of seven 
 golden lamp-stands brightly lighted. They 
 
 163 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 are seven Christian churches in places of 
 thick darkness. It ends with a vision of a 
 great city built entirely of precious stones 
 and with gates of pearl. But this heavenly 
 city turns out to be a great society of per- 
 fected human persons, because it is the 
 Church and also the Bride of the Lamb. 
 
 But in that chapter of I. Corinthians, 
 which, as we have stated, is chronologically 
 one of the earliest parts of the New Testa- 
 ment, and which was written after the date 
 of the Resurrection at a less interval than 
 that which separates us from the first term, 
 as President, of Mr. Cleveland, Paul tells 
 us more about the future state than we find 
 in any other one passage in the Bible. We 
 are to have bodies, but they are to be bodies 
 which shall be free from flesh and blood for- 
 ever. As there is no grown human body 
 which is not composed of flesh and blood, 
 Paul’s resurrection body must be very differ- 
 ent from anything we see here. He, there- 
 fore, soon hears one asking how such a thing 
 could be. Paul answers by an appeal to the 
 greatest mystery in the living world—a seed. 
 But he could not have imagined then how 
 
 104, 
 
 eatin CN il el ca ii” i a ae ad 
 
Su After Days 
 
 immeasurably modern science has strength- 
 ened the force of that appeal. ‘The complet- 
 est of all whales is one of whom 1,500,000 
 such whales could be gathered into the space 
 occupied by a pin’s head. He has then only 
 one cell to his physical being, but that cell 
 is a whale and nothing but a whale, and can- 
 not possibly grow into a fish any more than 
 it can grow into a bird, for whales are mam- 
 mals and hence separated by an impassable 
 biological gulf from all fishes. Long before 
 it has either flesh or blood, that microscopic 
 dot is a whale’s own body sure enough, be- 
 cause from it alone are to grow the billions 
 of cells of the adult whale’s body, each of 
 them fashioned after the specific pattern of 
 the first cell. Moreover, in that first cell is 
 the indelible hereditary impress of the whale’s 
 ancestors back to the first whale. 
 
 Therefore, Paul’s argument, as we at pres- 
 ent can state it, is that already a living body 
 goes through the most marvellous changes 
 without breaking its continuity with the body 
 preceding it. That is because there is in it 
 a living agency which is never the same with 
 the physical materials which it moulds, any 
 
 165 
 
In After Days 
 
 more than an architect is the same with the 
 stones of the building which he erects. Those 
 earthly materials are constantly being changed 
 and cast aside by that invisible architect 
 which uses the materials as a temporary 
 dress, and no more. Therefore, cannot the — 
 Almighty, the Source of Life, clothe this 
 the real body with the new garment of the 
 risen body? He can, for the seed sown in 
 weakness here will develop into the new body 
 endowed with power, imperishable and glori- 
 ous like the body of the Lord Man from 
 Heaven. 
 
 Instead, therefore, of a Greek hades, peo- 
 pled by thin shades and ghosts, our heaven 
 will show the dear features and lineaments of 
 our departed so vividly that then for the 
 first time we will know what life is. Here 
 on earth, owing to the easy exhaustion of our 
 mortal bodies, we lose one-third of our lives 
 in sleep, and many of our waking hours we 
 pass but little better than in a dream. But 
 there it will be fulness of life for evermore. 
 We need not then ask what our surroundings 
 will be, for even on this poor earth a place 
 is a garden or a desert according to those 
 
 166 
 
Su After Days 
 
 who live there. The promised eternal life 
 is not to be mere existence, for what is life 
 here without society with interchange of life 
 with other living, active minds, hearts, and 
 wills? We should, therefore, not ask where 
 we are to be, but with whom we are to be in 
 the world beyond. 
 
 Many Christians are disturbed, if not 
 shaken, at the rejection, by eminent men of 
 the world, of our divine revelation, and par- 
 ticularly by the falling away of so many 
 from the faith of their fathers. But both 
 these events in the future were repeatedly 
 and explicitly foretold by our Lord and by 
 His inspired apostles. They are all due to 
 that deep unceasing antagonism of human 
 nature, whose central motive is self and self- 
 approval, to that new nature which the Holy 
 Spirit alone can give, whose central motive 
 is the all-searching principle of self-sacrifice, 
 and of which Christ Himself is the greatest 
 example. But again let us turn to historical 
 fact. The end of every century since the 
 Resurrection has shown more believers in 
 Christ than at its beginning. Voltaire boast- 
 ed that it took twelve men to found the 
 
 167 
 
Gn After Days 
 
 Christian Church, but it needed only one, 
 himself, to overturn it. That was at the end 
 of the eighteenth century. Now, at the end 
 of the nineteenth century, there are at least 
 five to one, compared with Voltaire’s time, 
 whose faith rests upon the Risen One. 
 
 The store which other religions put upon 
 place in their conceptions of the future state 
 shows how superficial they all are. In them 
 the surroundings of self are more thought of 
 than the self which is the centric fact of all. 
 For human personality not only includes 
 mind, but also feeling, disposition, and will; 
 in other words, it is we as we are indeed. 
 Personality is itself indestructible. What- 
 ever part of the physical body be cut off, 
 whether hand or foot, no part of the per- 
 sonality goes with it. Modern medical science 
 also proves that the brain does not itself 
 think, but is only the instrument of the in- 
 visible thinker, just as the hand is. Person- 
 ality is also our certainty of certainties. 
 Whatever the case may be with what is out- 
 side of us, whether that be reality or only 
 appearance, we inwardly are sure that we exist. 
 
 168 
 
 ieee . — o — a 
 > ee ee ee eee ee ee 
 
Su After Days 
 
 This is all in full accord with the state- 
 ment, repeated five times for emphasis, when 
 man is first spoken of in the Bible, that in 
 man we are to see the image and likeness of 
 God. When Moses asked God what His 
 name is, the answer was, ‘My Name is—I 
 am!" ‘That is also what man can say, I am! 
 and never to better purpose than when he is 
 thinking deeply about himself, about this 
 world, and about the world which is to come, 
 for then he can discern in himself these true 
 likenesses to his Father. 
 
 1. Man knows that he himself is invisible. 
 No one can tell what he thinks or purposes 
 within, unless he chooses to reveal himself, 
 and, like God, he does not often reveal him- 
 self except to those who sympathize with him. 
 
 2. However he may change in his body 
 - during his years, man remains the same per- 
 sonality and never becomes any one else, 
 so that he can truly say that he is the same 
 yesterday as to-day, and, therefore, he will 
 be the same hereafter. 
 
 3. Alone of all beings on earth, man knows 
 what law is, and that it is eternal and omni- 
 present, ruling not only the material but also 
 
 169 
 
Su After Days 
 
 the intelligent universe. Well, therefore, did 
 the old Psalmist exclaim, as he recognized 
 the majesty before him of judges in their 
 seats, “I said ye are Elohim (God) and every 
 one of you sons of the Most High! But if 
 they forget this they would die like men” 
 (Ps. Ixxxii, 6). There is no race of man, 
 from the highest to the lowest, that does not 
 know what the word justice means. 
 
 4. But man also reflects in himself the 
 Infinite. He does not know the word enough 
 by experience, but insatiably asks for more, 
 whether it be possession, power, or attain- 
 ment. He is therefore equipped for a bound- 
 less existence. Could I ever cease wanting 
 to know more? 
 
 5. But man is as true a creator as God 
 Himself is, for a creator is one who gives 
 origin to things which would not otherwise 
 exist but for his intelligent purpose and de- 
 sign. On that account the whole earth is 
 full of things which man and not God has 
 created. And what marvels many of those 
 human creations are, showing what a master 
 man is of both matter and force! How little 
 does this earth now resemble what it was be- 
 
 170 
 
Su After Days 
 
 fore man took it in hand! And all this is 
 done while his stay here is so brief. If only 
 he had time, time never cut short by death, 
 what would he accomplish! 
 
 Such a being is of immeasurable worth. 
 Value is a term which cannot be connected 
 with anything impersonal. What is the value 
 of the great antarctic continent if no one can 
 live there? So a universe of matter is of no 
 more value than empty space if it be of 
 nothing but matter. Some speak of this 
 earth as being such an insignificant speck 
 among the starry worlds, that man must 
 share in his world’s insignificance. But as 
 those worlds are so largely composed of burn- 
 ing hydrogen gas, how much hydrogen gas 
 will it take to become valuable without a 
 sentient being to make use of it? ‘The truth 
 is that it is matter which is insignificant com- 
 pared with one imperishable human mind. 
 
 But there is a perfectability in man, the 
 thought of which deeply stirs the heart. This 
 was shown by men in the darkest days of the 
 Old Testament when, without a clear reve- 
 lation of the Rest beyond, they nevertheless 
 faced a cruel death rather than deny God. 
 
 12 EAP 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 To appreciate poetry we should fully un- 
 derstand the poet’s allusions. The xlii.- 
 il. psalms (one psalm) was composed by a 
 poor Hebrew captive as he was driven past 
 Mt. Hermon in winter on his way to Babylon. 
 Of the thirty-three peoples which Tiglath 
 Pileser says he caused to undergo that terri- 
 ble ordeal of captivity, not one survived it. 
 Little, but abiding, Judah survived the cap- 
 tivity, though this psalmist had witnessed 
 the hideous spectacle of infants’ heads dashed 
 by brutal soldiers against the stones lest they 
 would encumber the march. The psalmist’s 
 earliest journey had been with his parents— 
 and who does not vividly remember such 
 early journeys—to go up to the House of the 
 Lord, and three times a year since he had 
 joined in such pilgrimage to listen to 
 the splendid antiphonies of Ps. cexviii, 
 19-29, from the battlements of the Temple 
 and the answers of the approaching multi- 
 tude keeping holy day. But now he was like 
 the thirsty hart which dreads to approach 
 the water-brooks because it well knows that 
 lions are waiting there for it. No sight in 
 nature ever impressed me (the writer) as a 
 
 172 
 
Su After Days 
 
 storm on the slopes near Mt. Hermon when 
 four waterspouts rose simultaneously from 
 the darkened Mediterranean to the black 
 cloud which stretched for a hundred miles 
 over the sea, as it approached the great 
 mountain range. Incessant lightning, with 
 thunder which echoed through the valleys, 
 caused our horses to tremble under us as 
 the mighty phalanx of clouds drew near. 
 “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy 
 waterspouts; all Thy waves and Thy billows 
 have gone over me.” But worst of all, “as . 
 with a sword in my bones, mine enemies re- 
 proach me, while they continually say unto 
 me, where is thy god?’ According to all 
 then accepted standards Jehovah had failed. 
 He could not protect His own people from 
 the bitterest of calamities, nor even His Tem- 
 ple, for the Ark and the golden vessels were 
 being carried by the heathen to put in tri- 
 umph before the image of their mightier 
 Merodach. But as each fresh recollection 
 brought its anguish, this man could answer 
 with that beautiful refrain, “‘Why art thou 
 cast down, O my soul, and why art thou 
 disquieted within me? Hope thou in God, 
 173 
 
Mu After Bays 
 
 for I shall yet praise Him who is the health 
 of my countenance and my God!’ In com- 
 parison with Christians in these days of 
 light, being disquieted at the ranks of un- 
 believers, what was this man’s faith? Prob- 
 ably no archangel in heaven was ever sub- 
 jected to such a test of loyalty to God as was 
 this mourning: captive. Heart preference 
 being the deepest test of character, we now 
 can understand what justification by faith 
 means, and that it will be the special honor 
 through eternity of the redeemed children 
 of men. 
 
 I am now an old man, and five times have 
 I stood at an open grave to see it close over 
 the remains of my own beloved. The asso- 
 clations connected with such experiences are 
 too sacred for public mention or reference. 
 It is only because I have been asked to write 
 some words for the comfort of other bereaved 
 ones that I do so now. An open grave is a 
 cold and dark place. Vainly have I sought 
 in human science or philosophy for a ray of 
 light to dispel that darkness. There in our 
 desolation and utter helplessness we do not 
 ask for doctrine, not even for the doctrine 
 
 174 
 
Su After Days 
 
 of the Resurrection. We long for the pres- 
 ence of a mighty Friend. And as such He 
 comes with His unmistakable personal voice 
 saying, “J am the Resurrection and the Life. 
 Whosoever believeth in Me shall never die.” 
 That is also in keeping with what Paul said 
 as he approached his last day. I know—not 
 what I believed—but whom I have believed. 
 So when stricken ones turn to leave their 
 scene of burial let them think of that inspired 
 word. ‘For if we believe that Jesus died 
 and rose again, even so those also that are 
 fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with 
 Him.” What will that Reunion be! Our 
 loved ones are given us here for us to learn 
 and know in advance Him whose name is 
 Love. How plainly we are told that we shall 
 do so because we shall be then in His like- 
 ness. When the beloved Apostle wrote, 
 ‘* Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not 
 yet appear what we shall be: but we know 
 that when He shall appear we shall be like 
 Him, for we shall see Him as He is,” he was 
 but echoing the words of the old Psalmist, 
 “*As for me, I shall be satisfied when I awake 
 in Thy likeness.” 
 
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GUGLIELMO FERRERO 
 
Che Lite After This 
 
 Guyliclun Herrero 
 
VIll 
 Che Hife After This 
 
 “Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem 
 Seu ratio dederit, seu fors obiecerit, illa 
 Contentus vivat; laudet diversa sequentes?” ... 
 
 “Why, O Mecenas, is no one content with his 
 lot, whether it be chosen by himself or thrust 
 upon him by fate, but praises those that fol- 
 low other callings? ‘O fortunate merchants!’ 
 cries the soldier, burdened with years and broken 
 with much labor. The merchant in his turn, while 
 his ships are buffeted by the winds, declares the 
 soldiers’ life the better. And why? Hand to 
 hand they fight; in a moment comes swift death 
 or happy victory. The lawyer praises the farmer, 
 when at cockcrow the client knocks at his door. 
 The countryman, come to the city on summons 
 from court, declares only the city-dweller happy.” 
 
 Ss: it was in the days of the greatest splendor 
 of Rome, when the civil wars were ended 
 and the city was on the point of uniting and 
 
 179 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 enjoying, under a sceptre of peace, the vast 
 empire conquered by three centuries of fort- 
 unate wars; so its great poet, Horace, voiced 
 the universal discontent, the restless dissat- 
 isfaction of all. Who does not see that these 
 verses might be with equal truth repeated 
 of our own times, in the refulgence of wealth, 
 of power, of glory, of knowledge, that en- 
 lightens modern civilization? Men have 
 never been so rich, so powerful, so clever, as 
 they now are; nor have they ever been so 
 discontented, so anxious for change, the prey 
 of so intemperate a mania to find new homes, 
 different occupations, fresh experiences of 
 life. To how many of us will befall the 
 lot of being laid to rest for the eternal 
 sleep in the village or the city where our 
 eyes first saw the sun? Almost no man is 
 disposed to carry on the profession of his 
 father; the new generation seems always 
 bent upon beginning over again; every- 
 body changes from one study to another, 
 from one profession to another, impelled 
 by the continuous need of seeking a perfec- 
 tion, a greater happiness, an ideal ever van- 
 ishing, which, ever deluding our hopes and 
 180 
 
 Se ii ee 
 
Su After Days 
 
 expectations, is the supreme torment of our 
 lives. 
 
 This is exactly the same state of things as 
 existed in the time of Horace, and for the 
 same reasons. Riches, power, knowledge, do — 
 not increase our happiness, just as they did 
 not increase it for the contemporaries of the 
 great poet of Venosa; for we also, like the 
 Romans of the period of Augustus, place 
 the end of living too much within ourselves. 
 We lose faith in those ideas and beliefs that 
 propose to man an aim outside himself, be- 
 yond his own personal interests and pleas- 
 ures and the time in which he lives—ideals 
 that sometimes cause him to sacrifice to this 
 high end his own interests, his personal pleas- 
 ures, and even the brief moment of time that 
 is to him the whole patrimony of life. These 
 ideals, these beliefs, are chiefly three: glory, 
 family, and a future life. 
 
 If there be a sentiment that has almost en- 
 tirely disappeared from the mind of the 
 modern man, it is the solicitude for the good 
 opinion of posterity. Among the ancients, 
 on the contrary, at least in cértain epochs 
 in the history of the Greeks and Romans, 
 
 181 
 
Au After Days 
 
 how vivid was this feeling! The admiration 
 of posterity, the perpetuation of one’s own 
 name—in a word, immortality—was then a 
 need among minds elect, an obligation in 
 great families: to satisfy this need, to main- 
 tain this obligation, individuals and families 
 often cheerfully suffered exile, persecution, 
 ruin, and even death. Man lived spiritually 
 
 almost in contact with future generations. | 
 
 Religion, tradition, literature, all fed this 
 ardent hunger for immortality among choice 
 spirits. ‘To-day they do it no more: states- 
 men, writers, philosophers, artists, athletes, 
 all are anxious to know, not what the world 
 will think of them in the twenty-first and 
 twenty-second centuries, but what the news- 
 paper with the largest number of readers will 
 say of them the next day. The present, with 
 its struggles, its passions, its urgencies, and 
 its multiple seductions, quite bars out our 
 vision of what is to come. No civilization 
 has considered the future less than our own 
 has done, and no age has therefore been less 
 able to enjoy the comforts that absorbing 
 interest in a future life can give to man. 
 The longing for immortality as expressed 
 182 
 
 a ~~ 
 
Su After Days 
 
 in the attainment of glory can be comfort 
 and stimulus to but a small minority—the 
 minority made up of men singularly gifted, 
 and of aristocratic families already habitu- 
 ated to the power and wealth secured by 
 preceding generations. The vast majority 
 are necessarily shut out from winning great 
 distinction, because only a few in every gen- 
 eration can reasonably hope to survive for 
 centuries in the memory of posterity. In 
 fact, this passion for glory is found only in 
 intellectual or political aristocracies. 
 
 The cult of ancestors, on the other hand, 
 the religion of family, as known by ancient 
 Greeks and Romans and practised to-day in 
 China, can give the joys of a more restricted 
 immortality to all who, among the events of 
 common existence, succeed in founding and 
 continuing a family for several generations. 
 Then a man knows that, although all the 
 efforts put forth by him to preserve and 
 augment the material fortune and the repu- 
 tation of the family—his own laboriousness, 
 his spirit of self-abnegation, his sufferings— 
 will bring to him in person but transitory 
 recompense upon the earth, the greatest re- 
 
 183 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 ward will come after death; then, for his 
 own children, he will be transformed into a 
 god, and as such will be venerated and in- 
 voked by them; then, without further pain 
 or trouble, he will enjoy the complete devo- 
 tion of his descendants, and without risk or 
 fatigue to himself can return their worship 
 by doing them good as the guardian spirit of 
 their daily affairs. 
 
 Who in the European-American civiliza- 
 tion holds this faith to-day? Not only the 
 transformation of our ideas in regard to the 
 spiritual principle of man makes it difficult 
 for us to conceive the Manes to whom the 
 Romans rendered homage, or the souls of 
 ancestors whom the Chinese so piously ven- 
 erate; but more, the dissolution of the family 
 extinguishes the sentiment from which that 
 cult is born and developed. Children grow 
 up to-day with ideas too different from those 
 of their parents, and detach themselves too 
 soon from the family that has educated them. 
 Europe and America seem destined to be cov- 
 ered by an infinite number of separate hearth- 
 fires, each too small to outlast a generation, 
 and their indifferent builders can neither 
 
 184 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 believe in their own immortality nor find in 
 such an ideal a force and serenity that shall 
 illumine their daily affairs. At the cost of 
 great effort the modern age succeeds in saving 
 that last material relic of the ancient cult of 
 family—the religion of the tomb. But for 
 how long? Will the sons who love their 
 parents be able much longer to bury them 
 among flowers and heap upon their graves 
 the memorial signs of filial affection? I fear 
 that one day or other some hygienist will in- 
 vent a machine or a process utterly and in- 
 stantly to destroy the body, and that the 
 practical spirit of years to come will decide 
 to spare the expense of cemeteries. Who 
 does not know that land in modern cities is 
 extravagantly dear? ‘The lodging of the 
 dead costs too much. 
 
 So much the more ought men to take refuge 
 in the belief in the future life—this immor- 
 tality opened to all, even the poorest and the 
 simplest; not only to him who will never 
 succeed in making his own name famous in 
 some grand empire, but also to him who can 
 never found a family, ‘The belief in the fut- 
 ure life, if it do not altogether die out, in- 
 
 185 
 
Jun After Days 
 
 stead of gaining ground, is becoming to many 
 minds a thing as vague, indefinite, and color- 
 less as it was to the contemporaries of Horace; 
 it can then no more sustain and console men 
 in annoyance and adversity. Perhaps the 
 doctrines in which this belief has taken shape 
 no longer suit the changed conditions of 
 men’s minds, and new teachings able to re- 
 place them have not been yet formulated. 
 Perhaps modern life too much absorbs and 
 fatigues the spirit, insisting that every man, 
 even he of humble circumstances, shall learn 
 and do too many things; so that he has 
 neither the leisure nor the will to test ideals, 
 and, sounding them, to stir his imagination 
 till it transform them into something more 
 precious and important than the guise in 
 which they first appeared. Modern men are 
 proud of their activity; but the too active 
 life spurns the contemplative, atrophies the 
 imagination, habituates the spirit to heeding 
 only concrete things. 
 
 From this extinguishing of the ideal pas- 
 sions, this failing of the imagination, this 
 obliterating of the beliefs that put to life 
 some end beyond the material, is born the 
 
 186 
 
 Se 
 
 1 
 : 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 trouble, the malcontent, and the pessimism 
 of our day, like that which tormented the 
 times of Horace. 
 
 “L’homme est un puits ou le vide toujours 
 Recommence,” 
 
 wrote Victor Hugo. There is nothing to-day 
 
 more unreasonable than the bitter envy with 
 which so many look upon others who seem 
 to possess those supreme gifts of life, wealth 
 and power. Feeling themselves unhappy or 
 discontented, most men attribute their state 
 to a want of material means, or to the lit- 
 tle power at their command. It does not 
 occur to them that two centuries ago men in 
 their relative condition had less wealth and 
 no power, yet complained far less than 
 we; that the matter is plainly and solely 
 envy. 
 
 In fact, we live in a time when riches and 
 power have little weight in producing hap- 
 piness, and, therefore, are of relatively lit- 
 tle value, because men are too anxious 
 for them and forget everything else for 
 them. 
 
 13 187 
 
Su After Days 
 
 “Oui, de leur sort tous les hommes sont las, 
 Pour étre heureux a tous—destin morose! 
 Tout a manqué. Tout, c’est a dire, hélas, . 
 Peu de chose.” 
 
 Again [ quote Victor Hugo. The peu de 
 chose that fails us is precisely a desire, strong 
 and sure, for something unattainable in this 
 life. Man cannot be happy unless he ar- 
 dently longs for and awaits with assurance 
 —which is more difficult than the longing— 
 something he will not be able to obtain while 
 he lives, be it immortal glory, or the loving 
 cult of surviving children, or the paradise 
 splendors of an eternity yonder; unless he 
 projects beyond the span of his own life a 
 vital part of his aspirations and invests them 
 with his living spiritual forces. If all his 
 desires be fully circumscribed by the time in 
 which he lives, what happens toa man? On 
 the one hand, he strains himself desperately 
 to satisfy them, without relaxing for a mo- 
 ment of respite, worrying over his unsuc- 
 cesses and jealous of his more fortunate 
 rivals. Who will be able to compensate him 
 for what he has not possessed and enjoyed 
 188 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 in this life, if beyond it he sees, he wishes, 
 he craves nothing more? Fortune and suc- 
 cess, then, seem the essential condition for 
 happiness, and they are the paramount cause 
 of the envy that gnaws his heart. Only an- 
 other illusion! Probably the most restless 
 and discontented men to-day are those who 
 have won success most easily and found fort- 
 une most benign. Every wish once grati- 
 fied wears upon a man, and brings forth new 
 wants, ever the more importunate. What 
 before possession seemed enviable fortune, 
 proves soon after the winning but the gray 
 uniformity of a wonted condition: upon the 
 height sighed for from afar, man walks as on 
 a wearisome lowland plain. New aspirations 
 are forever springing into being from as- 
 pirations satisfied; and if at a certain junc- 
 ture a man does not manage to direct his 
 mind toward some goal fixed beyond the 
 term of his natural existence; if he does not 
 find his joy in working for a prize unattain- 
 able as long as he lives, he will one day find 
 himself full of riches and of discontent, fort- 
 uned materially, beggared in mind. No 
 man—not even of the rarest intelligence and 
 189 
 
In After Days 
 
 energy—can satisfy desires, constantly self- 
 renewing, in a world where every man is 
 searching for some portion of felicity. And 
 every man, after having secured his part of 
 the good things of this life, is bound to with- 
 draw himself to enjoy them in tranquillity 
 and to leave the field free to those who have 
 not yet acquired their share: if he be not dis- 
 posed to make this renunciation spontane- 
 ously, other men almost invariably find the 
 means to constrain him to it! 
 
 Full of worldly goods, but infelicitous, is 
 the state of many a man whom the masses 
 envy most. He seeks to shake off the plague 
 of satished desires by running about the 
 world, multiplying the diversions and excite- 
 ments of his surroundings, straining his pow- 
 ers in frenzied labor that has no aim if not 
 itself, nor can it further serve, unless to 
 astound us: but in vain! The automobile 
 cannot become a factor in felicity when the 
 organ of felicity is atrophied within us. 
 Machines can write, cut, saw, weigh, run, 
 make accounts, and, in part, think for us; 
 but they cannot solve the insoluble contra- 
 dictions of our sensibility and our sentiment, 
 
 190 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 nor annul the effects of our selfishness. ‘The 
 man who lives only in himself, for himself, 
 with himself, will torment himself to the end. 
 There is but one means adequate to hold in 
 check the insatiable eagerness of sense and 
 passion—that is, to desire intensely, with 
 faith, something outside ourselves, striving 
 energetically to win it. ‘This means is at the 
 disposition of all, the poor as well as the 
 rich, the unlettered as well as the learned— 
 perhaps the poor and the ignorant can make 
 even readier and larger use of it than the 
 rich! 
 
 Herein subsists the true human equality; 
 that which is not written in statute laws, 
 nor is it proclaimed by formal religions, but 
 which exists in the individual human soul, 
 and in the laws that govern the passions and 
 the thoughts of man, eternal and immutable 
 as the physical laws of nature. How often 
 has man protested against that mysterious 
 force that scatters in so arbitrary a fashion, 
 with such apparent injustice, the material 
 and moral good things of life? Why has one 
 man a profound and brilliant genius, while 
 another’s mind is simple and slow? Why 
 
 1g 
 
Gnu After Days 
 
 should some men have money, delight in art, 
 enjoy luxury, command their fellows, while 
 others live sadly, in poverty, in ignorance, 
 subordinate to others? These protests would 
 be legitimate and well founded if wealth and 
 power were the absolute causes of satisfac- 
 tion. They are, instead, often the occasions 
 of unhappiness, of corruption, of ennut, ex- 
 actly because a man rich and powerful, vain- 
 glorious, vitiated by facility in pleasure, al- 
 most invariably makes himself his own god, 
 confounds the brief moment of his stay upon 
 earth with eternity, and forgets how to wish 
 for anything beyond time and self. All his- 
 torians have been surprised at the moral de- 
 generation that sooner or later undoes classes 
 and families, once arrived at power and 
 wealth,—that corruption and weakness which 
 sooner or later supplant the virtues of the 
 forefathers, who acquired the greatness. The 
 main cause of this decadence is always the 
 same: incapacity to will and to. long for 
 something beyond personal pleasure. 
 
 I know that many people regard this tend- 
 ency of the modern mind to separate itself 
 from all beliefs that set before man an un- 
 
 192 
 
Su After Days 
 
 temporal aim, as an effect of the intellectual 
 progress and of the growing ability and cult- 
 ure of our age. All the forms through which 
 men have sought to render comprehensible 
 to the multitude the philosophical concept 
 of the future life—what are they to them 
 but children’s fables, which the matured rea- 
 son throws away, laughing? Why—they ask 
 —in an age when personal energy is the might 
 that moulds the world, must the ardor of the 
 young stand subject to the prudence of the 
 old, in family traditions that are the cult of 
 decrepit nations? It seems to many that 
 democratic progress has done great service 
 to man in eradicating immortality from the 
 heart, a plant at home only in the soil of 
 prejudice and aristocratic injustice. But 
 should not all men feel themselves more 
 readily equals and brothers, since all are 
 bound to disappear together forever, with 
 their own time? 
 
 I would not press this theory to its limits, 
 but merely maintain that it has a content of 
 truth, like all theories on human affairs. 
 Since the world to-day is more inclined to 
 admire its virtues than to recognize its de- 
 
 193 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 fects, I prefer to insist upon one point—ask- 
 ing, how far is this transformation of ideas 
 and sentiments the effect of an overgrown 
 egoism? It is so convenient—or at least at 
 first sight it seems so convenient—to live 
 only in the present, to spend all our efforts 
 upon ourselves, to take into the account of 
 real happiness only what can be seen, touched, 
 numbered, weighed, measured! All civili- 
 zations decay from an excess of egoism, the 
 product of wealth and power: are not these 
 phenomena that we witness a proof that 
 our boasted civilization also begins to suffer 
 from this moral disease? With the growing 
 indifference to the unseen world and_ the 
 problems of the future life, is there not also 
 diffused a dangerous indifference to the in- 
 terests of the species? 
 
 In fact, as always happens, this egoism, 
 once apparently wise, begins to prove itself 
 ingenuous and fallacious. Pretending to in- 
 sure to man more happiness than he can ac- 
 tually enjoy, it loads him with annoyance, 
 with weariness and dissatisfaction. The 
 moral restlessness that belonged in the past 
 to a few élites, overrich, overlearned, and 
 
 194 
 
 > 
 
 rm 
 t 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 therefore self-centred, is now spread through- 
 out two continents, in all classes, notwith- 
 standing the ameliorated material conditions 
 and the advance of culture. This is not 
 strange, at least for him who knows men and 
 history; since neither increased comfort nor 
 wider instruction will further the happiness 
 of man if it teaches him only to wear shinier 
 shoes and better laundered collars, but gives 
 him no mind to look before him beyond his 
 - own allotted lifetime. 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
Ia Chere a Lite After Death? 
 
 Henry James 
 
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 Is There a Lite After Death? 
 
 Part I 
 
 | CONFESS at the outset that I think it 
 the most interesting question in the world, 
 once it takes on all the intensity of which it 
 is capable. It does that, insidiously but in- 
 evitably, as we live longer and longer—does 
 it at least for many persons; I myself, in any 
 case, find it increasingly assert its power to ’ 
 attach and, if I may use the word so unjustly 
 compromised by trivial applications, to amuse. 
 I say “‘assert its power” so to occupy us, be- 
 cause I mean to express only its most gen- 
 eral effect. That effect on our spirit is 
 mostly either one of two forms; the effect of 
 making us desire death, and for reasons, ab- 
 solutely as welcome extinction and termina- 
 tion; or the effect of making us desire it as 
 
 £9 
 
Su After Days 
 
 a renewal of the interest, the appreciation, 
 the passion, the large and consecrated con- 
 sciousness, in a word, of which we have had 
 so splendid a sample in this world. Either 
 one or the other of these opposed states of 
 feeling is bound finally to declare itself, we 
 judge, in persons of a fine sensibility and 
 whose innermost spirit experience has set 
 vibrating at all; for the condition of indif- 
 ference and of knowing neither is the con- 
 dition of living altogether so much below the 
 human privilege as to have little right to pass 
 for unjustly excluded or neglected in this 
 business of the speculative reckoning. 
 
 That an immense number of persons 
 should not recognize the appeal of our specu- 
 lation, or even be aware of the existence of 
 our question, is a fact that might seem to de- 
 mand, in the whole connection, some particu- 
 lar consideration; but our anxiety, our hope, 
 or our fear, hangs before us, after all, only 
 because it more or less torments us, and in 
 order to contribute in any degree to a dis- 
 cussion of the possibility we have to be con- 
 sciously in presence of it. I can only see it, 
 the great interrogation or the great depre- 
 
 200 
 
Su After Days 
 
 cation we are ultimately driven to, as a part 
 of our general concern with life and our gen- 
 eral, and extremely various—because I speak 
 of each man’s general—mode of reaction 
 under it; but to testify for an experience we 
 must have reacted in one way or another. 
 The weight of those who don’t react may be 
 felt, it it true, in one of the scales; for it may 
 very well be asked on their behalf whether 
 they are distinguishable as “‘living” either 
 before or after. Only the special reaction 
 of others, or the play of thecr speculation, 
 however, will, in due consideration, have put 
 it there. How can there be a personal and a 
 differentiated life ‘‘after,” it will then of 
 course be asked, for those for whom there 
 has been so little of one before ?—unless in- 
 deed it be pronounced conceivable that the 
 possibility may vary from man to man, from 
 human case to human case, and that the 
 quantity or the quality of our practice of 
 consciousness may have something to say to 
 it. If I myself am disposed to pronounce - 
 this conceivable—as verily I expect to find 
 myself before we have done—I must glance 
 at a few other relations of the matter first. 
 201 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 My point for the moment is that the more 
 or less visibly diminishing distance which 
 separates us at a certain age from death is, 
 however we are affected toward the sup- 
 position of an existence beyond it, an in- 
 tensifier of the feeling that most works in 
 us, and that in the light of the lamp so held 
 up our aggravated sense of life, as I may 
 perhaps best call it, our impression of what 
 we have been through, is what essentially 
 fosters and determines, on the whole ground, 
 our desire or our aversion. So, at any rate, 
 the situation strikes me, and one can speak 
 of it but for one’s personal self. The sub- 
 ject is portentous and any individual utterance 
 upon it, however ingenious or however grave, 
 but comparatively a feeble pipe or a pathetic 
 quaver; yet I hold that as we can scarce 
 have too many visions, too many statements or 
 pictures of the conceived social Utopia that 
 the sincere fond dreamer, the believer in bet- 
 ter things, may find glimmer before him, so 
 the sincere and struggling son of earth among 
 his fellow-strugglers reports of the positive 
 or negative presumption in the savor of his 
 world, that is not to be of earth, and thus 
 
 202 
 
Su After Days 
 
 drops his testimony, however scant, into the 
 reservoir. It all depends, in other words, 
 the weight or the force or the interest of this 
 testimony does, on what life has predomi- 
 nantly said to us. And there are those—I 
 take them for the constant and vast majority 
 —to whom it in the way of intelligible sugges- 
 tion says nothing. Possibly immortality it- 
 self—or another chance at least, as we may 
 freely call it—will say as little; which is a 
 fair and simple manner of disposing of the 
 idea of a new start in relation to them. 
 Though, indeed, I must add, the contem- 
 plative critic scarce—save under one prob- 
 ability—sees why the universe should be at 
 the expense of a new start for those on whom 
 the old start appears (though but to our pur- 
 blind sight, it may, of course, be replied) so 
 to have been wasted. The probability is, in 
 fact, that what we dimly discern as waste 
 the wisdom of the universe may know as a 
 very different matter. We don’t think of 
 slugs and jellyfish as the waste, but rather 
 as the amusement, the attestation of wealth 
 and variety, of gardens and sea-beaches; so 
 why should we, under stress, in respect to the 
 14 203 
 
Su After Days 
 
 human scene and its discussable sequel, 
 think differently of dull people f 
 
 This is but an instance, or a trifle, how- 
 ever, among the difficulties with which the 
 whole case bristles for those on whom the 
 fact of the lived life has insisted on thrusting 
 it, and which it yet leaves them tormentedly 
 to deal with. The question is of the personal 
 experience, of course, of another existence; 
 of its being I my very self, and you, definitely, 
 and he and she, who resume and go on, and 
 not of unthinkable substitutes or metamor- 
 phoses. The whole interest of the matter 1s 
 that it is my or your sensibility that is in- 
 volved and at stake; the thing figuring to 
 us as momentous just because that sensibility 
 and its tasted fruits, as we owe them to life, 
 are either remunerative enough and sweet 
 enough or too barren and too bitter. Only 
 because posthumous survival in some other 
 conditions involves what we know, what we 
 have enjoyed and suffered, as our particular 
 personal adventure, does it appeal to us or 
 excite our protest; only because of the asso- 
 ciations of consciousness do we trouble and 
 consult ourselves—do we wish the latter pro- 
 
 204 
 
Ju Afier Days 
 
 longed and wonder if it may not be inde- 
 structible, or decide that we have had enough 
 of it and invoke the conclusion that we have 
 so had it once for all. We pass, I think, 
 through many changes of impression, many 
 shifting estimates, as to the force and value 
 of those associations; and there is no single, 
 there is no decisive sense of them in which, 
 throughout our earthly course, it is easy or 
 needful to rest. 
 
 Whatever we may begin with we almost 
 inevitably go on, under the discipline of life, 
 to more or less resigned acceptance of the 
 grim fact that “science” takes no account 
 of the soul, the principle we worry about, and 
 that, as however nobly thinking and feeling 
 creatures, we are abjectly and inveterately 
 shut up in our material organs. We flutter 
 away from that account of ourselves, on sub- 
 lime occasion, only to come back to it with 
 the collapse of our wings, and during much 
 of our life the grim view, as I have called it, 
 the sense of the rigor of our physical basis, 
 is confirmed to us by overwhelming appear- 
 ances. Ihe mere spectacle, all about us, of 
 personal decay, and of the decay, as seems, 
 
 205 
 
Jn After Days 
 of the whole being, adds itself formidably to 
 
 that of so much bloom and assurance and 
 energy—the things we catch in the very fact 
 of their material identity. There are times 
 when all the elements and qualities that con- 
 stitute the afrmation of the personal life here 
 affect us as making against any apprehensible 
 other affirmation of it. And that general 
 observation and evidence abide with us and 
 keep us company; they reinforce the verdict 
 of the dismal laboratories and the confident 
 analysts as to the interconvertibility of our 
 genius, as it comparatively is at the worst, 
 and our brain—the poor palpable, ponder- 
 able, probeable, laboratory-brain that we 
 ourselves see in certain inevitable conditions 
 —become as naught. 
 
 It brings itself home to us thus in all sorts 
 of ways that we are even at our highest flights 
 of personality, our furthest reachings out of 
 the mind, of the very stuff of the abject actual, 
 and that the sublimest idea we can form and 
 the noblest hope and affection we can cherish 
 are but flowers sprouting in that eminently 
 and infinitely diggable soil. It may be as 
 favorable to them—as well as to quite other 
 
 206 | 
 
Su After Days 
 
 moral growths—as we are free to note; but 
 we see its power to put them forth break 
 down and end, and ours to receive them from 
 it to do the same—we watch the relentless 
 ebb of the tide on which the vessel of experi- 
 ence carries us, and which to our earthly 
 eyes never flows again. It is to the personal- 
 ity that the idea of renewed being attaches 
 itself, and we see nothing so much written 
 over the personalities of the world as that 
 they are finite and precarious and insuscep- 
 tible. All the ugliness, the grossness, the 
 stupidity, the cruelty, the vast extent to 
 which the score in question is a record of 
 brutality and vulgarity, the so easy non- 
 existence of consciousness, round about us 
 as to most of the things that make for living 
 desirably at all, or even for living once, let 
 alone on the enlarged chance—these things 
 fairly rub it into us that to have a personality 
 need create no presumption beyond what 
 this remarkably mixed world is by itself 
 amply sufficient to meet. A renewal of being, 
 we ask, for people who understand being, 
 even here, where renewals, of sorts, are pos- 
 sible, that way, and that way, apparently, 
 - 207 
 
ju After Days 
 
 alone ?—leaving us vainly to wonder, in 
 presence of such obvious and offensive matter 
 for decay and putrescence, what there is for 
 renewal to take hold of, or what element may 
 be supposed fine enough to create a claim for 
 disengagement. The mere fact in short that 
 so much of life as we know it dishonors, or 
 at any rate falls below, the greater part of 
 the beauty and the opportunity even of this 
 world, works upon us for persuasion that 
 none other can be eager to receive it. 
 
 With which all the while there co-operates 
 the exhibited limitation of our faculty for 
 persistence, for not giving way, for not doing 
 more than attest the inextinguishable or ex- 
 tinguishable spark in the mere minimum of 
 time. The thinkable, the possible, we are 
 fairly moved to say, in the way of the resist- 
 ances and renewals of our conceded day, 
 bafe us and are already beyond our com- 
 mand; I mean in the sense that the spirit 
 even still in activity never shows as recover- 
 ing, before our present eyes, an inch of the 
 ground the body has once fairly taken from 
 it. The personality, the apparently final 
 eclipse of which by death we are discussing, 
 
 208 
 
Su Afier Days 
 
 fails, we remark, of any partial victory over 
 partial eclipses, and keeps before us, once 
 for all, the same sharp edge of blackness on 
 the compromised disk of light. Even while 
 “we” nominally go on those parts of us that 
 have been overdarkened become as dead; 
 our extinct passions and faculties and inter- 
 ests, that is, refuse to revive; our personality, 
 by which I mean our “soul,” declining in 
 many a case, or in most, by inches, is aware 
 of itself at any given moment as it 1s, how- 
 ever contracted, and not as it was, however 
 magnificent; we may die piecemeal, but by 
 no sign ever demonstrably caught does the 
 “liberated” spirit react from death piece- 
 meal. ‘The answer to that may of course be 
 that such reactions as can be “caught” are 
 not claimed for it even by the fondest lovers 
 of the precarious idea; the most that is 
 claimed is that the reaction takes place some- 
 where—and the farther away from the condi- 
 tions and circumstances of death the more 
 probably. The apparently significant thing 
 is none the less that during slow and succes- 
 sive stages of material extinction some near- 
 ness—of the personal quantity departing to 
 209 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 the personal quantity remaining, and in the 
 name of personal association and _ personal 
 affection, and to the abatement of utter per- 
 sonal eclipse—might be supposable; and 
 that this is what we miss. 
 
 Such, at least, is one of the faces, however 
 small, that life put on to persuade us of the 
 utterly contingent nature of our familiar in- 
 ward ease—ease of being—and that, to our 
 comfort or our disconcertment, this famil- 
 larity is a perfectly restricted thing. And 
 so we go on noting, through our time and 
 amid the abundance of life, everything that 
 makes, to our earthly senses, for the unmis- 
 takable absoluteness of death. Every hour 
 affords us some fresh illustration of it, drawn 
 especially from the condition of others; but 
 one, if we really heed it, recurs and recurs 
 as the most poignant of all. How can we 
 not make much of the terrible fashion in 
 which the universe takes upon itself to em- 
 phasize and multiply the disconnectedness of 
 those who vanish from our sight >—or they 
 perhaps not so much from ours as we from 
 theirs; though indeed if once we lend our- 
 selves to the hypothesis of posthumous reno- 
 
 210 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 vation at all, the fact that our ex-fellow- 
 mortals would appear thus to have taken up 
 some very much better interest than the poor 
 world they have left might pass for a posi- 
 tively favorable argument. On the basis of 
 their enjoying another state of being, we have 
 certainly to assume that this 1s the case, for to 
 the probability of a quite different case the 
 inveteracy of their neglect of the previous 
 one, through all the ages and the spaces, the 
 grimness of their utter refusal, so far as we 
 know it, of a retrospective personal sign, 
 would seem directly to point. (I can only 
 treat here as absolutely not established the 
 value of those personal signs that ostensibly 
 come to us through the trance medium. 
 These often make, I grant, for attention and 
 wonder and interest—but for interest above 
 all in the medium and the trance. Whether 
 or no they may in the given case seem to 
 savor of another state of being on the part 
 of those from whom they profess to come, 
 they savor intensely, to my sense, of the 
 medium and the trance, and, with their 
 remarkable felicities and fitnesses, their im- 
 mense call for explanation, invest that per- 
 211 
 
Su After Days 
 
 sonage, in that state, with an almost ir- 
 resistible attraction.) 
 
 Here it is, at any rate, that we break our- 
 selves against that conception of immortality 
 as personal which 1s the only thing that gives 
 it meaning or relevance. That it shall be 
 personal and yet shall so entirely and relent- 
 lessly have yielded to dissociation, this makes 
 us ask if such terms for it are acceptable to 
 thought. Is to be as dissociated as that con- 
 sistent with personality as we understand our 
 share in the condition ?—since on any con- 
 tingency save by that understanding of it 
 our interest in the subject drops. I prac- 
 tically know what I am talking about when I 
 say, “I,” hypothetically, for my full experi- 
 ence of another term of being, just as I know 
 it when I say “‘I” for my experience of this 
 one; but | shouldn’t in the least do so were 
 I not able to say “‘1”—had I to reckon, that 
 is, with a failure of the signs by which I 
 know myself. In presence of the great ques- 
 tion I cling to these signs more than ever, 
 and to conceive of the actual achievement of 
 immortality by others who may have had like 
 knowledge I have to impute to such others 
 
 212 
 
 re a ee. 
 
Su After Days 
 
 a clinging to similar signs. Yet with that 
 advantage, as it were, for any friendly re- 
 participation, whether for our sake or for 
 their own, in that consciousness in which 
 they bathed themselves on earth, they yet 
 appear to find no grain of relief to bestow on 
 our anxiety, no dimmest spark to flash upon 
 our ignorance. This fact, as after middle 
 life we continue to note it, contributes to the 
 confirmation, within us, of our seeming aware- 
 ness of extinct things as utterly and veritably 
 extinct, with whatever splendid intensity we 
 may have known them to live; an awareness 
 that settles upon us with a formidable weight 
 as time and the world pile up around us all 
 their affirmation of other things, and all im- 
 portunate ones—which little by little acts 
 upon us as so much triumphant negation of 
 the past and the lost; the flicker of some 
 vast sardonic, leering ‘‘Don’t you see?’ on 
 the mask of Nature. 
 
 We tend so to feel that become for us the 
 last word on the matter that all Nature and 
 all life and all society and all so-called knowl- 
 edge, with everything these huge, grim in- 
 differences strive to make, and to some degree 
 
 213 
 
Sn After Days 
 
 succeed in making, of ourselves, take the 
 form and have the effect of a mass of machin- 
 ery for ignoring and denying, the universe 
 through, everything that is not of their own 
 actuality. So it is, therefore, that we keep 
 on and that we reflect; we begin by pitying 
 the remembered dead, even for the very dan- 
 ger of our indifference to them, and we end 
 by pitying ourselves for the final demonstra- 
 tion, as it were, of their indifference to us. 
 “They must be dead, indeed,” we say; “they 
 must be as dead as ‘science’ affirms, for this 
 consecration of it on such a scale, and with 
 these tremendous rites of nullification, to 
 take place.” We think of the particular 
 cases of those who could have been backed, 
 as we call it, not to fail, on occasion, of some- 
 how reaching us. We recall the forces of 
 passion, of reason, of personality, that lived 
 in them, and what such forces had made 
 them, to our sight, capable of; and then we 
 say, conclusively, “Talk of triumphant iden- 
 tity if they, wanting to triumph, haven’t 
 done it!” 
 
 Those in whom we saw consciousness, to 
 all appearance, the consciousness of us, slow- 
 
 214 
 
Su After Days 
 
 ly déménager, piece by piece, so that they 
 more or less consentingly parted with it—of 
 them let us take it, under stress, if we must, 
 that their ground for interest (an us and in 
 other matters) “unmistakably” reached its 
 limit. But what of those lights that went 
 out in a single gust and those life passions 
 that were nipped in their flower and their 
 promise? Are these spirits thinkable as havy- 
 ing emptied the measure the services of sense 
 could offer them? Do we feel capable of a 
 brutal rupture with registered promises, 
 started curiosities, waiting initiations? ‘The 
 mere acquired momentum of intelligence, of 
 perception, of vibration, of experience in a 
 word, would have carried them on, we argue, 
 to something, the something that never takes 
 place for us, if the laboratory-brain were not 
 really all. What it comes to is then that our 
 faith or our hope may to some degree resist 
 the fact, once accomplished, of watched and 
 deplored death, but that they may well break 
 down before the avidity and consistency with 
 which everything insufferably contznues to 
 
 die. 
 
In After Days 
 
 Part II 
 
 I have said “we argue” as we take in im- 
 pressions of the order of those I have glanced 
 at and of which I have pretended to mention 
 only afew. Iam not, however, putting them 
 forward for their direct weight in the scale; 
 I speak of them but as the inevitable obses- 
 sion of those who with the failure of the il- 
 lusions of youth have had to learn more and 
 more to reckon with reality. For if I re- 
 ferred previously to their bearing us increase 
 of company I mean this to be true with the 
 qualification that applies to our whole atti- 
 tude, or that of many of us, on our question 
 —the fact that it is subject to the very shift- 
 ing admonitions of that reality, which, may 
 seem to us at times to mean one thing and at 
 times quite another. Yet rather than at- 
 tempt to speak, to this effect, even for “many 
 of us,” I had best do so simply for myself, 
 since it is only for one’s self that one can 
 positively answer. It is a matter of individual 
 experience, which I have seen multiply, to 
 satiety, the obsessions I have named and then 
 
 216 
 
 7” ——a eS 
 
Su After Days 
 suffer them to be displaced by others—only 
 
 once more to reappear again and once more 
 to give way. I speak as one who has had 
 time to take many notes, to be struck with 
 many differences, and to see, a little typically 
 perhaps, what may eventually happen; and 
 I contribute thus, and thus only, my grain of 
 consideration to the store. 
 
 I began, I may accordingly say, with a 
 distinct sense that our question didn’t ap- 
 peal to me—as it appeals, in general, but 
 scantly to the young—and [| was content for 
 a long time to let it alone, only asking that 
 it should, in turn, as irrelevant and insoluble, 
 let me. This it did, in abundance, for many 
 a day—which is, however, but another way 
 of saying that death remained for me, in a 
 large measure, unexhibited and unaggressive. 
 The exhibition, the aggression of life was 
 quite ready to cover the eround and fill the 
 bill, and to my sense of that balance still in- 
 clined even after the opposite pressure had 
 begun to show in the scale. Resented be- 
 reavement is all at first—and may long go 
 on appearing more than anything else—one 
 of the exhibitions of life; the various forms 
 
 217 
 
Ju Afirer Days 
 
 and necessities of our resentment sufficiently 
 meet then the questions that death brings 
 up. JLhat aspect changes, however, as we 
 seem to see what it is to die—and to have 
 died—in contradistinction to suffering (which 
 means to warmly being) on earth; and as we 
 so see what it is the difficulties involved in 
 the thought of its not being absolute tend to 
 take possession of us and rule us. Treating 
 my own case, again, as a “given” one, I 
 found it long impossible not to succumb—so 
 far as one began to yield at all to irresistible 
 wonder—to discouragement by the mere piti- 
 less dryness of all the appearances. This was 
 for years quite blighting to my sensibility; 
 and the appearances, as I have called them— 
 and as they make, in “‘science”’ particularly, 
 the most assured show—imposed themselves; 
 the universe, or all of it that I could make 
 out, kept proclaiming in a myriad voices that 
 I and my poor form of consciousness were a 
 quantity it could at any moment perfectly do 
 without, even in what I might be pleased to 
 call our very finest principle. If without me 
 then just so without others; all the more 
 that if it was not so dispensing with them the 
 218 
 
Su After Mays 
 
 simply béte situation of one’s forever and for- 
 ever failing of the least whiff of a positive 
 symptom to the contrary would not so in- 
 effably persist. 
 
 During which period, none the less, as I 
 was afterward to find, the question subtly 
 took care of itself for me—waking up as | 
 did gradually, in the event (very slowly in- 
 deed, with no sudden start of perception, no 
 bound of enthusiasm), to its facing me with 
 a “‘mild but firm” refusal to regard itself as 
 settled. That circumstance once noted, I 
 began to inquire—mainly, I confess, of my- 
 self—why it should be thus obstinate, what 
 reason it could at all clearly give me; and 
 this led me in due course to my getting, or at 
 least framing my reply: a reply not perhaps 
 so multitudinous as those voices of the unt- 
 verse that I have spoken of as discouraging, 
 but which none the less, I find, still holds its 
 eround for me. What had happened, in 
 short, was that all the while I had been prac- 
 tically, though however dimly, trying to take 
 the measure of my consciousness—on this 
 appropriate and prescribed basis of its being 
 so finite—I had learned, as | may say, to 
 
 15 219 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 live in it more, and with the consequence of 
 thereby not a little undermining the conclu- 
 sion most unfavorable to it. I had doubtless 
 taken thus to increased living in it by reaction 
 
 against so grossly finite a world—for it at 
 
 least contained the world, and could handle 
 and criticise it, could play with it and deride 
 it; it had that.superiority: which meant, all 
 the while, such successful living that the 
 abode itself grew more and more interesting 
 to me, and with this beautiful sign of its 
 character that the more and the more one 
 asked of it the more and the more it appeared 
 to give. I should perhaps rather say that 
 the more one turned it, as an easy reflector, 
 here and there and everywhere over the 1m- 
 mensity of things, the more it appeared to 
 take; which is but another way of putting, 
 for “‘interest,’’ the same truth. 
 
 I recognize that the questions I have come 
 after this fashion to ask my consciousness are 
 questions embarrassed by the conditions of 
 this world; but it has none the less left me 
 at last with a sense that, beautiful and ador- 
 able thing, it is capable of sorts of action for 
 which I have not as yet even the wit to call 
 
 220 
 
 i ee ee ee re 
 
Su After Dayz 
 
 upon it. Of what I suggestively find in it, 
 at any rate, I shall speak; but I must first 
 explain the felt connection between this en- 
 larged impression of its quality and portée 
 and the improved discussibility of a life here- 
 after. I hope, then, I shall not seem to push 
 the relation of that idea to the ampler enjoy- 
 ment of consciousness beyond what it will 
 bear when I say that the ground is gained by 
 the great extension so obtained for one’s 
 precious inward ‘“‘personality’’—one’s per- 
 sonality not at all in itself of course, or 
 on its claims of general importance, but as 
 conceivably hanging together for survival. 
 It is not that I have found in growing older 
 any one marked or momentous line in the 
 life of the mind or in the play and the free- 
 dom of the imagination to be stepped over; 
 but that a process takes place which I can 
 only describe as the accumulation of the very 
 treasure itself of consciousness. I won’t say 
 that “the world,’ as we commonly refer to 
 it, grows more attaching, but will say that 
 the universe increasingly does, and that this 
 makes us present at the enormous multipli- 
 cation of our possible relations with it; re- 
 221 
 
Ju After Days 
 
 lations still vague, no doubt, as undefined as 
 they are uplifting, as they are inspiring, to 
 think of, and on a scale beyond our actual 
 use or application, yet filling us (through the 
 “law” in question, the law that conscious- 
 ness gives us immensities and imaginabilities 
 wherever we direct it) with the unlimited 
 vision of being. ‘This mere fact that so small 
 a part of one’s visionary and speculative and 
 emotional activity has even a traceably in- 
 direct bearing on one’s doings or purposes or 
 particular desires contribute strangely to the 
 luxury—which is the magnificent waste—of 
 thought, and strongly reminds one that even 
 should one cease to be in love with life it 
 would be difficult, on such terms, not to be 
 in love with living. 
 
 Living, or feeling one’s exquisite curiosity 
 about the universe fed and fed, rewarded and 
 rewarded—though I of course don’t say 
 definitely answered and answered—becomes 
 thus the highest good I can conceive of, a 
 million times better than not living (however 
 that comfort may at bad moments have 
 solicited us); all of which illustrates what I 
 mean by the consecrated “interest” of con- 
 
 222 
 
Gn After Days 
 
 sciousness. It so peoples and animates and 
 extends and transforms itself; it so gives me 
 the chance to take, on behalf of my per- 
 sonality, these inordinate intellectual and ir- 
 responsible liberties with the idea of things. 
 And, once more—speaking for myself only 
 and keeping to the facts of my experience— 
 it is above all as an artist that I appreciate 
 this beautiful and enjoyable independence 
 of thought and more especially this assault 
 of the boundlessly multiplied personal rela- 
 tion (my own), which carries me beyond 
 even any “‘profoundest” observation of this 
 world whatever, and any mortal adventure, 
 and refers me to realizations I am condemned 
 as yet but to dream of. For the artist the 
 sense of our luxurious “‘waste” of postulation 
 and supposition is of the strongest; of him 
 is it superlatively true that he knuws the 
 aggression as of infinite numbers of modes 
 of being. His case, as I see it, is easily such 
 as to make him declare that if he were not 
 constantly, in his commonest processes, car- 
 rying the field of consciousness further and 
 further, making it lose itself in the ineffable, 
 he shouldn’t in the least feel himself an 
 223 
 
Jn After Days 
 
 artist. As more or less of one myself, for 
 instance, I deal with being, I invoke and 
 evoke, | figure and represent, I seize and 
 fix, as many phases and aspects and con- 
 ceptions of it as my infirm hand allows me 
 strength for; and in so doing | find myself— 
 I can’t express it otherwise—in communica- 
 tion with sources; sources to which I owe the 
 apprehension of far more and far other com- 
 _binations than observation and experience, 
 in their ordinary sense, have given me the 
 pattern of. 
 
 The truth is that to live, to this tune, in- 
 tellectually, and in order to do beautiful 
 things, with questions of being as such ques- 
 tions may for the man of imagination abound- 
 ingly come up, is to find one’s view of one’s 
 share in it, and above all of its appeal to be 
 shared, in an infinite variety, enormously en- 
 larged. ‘The very provocation offered to the 
 artist by the universe, the provocation to him 
 to be—poor man who may know so little 
 what he’s in for!—an artist, and thereby 
 supremely serve it; what do I take that for 
 but the intense desire of being to get itself 
 personally shared, to show itself for person- 
 
 224 
 
 ——_ =~ or OO 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 ally sharable, and thus foster the sublimest 
 faith? If the artist’s surrender to invasive 
 floods is accordingly nine-tenths of the 
 matter that makes his consciousness, that 
 makes mine, so persuasively interesting, so 
 I should see people of our character peculiarly 
 victimized if the vulgar arrangement of our 
 fate, as I have called it, imputable to the 
 power that produced us, should prove to be 
 the true one. For I think of myself as en- 
 joying the very maximum reason to desire the 
 renewal of existence—existence the forms of 
 which I have had admirably and endlessly 
 to cultivate—and as therefore embracing it 
 in thought as a possible something that shall 
 be better than what we have known here; 
 only then to ask myself if it be credible that 
 the power just mentioned is simply enjoying 
 the unholy ‘“‘treat” or brutal amusement of 
 encouraging that conviction in us in order to 
 say with elation: ‘“‘ Then you shall have it, 
 the charming confidence (for | shall wantonly 
 let it come to that), only so long as that it 
 shall beautifully mature; after which, as soon 
 as the prospect has vividly and desirably 
 opened out to you, you shall become as naught.” 
 225 
 
Sn After Days 
 
 “Well, you will have had them, the sense 
 and the vision of existence,” the rejoinder 
 on that may be; to which I retort in turn: 
 “Yes, I shall have them exactly for the space 
 of time during which the question of my 
 appetite for what they represent may clear 
 itself up. The complete privation, as a more 
 or less prompt sequel to that clearance, is 
 worthy but of the wit of a sniggering little 
 boy who makes his dog jump at a morsel only 
 to whisk it away; a practical joke of the 
 lowest description, with the execrable taste of 
 which I decline to charge our prime origi- 
 nator.” 
 
 I do not deny of course that the case may 
 be different for those who have had another 
 experience—there are so many different ex- 
 periences of consciousness possible, and with 
 the result of so many different positions on 
 the matter. Those to whom such dreadful 
 things have happened that they haven’t even 
 the refuge of the negative state of mind, but 
 have been driven into the exasperated posi- 
 tive, so that they but long to lay down the 
 burden of being and never again take it up— 
 these unfortunates have an equal chance of 
 
 2.26 
 
Su After Days 
 
 expressing their attitude and of making it as 
 eloquent and as representative as they. will. 
 Their testimony may easily be tremendous 
 and their revelation black. Will they be- 
 long, however, to the class of those the really 
 main condition of whose life is to work and 
 work their inner spirit to a productive or il- 
 lustrative end, and so to feel themselves find 
 in it a general warrant for anything and 
 everything, in the way of particular pro- 
 jections and adventures, that they may 
 dream that spirit susceptible of ? ‘This comes 
 again to asking, doubtless, whether it has 
 been their fate to perceive themselves, in the 
 fulness of time, and for good or for ill, living 
 preponderantly by the imagination and hay- 
 ing to call upon it at every turn to see them 
 through. By which I don’t mean to say 
 that no sincere artist has ever been over- 
 whelmed by life and found his connections 
 with the infinite cut, so that his history may 
 seem to represent for him so much evidence 
 that this so easily awful world is the last 
 word to us, and a horrible one at that: cases 
 confounding me could quite too promptly 
 be adduced. ‘The point is, none the less, that 
 227 
 
Sn After Days 
 
 in proportion as we (of the class I speak of) 
 enjoy the greater number of our most char- 
 acteristic inward reactions, in proportion as 
 we do curiously and lovingly, yearningly and 
 irrepressibly, interrogate and_ liberate, try 
 and test and explore, our general productive 
 and, as we like conveniently to say, creative 
 awareness of things—though the individual, 
 I grant, may pull his job off on occasion and 
 for a while and yet never have done so at all 
 —in that proportion does our function strike 
 us as establishing sublime relations. It is 
 this effect of working it that is exquisite, it 
 is the character of the response it makes, and 
 the merest fraction or dimmest shade of 
 which is ever reported again in what we 
 “have to show’’; it is in a word the artistic 
 consciousness and privilege in itself that thus 
 shines as from immersion in the fountain of 
 being. Into that fountain, to depths im- 
 measurable, our spirit dips—to the effect of 
 feeling itself, gud imagination and aspiration, 
 all scented with universal sources. What is 
 that but an adventure of our personality, and 
 how can we after it hold complete discon- 
 nection likely ? 
 228 
 
Qu After Days 
 
 I do not so hold it, I profess, for my own 
 part, and, above all, I freely concede, do not 
 in the least want to. Consciousness has 
 thus arrived at interesting me too much and 
 on too great a scale—that is all my revelation 
 or my secret; on too great a scale, that 15) 
 for me not to ask myself what she can mean 
 by such- blandishments—to © the altogether 
 normally hampered and benighted random 
 individual that I am. Does she mean noth- 
 ing more than that I shall have found life, 
 by her enrichment, the more amusing here? 
 But I find it, at this well-nigh final pass, 
 mainly amusing in the light of the possibility 
 that the idea of an exclusively present world, 
 with all its appearances wholly dependent 
 on our physical outfit, may represent for us 
 but a chance for experiment in the very inter- 
 est of our better and freer being and to its 
 very honor and reinforcement; but a chance 
 for the practice and initial confidence of our 
 faculties and our passions, of the precious per- 
 sonality at stake—precious to us at least— 
 which shall have been not unlike the sus- 
 taining frame on little wheels that often en- 
 cases growing infants, so that, dangling and 
 
 229 
 
In After Days 
 
 shaking about in it, they may feel their as- 
 surance of walking increase and teach their 
 small toes to know the ground. I like to 
 think that we here, as to soul, dangle from 
 the infinite and shake about in the uni- 
 verse; that this world and this conformation 
 and these senses are our helpful and in- 
 genious frame, amply provided with wheels 
 and replete with the lesson for us of how to 
 plant, spiritually, our feet. That conception 
 of the matter rather comes back, I recognize, 
 to the theory of the spiritual discipline, the 
 purification and preparation on earth for 
 heaven, of the orthodox theology —which is 
 a resemblance I don’t object to, all the more 
 that it is a superficial one, as well as a fact 
 mainly showing, at any rate, how neatly ex- 
 tremes may sometimes meet. 
 
 My mind, however that may be, doesn’t 
 in the least resent its association with all the 
 highly appreciable and perishable matter of 
 which the rest of my personality is composed; 
 nor does it fail to recognize the beautiful 
 assistance—alternating indeed frequently with 
 the extreme inconvenience—received from it; 
 representing, as these latter forms do, much 
 
 230 
 
Su After Days 
 
 ministration to experience. The ministra- 
 tion may have sometimes affected my con- 
 sciousness as clumsy, but has at other times 
 affected it as exquisite, and it accepts and 
 appropriates and consumes everything the 
 universe puts in its way; matter in tons, if 
 necessary, so long as such quantities are, in 
 so mysterious and complicated a sphere, one 
 of its conditions of activity. Above all, it 
 takes kindly to that admirable philosophic 
 view which makes of matter the mere en- 
 casement or sheath, thicker, thinner, coarser, 
 finer, more transparent or more obstructive, 
 of a spirit it has no more concern in producing 
 than the baby-frame has in producing the 
 intelligence of the baby—much as that 1n- 
 telligence may be so promoted. 
 
 I “like” to think, I may be held too art- 
 lessly to repeat, that this, that, and the other 
 appearances are favorable to the idea of the 
 independence, behind everything (cts every- 
 thing), of my individual soul; I “like” to 
 think even at the risk of lumping myself with 
 those shallow minds who are happily and 
 foolishly able to believe what they would 
 prefer. It isn’t really a question of belief— 
 
 231 
 
Qu After Bays 
 
 which is a term I have made no use of in 
 these remarks; it is on the other hand a 
 question of desire, but of desire so confirmed, 
 so thoroughly established and nourished, as 
 to leave belief a comparatively irrelevant 
 affair. There is one light, moreover, under 
 which they come to the same thing—at least 
 in presence of a question as insoluble as the 
 one before us. If one acts from desire quite 
 as one would from belief, it signifies little 
 what name one gives to one’s motive. By 
 which term action I mean action of the 
 mind, mean that I can encourage my con- 
 sciousness to acquire that interest, to live in 
 that elasticity and that affluence, which affect 
 me as symptomatic and auspicious. I can’t 
 do less if I desire, but I shouldn’t be able to 
 do more if I believed. Just so I shouldn’t be 
 able to do more than cultivate belief; and it is 
 exactly to cultivation that I subject my hope- 
 ful sense of the auspicious; with such suc- 
 cess—or at least with such intensity—as to 
 give me the splendid illusion of doing some- 
 thing myself for my prospect, or at all events 
 for my own possibility, of immortality. There 
 again, I recognize extremes “neatly meet”; 
 232 
 
 OE a 
 
 . 0 eee ee ee 
 
Su After Bays 
 
 one doesn’t talk otherwise, doubtless, of one’s 
 working out one’s salvation. But this coin- 
 cidence too I am perfectly free to welcome— 
 putting it, that is, that the theological pro- 
 vision happens to coincide with (or, for all I 
 know, to have been, at bottom, insidiously 
 built on) some such sense of appearances as 
 my own. If I am talking, at all events, of 
 what I “like” to think I may, in short, say 
 all: I like to think it open to me to establish 
 speculative and imaginative connections, to 
 take up conceived presumptions and pledges, 
 that have for me all the air of not being de- 
 cently able to escape redeeming themselves. 
 And when once such a mental relation to the 
 question as that begins to hover and settle, 
 who shall say over what fields of experience, 
 past and current, and what immensities of 
 perception and yearning, it shall not spread 
 the protection of its wings? No, no, no—l 
 reach beyond the laboratory-brain. 
 
 THE END 
 
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