GIFT OF 
 SEELEY W. MUDD 
 
 and 
 
 GEORGE I. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER 
 DR. JOHN R. HAYNES WILLIAM L. HONNOLD 
 JAMES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH F. SARTORI 
 
 to the 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SOUTHERN BRANCH 
 
 JOHN FISKE
 
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 IMMORTALITY AND THE 
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 Copyright, 1897, 
 BY GEORGE A. GORDON. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
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 To 
 
 R. M. G. 
 PSALM cxii. 4.
 
 THE INGERSOLL LECTURESHIP 
 
 Extract from the will of Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, 
 
 who died in Keene, County of Cheshire, New 
 
 Hampshire, Jan. 26, 1893. 
 
 First. In carrying out the wishes of my late 
 beloved father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll, as 
 declared by him in his last will and testament, I 
 
 five and bequeath to Harvard University in Cam- 
 ridge, Mass., where my late father was graduated, 
 and which he always held in love and honor, the 
 sum of Five thousand dollars ($5,000) as a fund for 
 the establishment of a Lectureship on a plan some- 
 what similar to that of the Dudleian lecture, that is 
 one lecture to be delivered each year, on any con- 
 venient day between the last day of May and the 
 first day of December, on this subject, "the Im- 
 mortality of Man," said lecture not to form a part 
 of the usual college course, nor to be delivered by 
 ' any Professor or Tutor as part of his usual routine 
 S of instruction, though any such Professor or Tutor 
 (3> may be appointed to such service. The choice of 
 rH said lecturer is not to be limited to any one religious 
 denomination, nor to any one profession, but may 
 d) be that of either clergyman or layman, the appoint- 
 rM ment to take place at least six months before the 
 a delivery of said lecture. The above sum to be 
 j safely invested and three fourths of the annual in- 
 "* terest thereof to be paid to the lecturer for his 
 services and the remaining fourth to be expended 
 in the publishment and gratuitous distribution of 
 the lecture, a copy of which is always to be fur- 
 nished by the lecturer for such purpose. The same 
 lecture to be named and known as " the Ingersoll 
 lecture on the Immortality of Man."
 
 Every one of my fellow-creatures who leaves this earthly 
 brotherhood, and whom, because he is my brother, my spirit 
 cannot regard as annihilated, draws my thoughts after him 
 beyond the grave ; he is still, and to him there belongs a flace. 
 While we mourn for him here below, as in the dim realms 
 of unconsciousness there might be mourning when a man 
 bursts from them into the light of this world's sun, above 
 there is rejoicing that a man is born into that world, as we 
 citizens of earth receive with joy those who are born unto us. 
 When I shall one day follow, it will be but joy for me ; sorrow 
 shall remain behind in the sphere I shall have left. 
 
 FICHTE.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 HE following essay was written 
 under the appointment by which 
 the author was honored, as first 
 Ingersoll lecturer upon "The Immortality 
 of Man," in Harvard University. The 
 appointment was received as a fresh call to 
 return to a subject that for many years has 
 occupied much of the writer's thought. 
 Since the publication, four years ago, of his 
 book, "The Witness to Immortality," new 
 lines of argument have been suggested ; 
 and what is here offered to the public, in 
 accordance with the terms of the Ingersoll 
 bequest, although standing entirely by itself 
 and resting solely on its own merits, may 
 be considered as supplementary to the ear- 
 lier and larger work. 
 
 It must be understood that the essay is 
 a discussion purely upon rational grounds.
 
 viii Preface 
 
 While it is impossible for the writer to 
 reason as if Christianity had never been, or 
 to ignore its supreme insight reigning in 
 the moral consciousness of our great divi- 
 sion of mankind, or to appear upon this or 
 any other field of inquiry in any character 
 other than that of a teacher of religion, he 
 has still set before himself a philosophical 
 endeavor, and has therefore considered it 
 inadmissible to introduce into the argu- 
 ment the ultimate basis of Christian belief 
 in the future life, the resurrection of Christ. 
 The special feature of the essay is indi- 
 cated by the term theodicy. The shadow 
 that lies upon the universe cannot hide its 
 abiding moral order as revealed in human 
 history. The attempt is therefore made, 
 after the ground is cleared of the obstruc- 
 tion presented by a materialistic psycho- 
 logy, to carry the question of the immor- 
 tality of man to the moral conception of 
 the universe for determination. It is be- 
 lieved that upon the validity and integrity 
 of the moral idea of the universe the entire
 
 Preface ix 
 
 question turns. To exhibit that idea in its 
 purity and absoluteness, in its freedom 
 from the great historic limitations that have 
 been fixed upon it and in its fruitfulness 
 for faith, has been considered essential to 
 the undertaking. The full strength of the 
 logic of a universe conceived as absolutely 
 righteous was deemed a necessity of the 
 case. This accounts for the polemic in 
 certain sections. It is a sincere sorrow 
 to be obliged to differ upon some points 
 from able and honored men with whom, in 
 general, the writer is in profound agree- 
 ment ; but when the appeal is to the full 
 and honest mind of the individual, above 
 all when the truth is believed to be at stake 
 and the life of humanity involved, the sor- 
 row must be borne. In justification of his 
 protest against Homer's orthodoxy, Plato 
 
 thought it sufficient to Say dAA' ov yap irpo ye 
 TT}S dA?70tas Tiftr^reos avr)p. And when it Came 
 
 Plato's turn, the polemic was again vindi- 
 cated almost in his own words a^oiv yap 
 OVTOW <j*i\oiv ocriov Trpori/xav TT)V dAi^etav. It is
 
 x Preface 
 
 the purpose recognized by this canon that 
 absolves a writer from the charge of a want 
 of reverence for the past when he is com- 
 pelled to contend against it, and that sup- 
 ports the rights of adverse criticism upon 
 his own work. When it is the sword of 
 the spirit by which a man seeks to live, he 
 could ask no happier fate than to die by it.
 
 CONTENTS . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. CONDITIONS OF THE DISCUSSION .... i 
 
 II. SIGNS OF HOPE . 9 
 
 III. THE DEEPER ISSUES OF THE DEBATE . . 16 
 
 IV. THE EVIDENCE FOR THE DENIAL ... 26 
 V. VALUE OF THE EVIDENCE FOR DENIAL . 32 
 
 VI. POSTULATES OF IMMORTALITY ... -45 
 
 VII. ILLOGICAL LIMITATIONS ....... 63 
 
 VIII. THE NEW HUMANITY 81 
 
 IX. THE NEW THEATRE FOR THE ABSOLUTE 
 
 MORAL PURPOSE 90 
 
 X. DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 96 
 
 XI. THE VERDICT OF THE INFINITE .... 105
 
 IMMORTALITY AND THE 
 NEW THEODICY 
 
 Conditions of the Discussion 
 
 HE first note in Plato's discussion 
 of immortality in the " Phaedo " 
 is the interest expressed in the 
 personal bearing of Socrates face to face 
 with death. The question is put at the 
 start, "And how did he die?" The 
 answer to this quesjtion constitutes the 
 lengthened charm of the opening and 
 the pathos and majesty of the closing 
 chapters of the immortal dialogue. Read- 
 ers of great literature, no less than those 
 who bring their humanity with them to 
 the consideration of the ultimate mean- 
 ing of existence, will be slow to surrender 
 these memorials of one of the strongest
 
 2 Conditions of the Discussion 
 
 and best of men, or to conclude that they 
 are in the way of the argument. In 
 Plato's hands the personal interest is pres- 
 ent as motive to the philosophical en- 
 deavor ; it is there as background, and as 
 atmosphere to the strenuous picture. He 
 employs it as introduction, recalls it from 
 time to time in the course of the argu- 
 ment, and returns to it at the end, always 
 in the service of the strictly rational con- 
 sideration of his problem. In the strength 
 of passionate desire to learn of the bearing 
 of a great man confronted by death, the 
 profound thinker moves out upon his in- 
 comparable discussion. And all those who 
 hope to win even the slightest attention 
 to their words upon this subject must here 
 follow his example. They must bring their 
 humanity into the field ; as men they must 
 come to the grand debate. The sense of 
 death as a sore and solemn trial is almost 
 universal, and those who, like Cromwell 
 and Agricola, Paul and Socrates, lift it to 
 the levels of moral grandeur, inspire a rev-
 
 Conditions of the Discussion 3 
 
 erential satisfaction that cannot be meas- 
 ured. In their various ways they flood 
 death with their humanity ; they keep the 
 problem which it raises a human problem, 
 and thus create heart and hope for the in- 
 tellectual wrestle with it. The multitudes 
 continue to linger about the cross because 
 of the sublimity of the personal bearing of 
 Christ in death, and because they believe 
 that he is humanity's best representative. 
 It is through this deep and abiding inter- 
 est in the fortune of men that the advance 
 is made to the present argument. This 
 passion of humanity, in which peasant and 
 philosopher alike share, may be relied upon 
 now, as when Socrates drank the hemlock, 
 to sharpen the intellect for its task, to fill 
 it with the incorruptible love of truth, and 
 to hold it with patient wisdom to its best 
 endeavor. 
 
 In any profitable consideration of the 
 immortality of man, it is essential that the 
 limits be determined within which the dis- 
 cussion must move. What to expect upon
 
 4 Conditions of the Discussion 
 
 a subject like this is half the battle. One 
 must surrender at the start all hope of 
 demonstration. But, then, absolute proof 
 or demonstration is possible of a very 
 small part of what is universally received 
 as knowledge. It is clearly impossible to 
 demonstrate the facts of history. At best 
 they must be accepted on the testimony of 
 witnesses ; and even when the testimony 
 is sifted by experts, the belief to which it 
 leads is not grounded upon complete proof, 
 but upon the capacity and integrity of the 
 men from whom it came. The monu- 
 mental record of Thucydides is universally 
 accepted as true, not because his facts 
 have been independently verified, but be- 
 cause of the confidence reposed in the his- 
 torian. Nobody who appreciates the value 
 of words pretends that the doctrine of 
 evolution, which has become the work- 
 ing hypothesis of the intellectual world, is 
 demonstrated. That would involve an ex- 
 haustive knowledge of the cosmos and its 
 total history. Until man becomes omnis-
 
 Conditions of the Discussion 5 
 
 cient, the conception of development as 
 giving the sole method by which the Crea- 
 tor works in space and time must remain 
 incapable of complete attestation. No clear 
 thinker will claim that the uniformity of 
 nature is an idea established by induction. 
 The induction would have to be as wide 
 as cosmic history, it would have to be made 
 by men as old as history, and to contempo- 
 raries of the same universal reach of life, 
 in order for the doctrine of the uniformity 
 of nature to stand, even as regards the 
 past, upon the ground of demonstration. 
 Suns rise and set, moons wax and wane, 
 tides ebb and flow, seasons come and pass 
 away, day and night follow each other in 
 unbroken and impressive succession ; and 
 from the limited observation which we and 
 our contemporaries are able to make, we 
 conclude that this has been the invariable 
 order from the beginning, and that it will 
 continue to be the invariable order to the 
 end. But the conclusion is a tremendous 
 assumption, and if we can hold no beliefs
 
 6 Conditions of the Discussion 
 
 that are incapable of complete logical justi- 
 fication, we must surrender this and hun- 
 dreds like it that are part of the substance 
 of our solidest thinking. The remark of 
 one traveler to another, on taking a last 
 look at Mont Blanc before leaving Cha- 
 mounix, " It appears as if it would stay 
 there until we come back," exactly ex- 
 presses the feeling toward the essential 
 and indemonstrable assumptions of sci- 
 ence. Upon the largest and best thought 
 they inspire confidence in their validity, 
 and nothing more can be said for them, or 
 need be. 
 
 The belief in immortality is not, there- 
 fore, excluded from a legitimate place in 
 human thought because it does not admit 
 of demonstration. It is a future event, 
 and as such cannot be proved. Even if 
 the reports of the spiritist are accepted 
 as authentic, still the fact that some men 
 have survived death does not prove that 
 all men must. A flock of sheep come to 
 a river. A number of them swim safely
 
 Conditions of tbe Discussion 7 
 
 across, and bleat to their brethren behind, 
 telling them as plainly as can be that 
 they still live ; nevertheless the sheep who 
 have not yet tried the river seem a good 
 deal excited. The question with them is 
 not whether others have survived the 
 wash and beat of the stream, but whether 
 they shall survive. That is not proved, 
 and in the nature of the case cannot be. 
 An intelligent member of the flock, hav- 
 ing known the weakness of many of its 
 brethren who report that they have safely 
 crossed the flood, and wisely judging its 
 own superior strength, might feel comfort- 
 ably sure of survival. Spiritism, even if 
 accepted as authentic, cannot yield demon- 
 stration. It still leaves those who have 
 not tasted death in the sphere of moral 
 faith. It may be admitted that if certain 
 of its survivals were attested, it would 
 practically remove all ground of fear for 
 even the weakest among the living. The 
 point to be observed, however, is that 
 human immortality is incapable of demon-
 
 8 Conditions of the Discussion 
 
 stration, that absolute logical justification 
 upon such a subject is impossible and 
 even inconceivable. The discussion must 
 therefore move in another sphere. Men 
 must moderate their intellectual expecta- 
 tions, and be prepared to act here, as 
 they do elsewhere, upon differing degrees 
 of moral consideration. If the Eternal 
 should speak, as millions of our fellow- 
 men believe that he has spoken, upon this 
 question, the acceptance of his word would 
 not be repose in a demonstration, but 
 confidence in the Divine speaker. Even 
 on the part of those who accept it, the 
 profoundest appeal of the resurrection 
 of Jesus Christ is to moral confidence : 
 " Because I live, ye shall live also." l 
 
 1 John xiv. 19.
 
 II 
 
 Signs of Hope 
 
 [HE prevailing mood upon this 
 question of a future life among 
 wise men is full of serious in- 
 terest and hope. Generally it is one of 
 prophetic silence. The oracles are dumb 
 because they are under Bacon's command 
 to weigh and consider. The old argu- 
 ments, the venerable certainties, the tra- 
 ditional repose, are broken up, and again 
 those who walk by faith are face to face 
 with the ultimate order of the universe. 
 It is always a good sign when men are " in 
 mute dialogue with death, judgment, and 
 eternity." Those who to-day are profound 
 believers have come out of great tribula- 
 tion ; they have won their faith through 
 victorious insight ; they feel that they 
 have seen God face to face, and that in
 
 io Signs of Hope 
 
 consequence their life is preserved. Those 
 who doubt nobly, for the most part, doubt 
 in hope. Thus the wise and governing 
 mind, the mind that shapes the spiritual 
 habit of the generation whose servant it is, 
 is once more in movement upon this ques- 
 tion of life after death. It is, as has been 
 said, a prophetic hour. The oracles are 
 dumb, not because they have nothing to 
 say, but because they are preparing for a 
 new apocalypse. The sense of difficulty is 
 compelling silence ; and golden silence is 
 preceding golden speech. The oracles are 
 dumb, not because the priest is dead, but 
 because he is waiting for the new wisdom 
 to gather in his heart, and form itself into 
 a fresh and mightier message to the wor- 
 shiper. 
 
 There is doubtless among us the mood 
 of Swift, the mood of misery, contempt, 
 and scorn. There are those who sympa- 
 thize with him when they see him paint- 
 ing his awful picture of the Struldbrugs, 
 making the flesh creep over the horror of
 
 Signs of Hope 1 1 
 
 perpetual existence, inciting the heart to 
 pray for the boon of self-forgetfulness, 
 changing hope to fear, and lifting the 
 light from the human ideal of endless life 
 which it has hitherto glorified to the grim 
 rest of absolute unconsciousness. But 
 never as now was scorn so widely discred- 
 ited as the key to the mystery of our 
 being. Omar Khayyam still has his disci- 
 ples. His light-hearted mockery, ghastly 
 humor, and gay assurance of the empti- 
 ness of existence are to certain moral 
 types contagious. 
 
 " Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and saint, and heard great argument, 
 About it and about ; but evermore 
 Came out by the same door wherein I went. 
 
 " With them the seed of wisdom I did sow 
 
 And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow, 
 And this was all the harvest that I reap'd, 
 I came like water and like wind I go. 
 
 " The revelations of devout and learned 
 Who rose before us, and as prophets burn'd,
 
 12 Signs of Hope 
 
 Are all but stories, which, awoke from sleep, 
 They told their comrades, and to sleep returned." 
 
 Still mirth, mockery, and dogmatism are 
 not the method of the scientific spirit. 
 Nor was there ever a time when they could 
 be described with less truth as the ac- 
 cepted path to salvation. 
 
 The settled despair, the consistent and 
 perfected pessimism of "The City of Dread- 
 ful Night," is too tremendous for the mob 
 of unbelievers ; and while many an heir of 
 faith has to pass through this desert to his 
 spiritual patrimony, it is the final abode of 
 but few. The number is small of those 
 who are permanently paralyzed with 
 
 "The sense that every struggle brings defeat 
 
 Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ; 
 That all the oracles are dumb or cheat, 
 
 Because they have no secret to express ; 
 That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain 
 Because there is no light behind the curtain ; 
 That all is vanity and nothingness." 
 
 Beyond all these is the Miltonic mood as 
 given in the great Ode on the Nativity. 
 The faith that has been is discredited, for
 
 Signs of Hope 1 3 
 
 the reason that it stands in the presence 
 of the faith that is to be. 
 
 " Apollo from his shrine 
 Can no more divine " 
 
 because of the advent of a sublimer revela- 
 tion. Old things are passed away in the 
 sense that all things have become new. 
 Many are the believers who to-day feel 
 themselves compelled to raise the deepest 
 questions, forced back until they stand 
 face to face with the ultimate realities, 
 driven to a new and tremendous wrestle 
 with destiny, from whom the old certain- 
 ties have been taken away, that once more 
 they may think, and out of victorious 
 thought discover the solider ground for 
 the ineradicable faith. The discipline of 
 doubt is indispensable to the growing in- 
 sight of mankind ; and whenever, as to-day, 
 and particularly upon the question of the 
 future life, the sense of difficulty induces 
 silence and profounder meditation, a pro- 
 phetic hour has arrived. The deeper in-
 
 14 Signs of Hope 
 
 sight will gradually perfect itself, and once 
 again break upon the world in song, 
 
 " Such music as 't is said 
 Before was never made, 
 
 But when of old the sons of morning sung, 
 While the Creator great 
 His constellations set, 
 
 And the well-balanced world on hinges hung, 
 And cast the dark foundations deep, 
 And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep." 
 
 The moods of pessimism come and go ; 
 they are like the fresh outbreaks of a 
 plague. While humanity is never secure 
 against them, they do not abide, and it 
 may be hoped that, with better intellectual 
 sanitation and robuster character, they will 
 finally disappear. At any rate, they are 
 abnormal and cannot endure. The histo- 
 rian of thought knows that they are tran- 
 sient even when they persist through an 
 entire generation. And we must return 
 to the ultimate fact that the permanent in 
 thought, the everlasting in belief, is the 
 fabrication of the spirits in whom normal 
 humanity is sovereign. Imagine an insect
 
 Signs of Hope 15 
 
 of an hour's life born under the blackness 
 of a thunder-cloud. What must needs be 
 its philosophy of the universe ! The uni- 
 verse is going to wreck ; in this state of 
 affairs it was born with multitudinous com- 
 panions, and it dies with all things march- 
 ing on to the apparently fatal catastrophe. 
 Men know that it is otherwise in this im- 
 aginary instance, and yet they expand 
 insignificant moods until they blot the sun 
 out of heaven ; they elaborate abnormal 
 and passing phases of thought until they 
 seem to darken the universe ; they see 
 the thunder-cloud and believe it to be the 
 sign of doom.
 
 Ill 
 
 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 
 
 HE new prophetic mood to which 
 reference has been made has al- 
 ready begun to utter itself in the 
 clearer appreciation of the deeper issues 
 of the grand debate. The problem is, of 
 course, the permanence of the human per- 
 sonality, the continuance of the soul after 
 death, in the possession of memory, reason, 
 and self-conscious life. But this problem 
 states itself as never before. It is no 
 longer, as with the ancient world, a ques- 
 tion of more or less of sensuous existence ; 
 nor, as with times that in comparison may 
 be termed recent, a matter relating mainly 
 to the gratification or disappointment of 
 human desire. It is a duel between two 
 contrasted philosophies of man's existence, 
 between universal reason and its opposite,
 
 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 17 
 
 between a noble optimism and an absolute 
 pessimism. Are man's rational world and 
 God's at heart coincident and concordant ? 
 Is the sphere in which human beings live, 
 and which they seek to bring under the 
 forms of reasonable thought and lofty 
 morality, a harmonious part of the uni- 
 verse ? Are the realms of the human and 
 the Infinite capable of reconciliation, or 
 are they in hopeless hostility ? These are 
 the issues involved. The question of the 
 immortality of man is nothing less than 
 the question of the reality of man's world, 
 its integrity and worth for the universe. 
 And this means simply the ultimate rea- 
 sonableness or unreasonableness, the intel- 
 ligence or brutality, of the Power that is 
 responsible for our existence. The debate 
 thus involves, at the outset, the life of rea- 
 son, the reality of thought, the existence of 
 an intelligible universe. This planet is 
 surrounded by the stellar spaces, and the 
 denial of immortality may be figured by 
 the thought that the sky constitutes a fixed
 
 1 8 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 
 barrier, a wall inside of which men live and 
 think, but beyond which exists nothing for 
 them. In that outside realm there are no 
 correspondences to this in which they live ; 
 reason and right with them are not reason 
 and right with it. Between the circle 
 within the wall and that beyond it, there 
 is no continuity, no sympathy, no relation 
 except one of dead antagonism. The rights 
 of thought, the significance of conscience, 
 the meaning of our human world, reach 
 only to the walls, and over that barrier the 
 infinite enemy of man is looking, and pre- 
 paring an invasion that shall at last be an 
 utter desolation. On the other hand, the 
 assertion of the reality of a future life may 
 be represented by the fact that the sky 
 lifts itself as one rises into it, recedes be- 
 fore one into ever ampler spaces, as contin- 
 uous with the places which one fills, as 
 concordant with the earth upon which one 
 lives. As space here and there is one, one 
 in its nature and in its laws, so thought is 
 thought', and right is right in time and in
 
 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 19 
 eternity, with man and with God. And 
 the fact that one part of the intelligible 
 universe is under the government of reason 
 and righteousness supports the faith that 
 the whole compass of being is pervaded 
 by a Mind that is creative and supreme. 
 Thus the fundamental issues declare them- 
 selves. 
 
 It is further clear that the denial of im- 
 mortality, equally with the affirmation of it, 
 implies a faith. Unbelief is belief in dis- 
 guise. Negative thought is implicitly pos- 
 itive thought ; for whoever denies that a 
 given thing is true thereby affirms that its 
 opposite is true. Denial is but the left 
 hand of unbelief ; its right hand constructs 
 and sustains a positive creed. Unbelief 
 has its interpretation, its philosophy of 
 human existence. It is assumed that the 
 material organization, the body, in fact, is 
 the main thing, its preservation and repro- 
 duction the chief end of life. Intelligence 
 is not supreme but secondary, something 
 called into existence incidentally, to help
 
 2O The Deeper Issues of the Debate 
 
 forward, at a given stage, the great move- 
 ment of unconscious life. This merely 
 subsidiary intelligence is allowed to amuse 
 itself with the idealisms of science, art, 
 morality, politics, philosophy, and religion, 
 inspired by the pleasures that support phy- 
 sical life and the pains that destroy it. The 
 conception of man here indicated is of a 
 being wholly terrestrial, whose thought has 
 value only for his kind, whose morality has 
 no consequence beyond his own weal or 
 woe and that of his fellows, whose art is 
 finite and whgse religion is but a subjective 
 dream. As it is impossible for man to get 
 outside the attractive forces of the earth, 
 to lift or project anything beyond terres- 
 trial limits, as every missile fired, every 
 aerial machine floated, however high it 
 may go, is forever within the lines that 
 sooner or later compel return, so it is held 
 that human thought, character, and conse- 
 quence are under similar fixed restrictions. 
 The home of our bodies is the home of our 
 souls. In origin, fortune, and destiny they
 
 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 21 
 
 are identical. All efforts at the transcend- 
 ence of material conditions are as foolish 
 as the dream of the boy that he may some 
 day fly his kite to the moon. 
 
 The ground of this faith of the unbe- 
 liever will come up for consideration pres- 
 ently. Here and now it is to be noted 
 that his unbelief is a faith of the most stu- 
 pendous kind. In our time a great body 
 of literature has accumulated that prac- 
 tically ignores the possible transcendence 
 of the human spirit. 1 Man is treated by 
 these writers as beginning and ending his 
 existence on the earth, and as sustaining 
 no relations that go beyond the seen and 
 the temporal. The literature in question 
 passes under the general name of agnosti- 
 cism, but it is aggressively dogmatic to a 
 degree. If reference happens to be made 
 to immortality it is to a belief that has 
 
 1 For an admirable summary of this literature see 
 the first chapter of Dr. Van Dyke's The Gospel for an 
 Age of Doubt, a book of high value both for believers 
 and unbelievers.
 
 22 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 
 
 become completely incredible ; as in 
 George Eliot's wild remark about the in- 
 conceivability of God, the impossibility 
 of a future life, and the absoluteness of 
 duty. The tacit assumption that the case 
 is hopeless for spiritual faith, and that the 
 limitation of human existence to this 
 world is as plain as day, are chief corner- 
 stones in the creed of the so-called agnos- 
 tic. Under the pretense of intellectual 
 humility a scheme is constructed that 
 denies to human life universal signifi- 
 cance, that treats all faith in a transcend- 
 ent world as an illusion. The formula, 
 " We do not know, and therefore we can- 
 not believe," is but a beggar's blanket, and 
 cannot be made to cover the case. The 
 logical strategy set up in the term "agnos- 
 ticism" is too weak to stand against the 
 aggressive frankness of its apostle. His 
 true name is not agnostic ; for he has 
 constructed a definite philosophy of life, 
 and his negation of the Infinite, whether 
 in the form of indifference or reasoned
 
 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 2) 
 opinion, is part of his total conception of 
 the universe. Huxley is a type of the 
 class to which reference is made, and of 
 him it must be said that he is as sure of 
 cosmic hostility to man as any Hebrew 
 prophet ever was that the stars in their 
 courses fought for Israel ; he is as posi- 
 tive and, one might add, as enthusiastic in 
 his faith that all things work together for 
 evil to those who love, as Plato and Paul 
 were that all things work together for 
 good ; and it is clearly possible that unbe- 
 lief no less than belief, negative thought 
 as well as positive, may be a mistake. 
 Believers have been of late so frequently 
 reminded of the errancy of their Bibles, 
 the fallibility of their traditions, and the 
 weakness of their powers, by their breth- 
 ren of the negative camp, that it may not 
 be out of place to return the compliment. 
 In view of the aggressive confidence with 
 which these apostles of the materialistic 
 creed preach their faith, it may not be 
 amiss to remind them of Cromwell's ad-
 
 24 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 
 
 vice to the Scotch, " I beseech you, in the 
 tender mercies of the Lord, believe it pos- 
 sible that you may be mistaken." Every 
 thinker takes his life in his hand, the 
 denier no less than the affirmer. Unbe- 
 lief is apt to pose as matter of fact against 
 theory, as science against faith ; but the 
 truth is that the universe by which men 
 are confronted is a reality in itself, and 
 all thoughts about it, whether affirmative 
 or negative, whether described as belief or 
 unbelief, are essentially of the nature of 
 faith. Men stand equally to their con- 
 trasted interpretations of what passes be- 
 fore them ; neither believer nor unbeliever 
 can pretend to a complete induction of the 
 facts, nor to an infallible inference from 
 those on hand. It must be understood, 
 therefore, that the great poem of Lucre- 
 tius is as truly the creation of faith as 
 Dante's Divine Comedy. Both poets look 
 upon the same universe ; they are specta- 
 tors of the same pageant, and from what 
 they see they form their contrasted judg-
 
 The Deeper Issues of the Debate 25 
 ments of what is. They quarry their hos- 
 tile faiths from the same rock, and, stand- 
 ing by them, await the judgment of the 
 Eternal.
 
 IV 
 
 The Evidence for the Denial 
 
 T is now in order to state the 
 main evidence upon which un- 
 belief rests its conclusion that 
 
 i 
 
 there is no future life for man. This re- 
 calls the problem, the survival at death of 
 the essential human personality, the con- 
 tinued conscious life of the soul after the 
 dissolution of the body. To this position 
 of faith it is objected that the fortune of 
 both soul and body seems identical. The 
 child new to earth and sky is as incapable 
 mentally as it is physically. The growth 
 of the physical organization is accompa- 
 nied, in all normal cases, with a corre- 
 sponding mental development. This pro- 
 cess of increase is coincident to maturity, 
 and in decline the coincidence is equally 
 plain. Plato at seventy cannot think and
 
 The Evidence for the Denial 27 
 
 write as he did at fifty ; the mind that pro- 
 duced the Laws is no longer the genius 
 that created the Republic. Bryant ceased 
 to write poetry in his old age, and took to 
 the translation of Homer, on the ground, 
 as he says, that old age incapacitates for 
 creative activity. There comes a day 
 when a Gladstone must confess that he is 
 no longer equal to the burden of political 
 leadership, when a Martineau must decline 
 to enter upon new tasks. John Henry 
 Newman has recorded his opinion that 
 after seventy severe intellectual exertion 
 means death. And indeed this participa- 
 tion of both body and mind in a common 
 fortune is undeniable. The helplessness 
 of infancy, the vigor of youth, the power 
 of manhood, and the decline of old age 
 extend to the total expression of man's 
 life. There is, as Aristotle says, an old 
 age of the mind, as well as of the body. 1 
 
 In addition to this common fortune in 
 which the spiritual and physical parts of 
 1 Pol. ii. 9, 23.
 
 28 The Evidence for the Denial 
 
 man's being are involved, it is observed 
 that for every change in the bodily organi- 
 zation there is a corresponding change in 
 the soul ; that affections of the nervous 
 system lead invariably to modifications in 
 thought and feeling, and that ideas and 
 volitions originating in the mind are at 
 once expressed in terms of bodily activity 
 and power. The relation is continuous 
 from the first signs of consciousness to 
 the last, and it is of the most intimate 
 and ineffable character. True, the same 
 science that takes our profound practical 
 experience of the marvelous intimacy of 
 body and soul, and works it over into the 
 established opinion that changes in the 
 one are invariably accompanied by changes 
 in the other, tells us, with the utmost can- 
 dor and emphasis, that the concurrent ac- 
 tivities are, so far as has been observed, 
 only concurrent. They are utterly un- 
 translatable the one into the other. No 
 wise disputant upon this subject will be 
 disposed to quarrel with the statements of
 
 The Evidence for the Denial 29 
 
 science as to the intimacy of body and 
 mind. Self-observation and reflection give 
 one a far profounder sense of that inti- 
 macy than any experiment conducted upon 
 another can. So long as the activities of 
 body and mind are not held to be identi- 
 cal, it is impossible to overstate the inti- 
 macy. Every exposition of the unsearch- 
 able closeness of the human spirit to the 
 physical organization which it fills but 
 serves to make one aware of the mysteri- 
 ous order of man's life. No believer in 
 the unity and permanence of the soul need 
 question, no believer can question, the 
 soundness of Aristotle's statement, that 
 mind is the perfection of the body as sight 
 is the perfection of the eye. 1 No com- 
 parison less strong and extreme can ade- 
 quately express the truly ineffable relation 
 between the inward man and the outward. 
 
 1 De Anima, ii. i, g. This comparison Aristotle does 
 not extend to the creative reason, that in man which 
 makes him a thinking being. An adequate modern 
 exposition of the great thinker at this point would be 
 of extreme interest
 
 ^o The Evidence for the Denial 
 
 Organization, then, is essential to the 
 expression of mind ; to the unbeliever it 
 seems essential to the existence of mind. 
 For it we wait in the darkness of the 
 prenatal state, for it we linger in the incapa- 
 ble wonder of infancy ; and when in youth 
 and manhood it is ours, we feel as if with 
 its development we had found ourselves. 
 Then the turn comes, and the bodily organ- 
 ization declines. Sight grows dim, hear- 
 ing becomes thick, taste indifferent, and 
 all the vital powers begin to live beyond 
 their income. Bankruptcy comes at last, 
 and with the failure of heart and flesh the 
 last ray of intelligence vanishes. The fact 
 would seem to be, so it is held, that not 
 only is organization essential to mind, 
 but also that this particular organization, 
 this present body, is essential. Transfer 
 from the earthly house of this tabernacle 
 to the house not made with hands, eternal 
 in the heavens, would appear to be an im- 
 possibility. Thus it comes to pass that 
 from identity of fortune throughout life,
 
 The Evidence for the Denial 31 
 
 from coincidence of activity, and from the 
 manifest dependence of the mind upon 
 the material organism for the expression 
 of its power, it is assumed, or concluded, 
 that the dissolution of the body is the 
 extinction of the soul. It is, finally, the 
 apparent indispensableness to mental life 
 of the particular organization that we call 
 a man's body, that makes it impossible for 
 so many to believe in the immortality of 
 the soul. The famous remark, attributed 
 to Socrates, " God may forgive sin, but I 
 do not see how he can," is not strong 
 enough to serve the purposes of negative 
 thought upon this question. It is admitted 
 that the Creative Power may be able to 
 secure the survival of the soul after the 
 brain has become fixed in death, but the 
 difficulty of so thinking is held to be so 
 great that the only reasonable conclusion 
 is its practical impossibility.
 
 Value of the Evidence for Denial 
 
 T now becomes necessary to review 
 the evidence presented for the 
 belief that the soul cannot sur- 
 vive the death of the body. And as a 
 preliminary, it should be remarked that 
 the difficulty of seeing through the case to 
 a positive faith is precisely what consti- 
 tutes it a problem. If there were no coin- 
 cident growth and decline of mind and 
 body, no interdependence, no community 
 of fortune, and no close and unsearcha- 
 ble connection between them, there would 
 be no problem. The statement of these 
 admitted facts is only, as the lawyers say, 
 the putting in of the case. Argument 
 is deferred, interpretation and judgment 
 come later. Whenever, therefore, the 
 facts previously enumerated about the in-
 
 Value of the Evidence for Denial 33 
 
 terrelation of the soul and the body ap- 
 pear conclusive against hope, it must be 
 borne in mind that this is simply prejudg- 
 ment. The sense of difficulty created by 
 the facts merely means, in the first in- 
 stance, that faith in immortality has be- 
 come a problem. If there were no dark 
 and distressing side to human existence, if 
 there were no difficulties in the way of 
 belief, there would be no room for debate. 
 But if some subtraction must be made 
 from the apparent weight of evidence 
 against hope, on the ground that only thus 
 is the question raised to serious impor- 
 tance, a further and perhaps larger deduc- 
 tion is necessary, owing to the activity in 
 the matter of sense and imagination. The 
 blow on the head which is followed by in- 
 stantaneous loss of mental expression, the 
 whiff of ether that carries the patient into 
 apparent absolute insensibility, the acci- 
 dent that turns the man of genius into an 
 imbecile for the remainder of his days, the 
 slow decay of the physical frame, and the
 
 34 Value of the Evidence for Denial 
 
 corresponding disappearance of intellectual 
 power, mightily affect feeling. The senses 
 take in such situations with abnormal in- 
 tensity. The impression, powerful at the 
 time, becomes a permanent memory ; and 
 the tragic poet, implicit in every man, here 
 finds the suitable and stimulating material 
 for the construction of the lurid drama 
 that, after life's fitful fever, lays the weary 
 and heavy laden to rest in the dreamless 
 and eternal slumber of the grave. Men 
 still fear death as children fear to go into 
 the dark. The impression upon the sensi- 
 bility is inevitable, and at first imagination 
 is but the slave of sense. There is no 
 moral blame in the matter ; nor is there 
 any immediate and universal remedy. The 
 sensuous feelings are slow to surrender ; 
 they are dull scholars ; they hold out 
 against truth, not, indeed forever, but for 
 a long time. The thing to be noted, how- 
 ever, is that in these feelings there is no 
 argument against immortality, nor do they 
 imply any real application of reason to the
 
 Value of the Evidence for Denial 35 
 
 problem. To dispose of the question by 
 feeling and imagination is to fail to carry 
 it to the only satisfactory tribunal. At 
 no time is Butler stronger than when he 
 contends that the influence of imagina- 
 tion, more than anything else, makes men 
 torture death into the destruction of the 
 human spirit. 
 
 To this must be added, as far as the 
 senses are concerned, the unobviousness 
 of the other side. The psalmist said that 
 he cried unto God out of the depths, and 
 that God heard him. Nowhere but in the 
 depths can the fundamental truths of the 
 world be found. If men, in the mass, are 
 incapable of profound thinking, profound 
 living is open to all ; and in the unobvious 
 realms below the surface the great discov- 
 eries are made, and nowhere else. The 
 process of knowledge that testifies so 
 mightily to the unity of the mind is subtle 
 and many miss it. The value of the ideal 
 is not quoted in the markets of the world, 
 and multitudes remain insensible to it.
 
 $6 Value of the Evidence for Denial 
 
 The ethical illumination of experience and 
 the moral trend of history are not obvious 
 truths, and so are unacknowledged by vast 
 numbers of the race. The capacity of 
 man for fellowship with the Infinite and 
 the philosophy of the religious life are 
 matters not for sensational impression, but 
 for thought ; and, in a word, the kingdom 
 of heaven, that institute of the Eternal 
 Spirit which includes the ideals, the values, 
 the fellowships, and the hopes of humanity 
 at its best and in its highest interpreta- 
 tion, does not come with observation. The 
 evidence for man's immortality is not in 
 the earthquake, nor in the tempest, nor in 
 the fire, but in the still small voice. And 
 upon the world at large, which is very 
 hard of hearing, that voice has but little 
 power. If it were possible, which it is not, 
 to make the considerations that support 
 belief in the endless life of the soul as 
 obvious as the impressions of sense and as 
 palpable as the repetition of the lurid and 
 terrible in imagination, it is believed that
 
 Value of tbe Evidence for Denial 37 
 
 they would absolutely control the convic- 
 tion of mankind. So accessible to dramatic 
 situation and coloring are the majority of 
 men, and so insensible to thought. 
 
 We come now to the final question be- 
 tween belief and unbelief. What is the 
 nature of the organization upon which the 
 mind is said to be completely dependent ? 
 Professor Goldwin Smith assumes that it 
 is now clear that the soul is not a unity 
 in itself, but the name for the higher and 
 finer activity "of our general frame." 1 
 Upon a momentous question it is not alto- 
 gether satisfactory to think like a philoso- 
 pher with one lobe of the brain, and like 
 the vulgar with the other. Like a philo- 
 sopher Professor Smith tells us what the 
 soul is. It is " the higher and finer activ- 
 ity of our general frame." But what he 
 means by the phrase " our general frame " 
 he does not say. This, however, as Berke- 
 ley has shown, and after him John Stuart 
 Mill, and every other thinker who has gone 
 
 1 The Forum, July, 1896, p. 610.
 
 38 Value of the Evidence for Denial 
 
 to the heart of the matter, is the funda- 
 mental question at issue. And if one is 
 to allow the great thinkers of mankind to 
 mould one's general thought of the mate- 
 rial universe, one cannot but be influenced 
 by their work at this particular point. 
 Since speculation escaped its infancy, the 
 world of matter has been generally held to 
 be, in one form or another, an idealism. It 
 is everywhere admitted that the material 
 universe is not what it seems to be to the 
 ordinary mind. In the process of analysis 
 it is transformed into the permanent pos- 
 sibility of sensations with Mill, into the 
 Unknowable Power with Spencer, into the 
 Infinite Spirit with Berkeley, and into 
 the manifestation of the Absolute by a 
 whole procession of German thinkers. If 
 the analysis is but thorough and consistent 
 and intelligible, everything material dis- 
 solves at last in the Universal Will, as the 
 falling snowflakes melt into the current of 
 the stream. Matter becomes the popular 
 name for force, force the scientific name
 
 of the Evidence for Denial 39 
 
 for will, and will the philosophical explana- 
 tion, guided by the analogy of the human 
 personality, of the universe in space and 
 time. 
 
 a surgeon looks in upon the 
 
 brain of a patient, what is the nature of 
 that upon which he looks ? He sees some- 
 thing ; he can touch something ; he can 
 investigate and operate upon something. 
 Popularly it is understood that he is deal- 
 ing with a substance foreign to the think- 
 ing principle within. But can the surgeon 
 get beyond sight and touch ? Is he not 
 investigating and operating in a world of 
 mind ? And can he say anything further 
 of the object before him than that it gives 
 rise to his peculiar mental life at the mo- 
 ment, and that he possesses the power of 
 inducing modifications in it ? If the uni- 
 versal matter of the ordinary mind is a 
 myth, the material body is a myth. The 
 particular specimen of the outward uni- 
 verse, the human body, must follow the 
 example, take on the character, and share
 
 4O Value of the Evidence far Denial 
 
 the fate of the whole. It seems unaccount- 
 able that the philosophy which derives its 
 life from Hume, and which dissolves the 
 outward world into a series of sensations, 
 should erect the human body, which is, ac- 
 cording to the theory, but a given speci- 
 men of that world, into a material organism 
 upon whose life the existence of the soul 
 is wholly dependent. Thinking of this 
 sort is either the mad inconsistency or 
 the base hypocrisy of the philosophy in 
 question. 
 
 We have thus seen that another man's 
 body is but the condition of sensational 
 life to the surgeon. We now ask, What is 
 the surgeon's body to himself ? It cannot 
 be the material organism of the ordinary 
 mind, for material organism of that sort 
 there is none anywhere. It can be no 
 other than a form of mind, an attachment 
 in the service of the human spirit from its 
 Maker, a source of mental nutrition, an 
 order which operates as receptivity when 
 spoken to from without, and which acts as
 
 Value of the Evidence for Denial 41 
 
 the medium of expression when addressed 
 from within. The body is thus trans- 
 formed into an order of feelings, the soul 
 into an order of thought, and both into an 
 order of mind. Our human universe is 
 a dualism. It is composed of sense and of 
 thought, and these two are in conjunction. 
 The universe of sense has its law and ne- 
 cessity, and it claims the order of sense 
 that constitutes man's body as its subject ; 
 the universe of thought has its character 
 and power, and it claims the order of 
 thought that constitutes the soul as its 
 servant. The deepest account, so far as 
 it appears, that any man can give of his 
 body is that it is a form of his conscious- 
 ness. It enters into his consciousness, 
 conditions it, serves it, affects it in a thou- 
 sand ways; but still it is no machine in 
 the revolving wheels of which the spirit can 
 alone live. It is a form of his personality 
 that comes and goes. The great note of 
 the sense-universe to which the body be- 
 longs is change ; the great mark of the
 
 4% Value of the Evidence for Denial 
 
 personal universe is permanence. And, 
 therefore, it may well be that the body, the 
 sensuous concomitant of the spirit, passes 
 Utterly away at what is called death, accord- 
 ing to the law of its order ; and that ac- 
 cording to the law of its order the person- 
 ality abides. It should be added that since 
 it is the sensational philosophy that is the 
 usual basis for the denial of the immortal- 
 ity of man, inasmuch as, according to that 
 philosophy, there is no necessary connec- 
 tion, no causal relation between the series 
 of feelings called the body and the series 
 called the soul, a mere concomitance, 
 however striking, a bare association how- 
 ever constant, cannot be held as evidence 
 that the spiritual member of the fellowship 
 may not exist when the other member has 
 been withdrawn. How clearly John Stuart 
 Mill saw this is evident from these words : 
 "The relation of thought to a material 
 brain is no metaphysical necessity, but 
 simply a constant coexistence within the 
 limits of pbservation. And when analyzed
 
 Value of the Evidence for Denial 43 
 
 to the bottom . . . the brain, just as much 
 as the mental functions, is, like matter it- 
 self, merely a set of human sensations 
 either actual or inferred as possible. Expe- 
 rience furnishes us with no examples of 
 any series of states of consciousness with- 
 out this group of contingent sensations 
 attached to it ; but it is as easy to imagine 
 such a series of states without as with 
 this accompaniment, and we know of no 
 reason in the nature of things against the 
 possibility of its being disjoined." l 
 
 The conclusion to which one would seem 
 to be forced upon this question of organi- 
 zation is that the body is a section of the 
 total human consciousness, that it is a sec- 
 tion which fluctuates greatly during the 
 present life, and that as an inconstant part 
 of the personality it may pass utterly away, 
 and still leave the personality itself in full 
 vigor and open to new and superior oppor- 
 tunities. Science can show nothing more 
 than concurrence of activity on the part 
 
 1 Essays on Religion, pp. 199, 200.
 
 44 Value of the Evidence for Denial 
 
 of body and soul. Human life is a chariot 
 'drawn by two horses, and when one drops 
 it does not follow that the other ceases to 
 exist. Some embarrassment may be occa- 
 sioned by the break, and some delay ; yet 
 in the resources of the universe it is not 
 hard to believe that another mate has been 
 provided, in anticipation of the need. At 
 least, nothing in the known relation of the 
 mind and the body appears to contradict 
 that vast and inspiring hope.
 
 VI 
 
 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 HE denial of immortality is the 
 creed that constructs itself out 
 of certain aspects of human life. 
 Those aspects have been considered, and 
 it has appeared that the facts do not seem 
 to warrant the dismal interpretation put 
 upon them. In passing now from the 
 negative side to the positive, from a re- 
 view of the denial to a consideration of the 
 affirmation of man's immortality, it must 
 be understood that we are going, not from 
 science to faith, but from one form of 
 belief, which has been shown to be prema- 
 ture, to another which is held to be valid, 
 persistent, and, all things considered, in- 
 evitable. Since science is dumb upon the 
 question, the belief in immortality seeks 
 its premise from philosophy. The con-
 
 46 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 struction of that premise may seem to de- 
 lay unreasonably the conclusion, but the 
 delay is not really unreasonable. For it is 
 only as an inference from a given interpre- 
 tation of the universe that belief in the 
 future life can defend itself. The belief 
 stands or falls with the moral idea of the 
 universe. That idea is its necessary pre- 
 supposition, and that idea at its best pro- 
 vides the strongest foundations for hope. 
 A more consistent expression than has 
 generally prevailed of the moral concep- 
 tion of the universal order under which 
 men live is an indispensable preliminary 
 in this discussion. 
 
 The three grand positions from which 
 faith in a hereafter for man would seem to 
 follow are the moral perfection of the Cre- 
 ator, the reasonableness of the universe, 
 and the worth of human life. The three 
 are at heart one ; for if the first is true, 
 if God is absolutely good, the other two 
 must follow. Still a few words upon each 
 one of the three may tend to clearness.
 
 Postulates of Immortality 47 
 
 That a Supreme Mind orders and gov- 
 erns all things may be held to be capable 
 of demonstration. The natural and sane 
 operation of the human intellect conducts 
 irresistibly to this conclusion. It is, in- 
 deed, impossible to survey the earth* and 
 the heavens, to note the countless orders 
 of life below, and the everlasting march of 
 splendors on high ; to regard the uniform 
 and marvelous operation of law in things 
 the least significant, and in things the 
 most sublime ; to behold everywhere the 
 signs of unity, individuals running into 
 families, families into societies, societies 
 into kingdoms, and kingdoms moving to 
 their concordant places within the same 
 circle of being ; to dwell upon the evi- 
 dence that men are living, not in a chaos, 
 but in a cosmos, not amid infinite miscel- 
 laneousness, but in an ordered and real 
 universe ; it is impossible to allow all 
 these judgments their legitimate impres- 
 sion upon the mind, and still resist the 
 belief in a supreme and all-controlling In-
 
 48 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 telligence. When Bacon says that he 
 would rather believe all the fables in the 
 Legend, and in the Talmud, and in Alco- 
 ran, than that this universal frame is with- 
 out a mind, he is giving expression to the 
 scientific understanding ; he is the prophet 
 of the sane intellect everywhere. 
 
 It cannot, however, be maintained that 
 the absolute goodness of the Creator is 
 demonstrable. The complete induction of 
 the facts accessible to man would show 
 wonderful devices for joy in the living 
 world, unimagined sources of zest even in 
 the stern side of existence, and amazing 
 adjustments in man's environment for the 
 production of heroic and splendid charac- 
 ter. Still, when all this has been said, 
 there will remain a large residuum of un- 
 accountable distress, and, what is more 
 serious, an order that does not discrimi- 
 nate between the just and the unjust. 
 The converse to the sublime fact that God 
 makes his sun shine upon the evil and 
 the good, and his rain fall upon the just
 
 Postulates of Immortality 49 
 
 and the unjust, is supplied in the famous 
 line, 
 
 " Here 's a night 
 That pities neither wise men nor fools." 
 
 The belief in the absolute goodness of 
 God is an assumption, an assumption, in- 
 deed, without which men cannot live, but 
 still an assumption, that is, a belief for 
 which there is proof, but not demonstra- 
 tive proof. The logical impulse impels to 
 this belief, for thus it becomes possible 
 to account for all the good in the world, 
 and to hope for a good issue from all the 
 apparent evil. The disinterestedness of 
 a Moses ; the passionate devotion of an 
 Isaiah ; the self-effacement and heroism of 
 a Paul ; the reforming zeal and courage for 
 righteousness of a Luther; the burning 
 love of the saints of the earth, in all ages, 
 among all peoples, and under the forms 
 of all religions ; the moral integrity, the 
 patient endurance, and pious humanity of 
 the great majority of those by whom the 
 world has been kept alive and carried for-
 
 50 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 ward, and, above all, with us in this part 
 of the globe, the sublime character of 
 Jesus Christ, compel one to think of the 
 Infinite as at least good enough to ac- 
 count for this amazing total of human 
 goodness. For it is certain that it could 
 not have originated or persisted or per- 
 fected itself against the purpose or with- 
 out the sympathy of the Creator. 
 
 One is also guided by the moral impulse 
 to the great conclusion that God must be 
 perfectly good. Men thus honor the deep- 
 est and most venerable instinct in the hu- 
 man heart. 
 
 " Shall mortal man be more just than God ? 
 Shall a man be more pure than his Maker ? " 1 
 
 Here is the final moral incredibility. Al- 
 most as strong is the expression of Plato's 
 ethical passion, " God is in no way what- 
 ever unrighteous, but he is righteous in 
 the Jiighest possible degree ; and nothing 
 is more like him than the one of us who 
 shall become supremely just." 2 It is a 
 
 1 Job iv. 17. a Thecet. 176 C.
 
 Postulates of Immortality 57 
 
 reasonable conscience that makes cowards 
 of us all. One of the aboriginal and inde- 
 structible sentiments of humanity speaks 
 in the great words, 
 
 " I dare do all that may become a man ; 
 Who dares do more is none." 
 
 There is a moral law or instinct in man, 
 inalienable from his being, which he can- 
 not override and remain man. It would 
 seem that this feeling that God must be 
 wholly good should remain inviolable, and 
 that it should be ruler among all human 
 thoughts. It is not simply the religious 
 impulse, but also the fundamental ethical 
 constitution of mankind that speaks in 
 Whittier's faith, 
 
 " The wrong that pains my soul below, 
 I dare not throne above." 
 
 That "dare not," coming as it does, not 
 from the basest but from the best in man, 
 rightfully and mightily supports the con- 
 clusion that God is good. 
 
 The necessities of worship plead for the
 
 52 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 same thing. The mood of homage to the 
 Eternal is confessedly the highest in man, 
 and it is plainly impossible for intelligent 
 man unless he is able to behold in God ab- 
 solute moral perfection. The absoluteness 
 of devotion, the fervor and sublimity of 
 the homage, expressed in the great words, 
 "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in 
 him," is unattainable except by those who 
 are forever assured of the perfect integrity 
 of the Divine Being. The insight obtained 
 into the Divine method of educating the 
 human spirit, through the higher moods of 
 worship and the confidences established, 
 all flow from the august assumption that 
 the soul is dealing with a Being of utter 
 rectitude and love. The logical impulse 
 that finds good in the works of God's 
 hands, and often, as in the moral leaders of 
 mankind and in the Master of the Chris- 
 tian world, immeasurable good, conducts to 
 faith ; the moral instinct that holds it blas- 
 phemy to think the creature juster and 
 purer than the Creator impels yet more
 
 Postulates of Immortality 53 
 
 powerfully to the same conclusion ; finally, 
 the necessities of worship, and all the re- 
 finement and strength that come to man's 
 spirit by means of it, mightily support this 
 belief. 
 
 The belief in the moral perfection of 
 God is an assumption for which there is 
 proof, but by no means complete proof. 
 Its deepest justification is that it is the as- 
 sumption without which human life cannot 
 be understood ; without which the ideals, 
 the higher endeavors, the best character 
 and hope of man, are unaccountable and 
 insane. As F. D. Maurice said a genera- 
 tion ago, assume the answering Reality to 
 the first words of the Lord's prayer, " Our 
 Father, who art in heaven," and the total 
 of human history becomes intelligible. If 
 scientific suppositions are justified by the 
 completeness of their working, so here the 
 order and hope that flow from the first and 
 sublimest of assumptions would seem to 
 be a vindication that cannot be impugned. 
 And it need hardly be added that if God
 
 54 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 is the Father of men, endless life must fol- 
 low. If there is a real relation between 
 the Divine conscience and heart and the 
 conscience and heart of man, it must be a 
 permanent relation. God cannot be con- 
 ceived as wise and good at the same time 
 that he is believed to extinguish human life 
 at death. Both beliefs cannot be enter- 
 tained ; one or the other must prevail. If 
 death is the end, God cannot be thought of 
 as good ; if God is thought of as infinitely 
 good, death cannot be the end. 
 
 The second position from which faith in 
 the endless life strengthens itself is the 
 reasonableness of the universe. One great 
 note of the order amid which men live is 
 that it is an order. It is the expression of 
 intelligence. The universe invites to study, 
 reveals its secret to the devoted mind, wins 
 the intellect by the highest of promises, 
 the possession of the truth, into the open 
 vision of at least part of its ways. The 
 order under which he lives inspires the rea- 
 son of man, incites to philosophic reflec-
 
 Postulates of Immortality 55 
 
 tion, fills the spirit with the passion for 
 unity, elicits in the intelligence the ideal 
 of an intelligible world. And this ideal of 
 the universe as intelligible is the most fun- 
 damental and the most practical of all our 
 purely intellectual conceptions. The arm 
 of science would be paralyzed at once if 
 the idea should come to abide that the 
 outward world is a hopeless chaos. Astron- 
 omy, geology, biology, physiology, psy- 
 chology, ethics, political economy, history, 
 and all science whatever would die equally 
 with philosophy if the reasonableness of 
 the universe should be denied or seriously 
 doubted. One can imagine a race of crea- 
 tures enacting an immense drama, immense 
 for them, on the exterior of a soap bubble. 
 One can picture their works of science 
 and art and philosophy ; their sense of 
 the bubble's physical properties and rela- 
 tions, their expression of its resplendent 
 beauty as it floats in the sunlight, their 
 comprehension of its bearing toward the 
 ultimate reality. And one can see that if
 
 $6 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 these infinitesimal creatures should come 
 to the conclusion that their abode was a 
 mere bubble and nothing more, some- 
 thing isolated from all being, and leading 
 through the comprehension of it to no 
 universe beyond, it would be impossible 
 for the scientific, artistic, and philosophic 
 impulses in them to remain living and 
 fruitful. This must be one of the many 
 meanings of that profound remark of 
 Goethe, that only the believing ages are 
 the fruitful ages. That the universe is 
 throughout intelligible, that it may be un- 
 derstood, one part by another, and progress 
 made through the part upon the whole, and 
 that when understood it will be found ra- 
 tionally satisfactory, is the fundamental as- 
 sumption of the intellectual exertion of the 
 world. And if it is plain that God cannot 
 be regarded as infinitely good, if he denies 
 to virtue the " glory of going on and still 
 to be," it is equally obvious that if death 
 be the end of man the ideal of the universe 
 as throughout reasonable is vain. The
 
 Postulates of Immortality 57 
 
 hopes of knowledge and of goodness, the 
 sense of a prophetic human fellowship, and 
 the expectation of a life concordant with 
 the life of the universe are contradicted ; 
 and the movement that began and that re- 
 ceived fresh momentum from day to day, 
 from faith in the world as reasonable, is 
 turned back upon itself, and all things are 
 rolled in everlasting confusion. The be- 
 liever in the reasonableness of the order 
 under which he lives must not be put to 
 shame ; otherwise the belief will be surren- 
 dered. Death as a finality is the demon- 
 stration of the delusion of belief in the 
 universe as intelligible. For it is man's 
 universe that in the first place is supposed 
 to be intelligible ; not the absolute uni- 
 verse, whatever that may mean. And a 
 universe that defeats his best life, that 
 contradicts his deepest thought, cannot be 
 considered, by man at least, as the expres- 
 sion of Supreme Reason. 
 
 The worth of human life to the Creator 
 depends, of course, upon his character.
 
 58 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 If one is permitted to construe the uni- 
 verse through human personality, and un- 
 less one shall take his stand in blank ag- 
 nosticism one can do no other, the best 
 thing to be done is to continue the pro- 
 cess and interpret the Ultimate Character 
 through its highest historic expression. 
 Humanity has a better right, surely, to 
 claim to be the regulative revelation of the 
 character of the Infinite than the orders 
 beneath it can possibly have. And it is 
 humanity at its best that says, " He that 
 hath seen me hath seen the Father." 1 
 The worth of human life to such a God is 
 beyond dispute. It must be of permanent 
 value, not only in those solitary instances 
 where it becomes the flowering of moral 
 beauty and disinterested service, but also 
 in our total humanity so long as the bare 
 possibility of noble character continues. 
 If the Supreme Being loves goodness, the 
 naked capacity for it must lay hold of his 
 conserving power. And therefore one is 
 
 1 John xiv. 9.
 
 Postulates of Immortality 59 
 
 ready for an expression of God's moral in- 
 terest in mankind infinitely wider than 
 that to which one has been accustomed. 
 For the difficulty once surmounted of the 
 relation of the soul to the body, the great 
 obstacle to faith in the permanence of 
 the human spirit is the extremely limited 
 expression that has been allowed to the 
 moral interest of God in the race. It 
 must be clear that if one is thrown back 
 for the ground of a given belief upon the 
 character of the Creator, then only upon 
 the widest possible disclosure of that char- 
 acter, and the largest and most consistent 
 thought concerning it, can one find the 
 most assured basis for faith. The appeal 
 in behalf of the permanence of man is ulti- 
 mately away from all matters of physical 
 organization, to the heart of the universe, 
 to the Absolute conscience and pity that 
 are believed to have dominion over all 
 things. The freshest discussion of the 
 immortality of man, therefore, must con- 
 sider it with reference to what may be
 
 60 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 termed the new theodicy ; that is, upon 
 the faith that God exists a morally per- 
 fect being, what is the full logic of this 
 position in a consideration of the probable 
 destiny of man ? If that faith is to con- 
 tinue in the earth, it must provide a field 
 for the expression of God's moral interest 
 in the race commensurate with his char- 
 acter. There is no other way open for the 
 reconciliation of the actual and the ideal. 
 The sincerity of the Divine intention in 
 seeking this reconciliation, his unrestricted 
 opportunity, and the infinity of his re- 
 sources, must be put beyond the possibility 
 of doubt. So much, at least, the -faith in 
 his absolute goodness necessitates. It is 
 true that many profound and believing 
 men to-day abhor all theodicies. The 
 sense of the mystery of human existence 
 is so deep that all attempts to carry even a 
 single line of light to its heart seem fore- 
 ordained to failure. The unfathomable 
 depths of human suffering appear to be 
 forever beyond the plummet of the explor-
 
 Postulates of Immortality 61 
 
 ing reason, and the shadow that lies upon 
 the universe is too heavy to be mitigated 
 by man's thought, however luminous. 
 Men of this type prefer silence upon the 
 ultimate problems. Still they live in the 
 aboriginal moral sentiments of their kind, 
 and their scorn for theodicies is the scorn 
 of those who through feeling have tran- 
 scended their difficulty. " Shall not the 
 judge of all the earth do right ? " That is 
 the bold challenge of those to whom refer- 
 ence is here made. The problem which 
 human history raises when placed in the 
 presence of God is shattered by the explo- 
 sion of a tremendous moral instinct. The 
 instinct is precious, and its power is great. 
 Let it continue to clothe itself in the 
 noble words attributed to the first Hebrew 
 face to face with Sodom and the Infinite, 
 "Shall not the judge of all the earth do 
 right?" But this belief formed by the 
 interior play of moral feeling becomes a 
 vast premise for rational insight. The 
 question is not between a theodicy and no
 
 62 Postulates of Immortality 
 
 theodicy, but between a theodicy implicit 
 and a theodicy explicit. Moral feeling 
 holds in solution the sublimest vindication 
 of the ways of God to man, and for those 
 who long to add vision to passion it can- 
 not be other than a service to life to seek 
 for the intellectual content of the highest 
 ethical sentiments. If any one desires to 
 renew his confidence in the greatness pos- 
 sible to a theodicy, let him turn again to 
 the second book of Plato's Republic. He 
 will there find a theodicy in behalf of 
 righteousness without which it is impossi- 
 ble to be an honorable man. And until 
 the fundamental belief in the absolute 
 goodness of God is pressed to the conclu- 
 sions to which it inevitably leads, the 
 weight upon those who are bearing the 
 heat and burden of the day must remain 
 too heavy to be borne.
 
 VII 
 
 Illogical Limitations 
 
 INCE absolute moralism or a uni- 
 verse supremely and everlast- 
 ingly devoted to moral ends is 
 the grand basis of belief in a future life for 
 man, it is necessary to consider briefly the 
 various ideas of limitation that have been 
 held concerning God's interest in mankind. 
 These ideas, properly understood, mean a 
 restriction upon the moral purpose of God 
 and the moral character of his universe. 
 .The more widely they prevail, the more 
 difficult do they make belief in a hereafter 
 for the human soul. For whenever the 
 ultimate appeal as to what is or as to what 
 will be is taken to the supreme moral con- 
 ception, it follows that only the noblest 
 views, only the judgments that are in pro- 
 foundest accord with their standard, can
 
 64 Illogical Limitations 
 
 be true. If the origin, career, and destiny 
 of mankind are to be interpreted in accord- 
 ance with the sublime assumption of the 
 moral perfection of God, only those ideas 
 can be valid which are consistent with 
 that assumption. In a profound sense in 
 this sphere, morality creates and immo- 
 rality destroys its object. The supreme 
 moral conception tells us what God must 
 be if he is to be at all ; and it denies the 
 rights of God to any being whose purpose 
 and government fall below its own stand- 
 ard. Sheer, bare almightiness cannot con- 
 stitute its possessor the object of human 
 accountability and veneration. Nor can 
 omniscience raise a being to that sovereign 
 elevation. The absolute character alone 
 justifies absolute authority ; the ultimate 
 source of all power and all obligation is the 
 supreme love. The battle of belief and 
 unbelief must finally be settled upon this 
 field. The believer must purge his faith 
 as Gideon did his army ; he must exalt the 
 whole series of conceptions that go to form
 
 Illogical Limitations 65 
 
 it ; he must work it over into a pure and 
 consistent moralism, into a scheme that 
 begins and ends in the perfect love of 
 God. Anything less than this outside the 
 sheltered fold of traditional orthodoxy has 
 already become incredible. Anything less 
 than philosophical loyalty to the absolute 
 moralism of Jesus Christ handicaps faith 
 hopelessly, gives skeptical thought an im- 
 mense advantage, manufactures obstacles 
 against its own success, and indeed creates 
 the forces that ultimately make its pro- 
 gress impossible. As unbelief must be 
 pushed into full consistency, as it must 
 be stripped of the alleviations that come 
 from poor logic and from the associations 
 of faith that have gone to form the bet- 
 ter spirit of the unbeliever, as negative 
 thought must be shown as at last atheis- 
 tic thought, and this type of thinker must 
 be compelled to do battle for his convic- 
 tions from the position of absolute pes- 
 simism, so the antagonistic view of the 
 world, the vision of belief, must be lifted
 
 66 Illogical Limitations 
 
 into the completes! attainable correspond- 
 ence with the supreme historic mind, the 
 mind of Christ. Only thus can men see 
 where they are and what they are facing ; 
 only thus can the true nature of the con- 
 test be determined, and the issues on the 
 one side and on the other be decisively 
 discerned. 
 
 It is usual to discredit the view that holds 
 to the unlimited moral interest of God in 
 mankind by applying to it the evil epithet 
 of universalism. But universalism is not 
 raised as a question of fact by the position 
 above taken, but only, if at all, as matter of 
 inference, and that, too, in a region where 
 inferences can never become more than 
 hopes. In a root and branch discussion 
 the philosophical and the homiletical inter- 
 ests must not be confounded. If all men 
 were philosophers, the two interests would 
 be seen to be identical, but all men are not 
 philosophers. Still the fundamental prob- 
 lem of speculative theology and preach- 
 ing is the same. It concerns the charac-
 
 Illogical Limitations 67 
 
 ter of God ; and nothing, in the long run, 
 can strengthen the arm of moral appeal 
 that is not warranted by the highest con- 
 ception of the Divine character. It is this 
 conception that is now under discussion, 
 and the full logic of which it is deemed 
 desirable to employ in vindication of belief 
 in the immortality of man. To try to dis- 
 credit it by the cry of universalism is to 
 mistake the issue. Universalism is a doc- 
 trine that has to do with matters of fact, 
 that contends that, as a matter of fact, all 
 men will finally be saved. The position 
 above taken concerns God's relation to 
 mankind, inquires after his disposition to- 
 ward the human race, and from the as- 
 sumption that he is a Being absolutely 
 good concludes as to what must be the 
 scope of his moral purpose. 
 
 The only alternative to this final ap- 
 peal to the moral reason of man, qualified 
 for its task of judgment by long discipline 
 in the school of Christ, the sovereign 
 moral teacher, is the complete abdication
 
 68 Illogical Limitations 
 
 of thought. As the uneducated mind be- 
 lieves that the outward world is what it 
 appears to be, colored, sounding, fragrant, 
 and solid, as it believes that grass is green, 
 the sky blue, the flower beautiful, the 
 mountain a mass of rock, independent of 
 the mind that considers, so there are those 
 who find the standard of religious belief 
 in the accepted traditions of the world. 
 Whatever their name or denomination, 
 wherever they sojourn, their true home is 
 in the Roman church. The realm of no- 
 reason is their dwelling-place, and the 
 church of mere will-worship must continue 
 to be their sanctuary. That agnostics 
 should become Romanists seems to certain 
 writers strange ; the truth is that when 
 religious feeling takes possession of these 
 men they can logically become nothing 
 else. Their moral reason still remains in- 
 competent to discover or to justify the 
 supreme object of religious feeling, or the 
 manner in which that object should be wor- 
 shiped. Nothing remains for the poor
 
 Illogical Limitations 69 
 
 agnostic who has had the misfortune to 
 become devout but to fall back upon tradi- 
 tion and accept the contents of faith on 
 authority. It is devout agnosticism that 
 to-day is becoming the mother of a mena- 
 cing institutionalism that is exerting itself 
 to install over the religious mind extreme 
 high churchism. Let it be understood that 
 the movement originates and derives all 
 its vigor from the acknowledged incompe- 
 tence of the moral reason of man to fix 
 the object of his worship, and Protestants 
 will see the alternative that divides the 
 field against them with atheism. 
 
 The first grand form of limitation upon 
 the moral interest of God in mankind is 
 presented in the Hebrew idea of the rem- 
 nant. No blame, intellectual or moral, 
 attaches to Isaiah in consequence of this 
 idea. It was the best that he could do, 
 even under special inspiration, amio! the 
 mad condition of the times in which he 
 lived. He held in his heart of hearts the 
 faith in the victorious future of Israel
 
 jro Illogical Limitations 
 
 upon this earth, and at the same time he 
 saw her utterly unworthy of her high call- 
 ing and completely incapable of advancing 
 upon it. What remained was simply to 
 look upon history as the operation of the 
 moral judgment of God, destroying unwor- 
 thy Israel, like a doomed tree, and when 
 the evil growths were cut down and burned, 
 feeding the hopes of the future upon the 
 fresh sprouts sent up from the living roots. 
 This was the way in which the greatest of 
 the Hebrew prophets met the problem 
 springing from the sublime faith and the 
 terrible history of his nation. He could 
 not surrender the faith, and he could not 
 recognize in the actual nation the true 
 nation. There was for Isaiah but one 
 way out of the difficulty. The unworthy 
 nation shall be destroyed ; the worthy 
 remnant shall abide, and from this a new, 
 holy, and victorious people shall come, in 
 whom the original purpose of God will be 
 realized. 
 
 This is a theodicy independent of a fu-
 
 Illogical Limitations ji 
 
 ture world. It is a theodicy exclusively for 
 Israel. It is a theodicy according to which 
 the nation as a whole perishes, and only 
 the remnant survives. It is a justification 
 of the ways of God with Israel which in- 
 volves a tremendous miscarriage of the 
 Divine purpose. It was the best that even 
 transcendent spiritual genius could at that 
 time achieve, but as applied to Israel it is 
 utterly incredible as a statement of the 
 whole truth ; and when applied to the na- 
 tions of the earth contemporary with Israel, 
 and to the teeming millions of the entire 
 historic and prehistoric periods of human 
 life, it becomes monstrous. If it is a true 
 description of the Divine method with 
 humanity, it must break down all confi- 
 dence in the power and goodness of God. 
 If it is anything more than a half truth, a 
 merely introductory statement preparing 
 the way for the larger truth, it excludes all 
 idea of a future life for man, and it makes 
 intelligent trust in the Creator impossible. 
 One cannot avoid the feeling that a cer-
 
 72 Illogical Limitations 
 
 tain injustice is done a great spiritual 
 leader by isolating one of his ideas from 
 its context, and by giving it an application 
 which perhaps he never meant to give to 
 it. It may be that as a doctrine for this 
 world it was subordinate in his thought 
 to some larger conception for whose utter- 
 ance he might have felt that the times 
 were not ripe. Still the idea of the salva- 
 tion of the remnant accords so well with the 
 doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and 
 with other theories of limitation about to be 
 mentioned, that, even at the risk of seem- 
 ing to do dishonor to a permanent inspirer 
 of men, it is necessary to show the total 
 inconsistency of one of his conceptions, 
 when converted into a finished philosophy 
 of history, and made to cover the entire 
 career of man with the belief in the moral 
 perfection of God. No believer in the 
 salvation of a remnant only can show the 
 slightest ground in moral reason for belief 
 in anything that is worth believing. 
 
 This leads to the church doctrine of elec-
 
 Illogical Limitations 75 
 
 tion which still stands in many of the pop- 
 ular creeds, and which is taught in nearly 
 all the theological systems from Augustine 
 to Shedd. Again, it must be said that 
 with the conditions which these thinkers 
 imposed upon themselves it was impos- 
 sible to do other than they did. To those 
 who believed that one text of Scripture 
 carried as much authority as another, a 
 restricted theory of salvation was a neces- 
 sity. Where criticism of the contents of 
 the Bible was forbidden, where the deter- 
 mination of all Biblical truth by the abso- 
 lute moralism of Christ was not insisted 
 upon, where it was incumbent upon the 
 believer to construct his creed from the 
 whole body of the Scriptures, any other 
 conclusion than that at which he arrived 
 was out of the question. The patristic 
 Augustine, the reformer Calvin, and the 
 puritan Edwards were each like a Sam- 
 son shorn of his strength trying to defy 
 the Philistines. The conditions made suc- 
 cessful resistance hopeless from the start.
 
 J4 Illogical Limitations 
 
 And there are few sadder or more tragic 
 scenes in the history of the higher thought 
 of the world than the spectacle of these 
 mighty thinkers, sightless in the presence 
 of the most fundamental of all the moral 
 problems of man, grinding in the prison 
 of the great adversaries of faith, and thus 
 contributing to the support of the unbelief 
 against which they had contended all their 
 lives. The memory of the heroic charac- 
 ter, by which it will be found at last that 
 they slew more than by all their deftly 
 constructed orthodoxies, does indeed soften 
 regret for their errors, and confers upon 
 them a clear title to grateful and everlast- 
 ing remembrance. They are here referred 
 to as the great advocates of the theological 
 doctrine of election, a doctrine which 
 destroys the grand premise for belief in 
 the immortality of man, because it makes 
 the conception of the moral perfection of 
 God empty and incredible. The sorest in- 
 justice to the thinkers named above is 
 done, not by those who practice upon them
 
 Illogical Limitations 75 
 
 a wise selection and a reasonable rejection, 
 but by those who perpetuate their errors ; 
 errors for which it is easy to find palliating 
 circumstances in the case of the masters, 
 but for which, in the conditions of their 
 disciples of to-day, there can be no valid 
 excuse. Election as it has prevailed, and 
 as it is to be feared it still prevails in many 
 places, election and faith in a moral 
 Deity are conceptions mutually and eter- 
 nally exclusive. 
 
 The form which the ancient idea of the 
 limitation upon God's interest in man most 
 frequently bears in our time is that of 
 opportunity of salvation for this life only. 
 Character for eternity is fixed in time. In 
 this way it is thought a grander earnest- 
 ness will attach itself to human endeavor, 
 a more solemn and tremendous importance 
 to the present opportunity. The motives 
 which have led to the restriction of the 
 moral opportunity for man to this world 
 have been, in many cases at least, of the 
 noblest character. They have been, in
 
 yd Illogical Limitations 
 
 the first instance, motives of fidelity to the 
 Bible and its teachings ; and in the second, 
 they have risen out of the passionate desire 
 to guard the interests of righteousness. 
 The mistake of the position was twofold. 
 The Bible was made for man, not man for 
 the Bible ; and the book must be made 
 subservient to the Christian interests of 
 life. The other mistake was in supposing 
 that the strenuousness of existence which 
 the view in question sought to guard, and 
 the idea of righteousness which it justly 
 held to be supreme, were in mortal peril 
 under the protection of any other view. 
 Those who refuse to limit the grace of 
 God to this world believe that righteous- 
 ness is its own safeguard, and that in con- 
 sequence human life retains its strenuous- 
 ness, made all the more impressive because 
 fired by a new confidence in God and a 
 larger hope for mankind. 
 
 It must now be said that a doctrine that 
 confines the moral opportunity of man to 
 this life undermines faith in the moral
 
 Illogical Limitations 77 
 
 character of God. To say that the Creator 
 has a supreme moral interest in human 
 beings, that he is full of compassion for 
 them, and offers to help them into the way 
 of righteousness during the brief and un- 
 certain period of their existence upon this 
 earth, but that after death his mood is one 
 of unalterable mercilessness toward all the 
 failures in time, and that the environment 
 of the future is so constructed as to make 
 the desire for ethical improvement sup- 
 posing it to exist, which is not at all un- 
 likely eternally ineffectual, is to destroy 
 forever the moral idea of God. Nor are 
 alleviations of this dismal hypothesis at all 
 sufficient ; such as the provision of a future 
 chance for those who have had no Chris- 
 tian opportunity upon earth. That makes 
 a bad conception a trifle less incredible, 
 but no more. It does not meet the ques- 
 tion, What does the perfect and immutable 
 character of God, as the Creator and Fa- 
 ther of men, necessitate in his relation to 
 the race ? The question is not what men
 
 j8 Illogical Limitations 
 
 deserve, but what God's honor demands. 
 The old theology, which is always to be 
 distinguished from the old religion and em- 
 phatically from the Christian religion, was 
 full of shuffle and sophism here. It con- 
 tended for the eternal willingness of God 
 to save ; threw the blame upon the lost ; 
 and all the while it knew perfectly well 
 that the willingness of man to accept salva- 
 tion is the final outcome of the willingness 
 of God to bestow it. The theory in ques- 
 tion draws a circle, larger or smaller as the 
 case may be, within which, at most, is gath- 
 ered an insignificant minority of the human 
 beings who have lived upon the earth, over 
 which the saving purpose of God extends, 
 but beyond which to the countless millions 
 who exist there he is compassionless and 
 implacable. Now this is the same thing 
 logically as to say that one can cut out a 
 circle in space, within which the law of 
 gravitation operates, and where the order 
 and beauty that always follow may be be- 
 held ; but beyond which there is no grav-
 
 Illogical Limitations 79 
 
 itation, no law of space, and where nothing 
 exists except chaos and utter contradiction. 
 The answer to such a wild fancy would be 
 that space is forever the same, that grav- 
 itation can be nowhere unless it is every- 
 where. And similarly the sufficient ex- 
 posure of the illogical theory in question 
 is contained in the bare statement that 
 God is the Father of lights, from whom 
 cometh down every good and perfect gift, 
 who is without variableness or the shadow 
 that is cast by turning. In all worlds God 
 is the same, and his moral interest in men 
 and his endeavor for them must be equal 
 to the duration of their existence. 
 
 The unrelenting assertion of the theory 
 of a probation for men for this life only, 
 coupled with the declaration that without 
 the knowledge of Jesus Christ salvation is 
 impossible, has told tremendously upon the 
 sublime inclination of human beings to 
 trust their Maker. This sort of thinking 
 and preaching has made men suspicious of 
 the Supreme Being, has broken down the
 
 8o Illogical Limitations 
 
 great expectation which all souls naturally 
 have from God, and has left them without 
 the premise that is indispensable for faith 
 in the future life confidence in the char- 
 acter of the Eternal. The old theodicies, 
 whether of the remnant, or election, or the 
 restriction of moral opportunity to this life, 
 rend asunder the ethical idea of God. 
 They are like old forts, to be praised for 
 the service they rendered in straitened 
 days, and at the same time to be univer- 
 sally abandoned, as no longer of any use, 
 except to the enemies of faith. Robert G. 
 Ingersoll and others like him depend for 
 their supplies upon a theory of the Bible 
 which every enlightened believer has left 
 behind him, and upon a philosophy of the 
 Christian religion utterly discredited by 
 the moral reason of man, and above all by 
 the Christian religion itself.
 
 VIII 
 
 The New Humanity 
 
 HE advent of the doctrine of evo- 
 lution has done much to discredit 
 old notions of the relation of God 
 to mankind. The vista of humanity which 
 it has opened to the mind of our time is so 
 vast and bewildering that religious think- 
 ers everywhere have felt compelled, as in 
 the light of a further revelation of God, to 
 reinterpret old beliefs. With the entire 
 field of humanity fairly within sight, with 
 even but an imperfect sense of the reach 
 and fullness of the spaces that beings like 
 ourselves have peopled, standing only in 
 the early dawn of this wide and wondrous 
 day, it has been found impossible to work 
 the old ideas of limitation, whether rem- 
 nant, election, or probation restricted to 
 this life. For such minds the work of ref-
 
 82 The New Humanity 
 
 utation is already accomplished ; the new 
 wine has burst the old wine-skins. No 
 intelligent person who for an hour takes 
 in the new situation, and allows it its legiti- 
 mate influence upon the mind, can ever 
 again support the traditional idea which 
 limits God's saving interest in the race to 
 this earth. A new humanity has arisen, in 
 number exceeding the stars. It is too vast 
 and noble to be consigned to perdition, 
 unless all men are so consigned ; and it is 
 too crude for any sphere except one full of 
 incentives to progress. It is this new hu- 
 manity that the religious thinker of to-day 
 must reckon with, whose semi-brutal char- 
 acter and amazing capacities for ethical 
 improvement he must equally acknowledge, 
 and whom he must cover with the everlast- 
 ing mercy of God. 
 
 It must further be observed that the 
 goal of evolution has given new strength 
 to hope. The cosmic process aims at the 
 improvement of life, and when it fails here, 
 as it has hitherto failed in the decided
 
 The New Humanity 83 
 
 ethical improvement of mankind in general, 
 it need not be held that the failure is final. 
 The purpose to lift life to its highest pos- 
 sible level, which is what the doctrine of 
 natural selection means, need not be more, 
 in the case of man, than a purpose tempo- 
 rarily defeated. There is nothing to forbid 
 the supposition that the cosmic or Divine 
 endeavor will be renewed upon another 
 and happier field. The idea of an end 
 toward which everything moves according 
 to its kind is one full of the richest prom- 
 ise. Anything more than temporary de- 
 feat is too tremendous an accusation to 
 bring against the universe, especially in 
 the sphere of its highest endeavor, and in 
 the case of its final product in time. The 
 doctrine of final causes, the idea of ends, 
 and the responsibility of the universe for 
 their fulfillment, has gained new strength 
 and impressiveness from evolution. 
 
 What may be termed the reversal of 
 the method of animal evolution, when the 
 process arrives at the character of human
 
 84 The New Humanity 
 
 beings, and which Dr. John Fiske has pre- 
 sented so strikingly in his " Destiny of 
 Man," is another freshly open fountain of 
 moral hope. The love of life, and the vic- 
 torious struggle for it against countless 
 enemies, which has been perhaps the main, 
 although by no means the unmodified or 
 only method of advance in the animal 
 world, undergoes revision and even rever- 
 sal, when evolution reaches the higher 
 possibilities of the human race. The sense 
 of justice upon which civilization depends, 
 the sentiment of pity without which man 
 cannot be man, the passion of love the sov- 
 ereignty of which would mean the perfec- 
 tion of human character, call for the pre- 
 dominance of purposes that are other than 
 self-regarding. If self-regarding purposes 
 are still retained, as they ever must be, 
 they are nevertheless transformed, and the 
 self is no longer the isolated and Ishmael- 
 itish self whose hand is against every other 
 hand, but the self that is in accord with 
 the Universal Self, and whose perpetual
 
 The New Humanity 85 
 
 prayer is " Not my will, but thine, be 
 done." 
 
 This new epoch, opened up by the be- 
 ginning of the serious and more constant 
 development of the moral life of the race, 
 projects upon the horizon of the future the 
 fairest hopes. The transfer is from a realm 
 ethical only by anticipation, moral only by 
 tendency and aspiration, to one where mo- 
 rality is the sovereign consideration. We 
 are no longer in the flesh but in the spirit. 
 Henceforth, having been lifted into the 
 sphere of the spirit, into the order of a 
 universe whose law is love, we are to dis- 
 cover, so far as we can, its character and 
 scope, and to consider what pledges it 
 gives concerning the destiny of mankind. 
 And upon this level the very idea of de- 
 velopment, as setting forth the universal 
 method of the Creator, becomes prophetic. 
 When man's ethical nature is reached, and 
 where so much room and material for de- 
 velopment exist, it would seem to be not a 
 violent inference from evolution to suppose
 
 86 The New Humanity 
 
 that this world is but the first stage in the 
 moral discipline of the race ; that there are 
 other worlds to follow where the discipline 
 is continued, and that in the line of this 
 consideration the magnificence of the old 
 words appear : 
 
 " I have seen an end of all perfection, 
 But thy commandment is exceeding broad." l 
 
 If evolution is to be theistically employed, 
 and employed in no other way can it 
 consistently be, the amazing sense of 
 humanity which it inspires must work 
 freedom from inadequate notions of the 
 relation of God to mankind, the goal at 
 which it aims must create expectations of 
 a renewed and successful endeavor for the 
 race, the reversal of its method must open 
 to faith a Divine universe, where the pro- 
 vision for the ascent of man is the old 
 vision of Origen transfigured, of an infinite 
 stairway of worlds reaching to the throne 
 of God. 
 
 The main value, however, in the present 
 
 1 Ps. cxix. 96.
 
 The New Humanity 87 
 
 discussion of the doctrine of evolution is 
 in forcing an alternative. The mass of 
 humanity which it rolls into the field of 
 vision is so great that the moral concep- 
 tion of the universe must either rise to 
 meet the new emergency or perish. If 
 the moral view of man's life shall insist 
 upon identifying itself with theories of the 
 remnant, election, or probation confined to 
 this life, it is simply taking steps to de- 
 stroy itself. For no man in his senses 
 can survey the bewildering total of human- 
 ity that evolution puts before him, and 
 admit that the saving interest of God in 
 mankind ceases at death, and still believe 
 that God is a moral being. It is either 
 something other and infinitely better than 
 this, or it is nothing. The moral view of 
 the universe, by which is understood the 
 utter righteousness and fatherly kindness 
 of the Supreme Being, must fight for its 
 life. To meet the necessities of the case 
 presented by the new humanity, it must 
 itself undergo evolution. It is for this
 
 88 The New Humanity 
 
 great service that the believer in God 
 should be most grateful to evolution. It 
 drives him back upon the deepest concep- 
 tion in his faith, it compels him to con- 
 sider afresh the significance of the idea 
 of righteousness, it forces him to an al- 
 ternative. Either this world is a moral 
 world, or it is not ; if it is a moral world, 
 the Creator's redeeming interest in man- 
 kind must continue forever. If the limi- 
 tation put upon the Divine purpose by the 
 Latin theology, and by what still passes 
 among us in all denominations for ortho- 
 doxy, is true, every man who understands, 
 in the least degree, the waste of life that 
 this involves over the unmeasured ex- 
 panses of time must abandon faith in the 
 moral perfection of God. If this is true, 
 men have no Father in heaven ; if men 
 have a Father in heaven, this is not true ! 
 One must either surrender as vain the 
 moral view of the world, or, holding it as 
 valid, take advantage of the irresistible 
 logic of it, stake everything upon the full
 
 The New Humanity 89 
 
 and magnificent idea, and stand by a faith 
 that fills the universe with light, the old 
 faith that " God is light, and in him is no 
 darkness at all." 1 
 
 1 I John i. 5.
 
 IX 
 
 The New Theatre for the Absolute Moral 
 Purpose 
 
 E are thus introduced to the new 
 theatre of the Absolute Moral 
 Purpose. The entire period of 
 humanity upon this earth is covered by it ; 
 the total drama of man's existence in this 
 world is the revelation of the beginning of 
 God's endeavor to bring his sons home to 
 glory. The universe in its total relation 
 to man is a moral, or, if the term be pre- 
 ferred, a redemptive universe. As man's 
 highest attainment is his hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness, so the sublimest beati- 
 tude of God himself would seem to be 
 the eternal passion to make righteousness 
 sovereign over all his moral creatures. 
 Man's field of service for time is the world ; 
 God's for eternity is the universe that he
 
 The Absolute Moral Purpose gi 
 has made, in so far as it is capable of shar- 
 ing his life. 
 
 This view of the sphere of the Divine 
 purpose is held as the inevitable conclu- 
 sion from a consistent moral scheme of 
 the universe ; above all it is held as the 
 sole logical issue of the absolute moralism 
 of Jesus Christ. It is with the moral char- 
 acter of God, the moral order of the world, 
 the moral condition and hope of man, the 
 moral nature of his own mission, and the 
 transcendent moral effect in history of 
 his own career, that the mind of Christ 
 is incessantly and absorbingly occupied. 
 Everything is placed and everything is 
 judged according to a sovereign moral con- 
 ception, and the apostles who say that God 
 is love are but giving epigrammatic ex- 
 pression to the entire body of their Mas- 
 ter's teaching. It is this conception at 
 its best, accepted directly from Christ the 
 supreme master of it, that believers to-day 
 are to handle against its great adversary, 
 the conception of a universe indifferent to
 
 92 The Absolute Moral Purpose 
 
 the fate of its own highest achievements, 
 and regardless of man in his origin, career, 
 and destiny, without purpose and without 
 heart, hurrying forward to the grave at 
 express speed all the human life upon this 
 planet, and drowning all in the abysses of 
 eternal death. 
 
 It is not forgotten, and to obviate mis- 
 understanding it is here and now recalled, 
 that fine views do not necessarily make 
 fine men, that a grand theological scheme 
 does not of itself alone reconstruct bad 
 character, transform wicked society, and 
 institute the kingdom of God upon the 
 earth. It is distinctly borne in mind and 
 solemnly cherished, that the achievement 
 of moral character by men and families and 
 by human society at large involves a pro- 
 cess of long continuance and of the utmost 
 strenuousness. Seriousness in the pres- 
 ence of the momentous moral task of ex- 
 istence is the only permissible mood. Of 
 that which has been from the beginning, 
 both the shameful creation and the inex-
 
 The Absolute Moral Purpose 93 
 
 pressible affliction of mankind, of human 
 sin, it is impossible to entertain views too 
 profound, so long as we do not date it 
 from the Eternal, nor make God responsi- 
 ble for its permanence. The way up from 
 the animal condition into that of the per- 
 fected son of God remains an agony and 
 a bloody sweat. Nothing can change that 
 pathway of torture and tears, nothing can 
 mitigate its iron and everlasting necessi- 
 ties. At the same time the struggling will 
 desires to know whether the process is a 
 reality, whether the sore travail is ever to 
 come to the birth, whether the universe 
 is for man or against him when he sets his 
 heart upon the moral ideal. A creed is a 
 necessity for human action ; for it is sim- 
 ply the plan of campaign, with the sum of 
 the motives that flow from it, which make 
 struggle rational and the hope of victory 
 possible. No creed at all paralyzes the 
 will and eliminates it from the problem of 
 living ; a bad creed distorts the character 
 and arrests the development of power ; the
 
 94 The Absolute Moral Purpose 
 highest possible creed, the absolute moral- 
 ism of Christ, gives the largest inspiration 
 and the profoundest justification to the 
 best thoughts and activities of man. The 
 effort, therefore, to reach the better belief 
 is always an effort in the interest of the 
 better behavior. 
 
 It will also be found that the view here 
 advanced upon philosophical grounds is 
 not without wide support in the writings 
 of the New Testament outside of the 
 utterances of Christ. Some of the sub- 
 limest passages in the epistles of Paul are 
 severely let alone, as leading the mind in 
 unorthodox directions. The assertion of 
 the universality of the Divine purpose in 
 the eleventh chapter of Romans is sel- 
 dom noted ; nor the Pauline pantheism in 
 the fifteenth of the first letter to the Cor- 
 inthians ; nor again the mighty faith that 
 of Him, and through Him, and unto Him 
 are all things. 1 The absoluteness of the 
 moral views, the sovereignty of the Divine 
 
 1 Romans xi. 36 ; Hebrews ii. 10.
 
 The Absolute Moral Purpose 95 
 
 universe expressed in these and similar 
 passages, will yet create a literature more 
 abundant and infinitely nobler than that 
 which other sentences, isolated from them, 
 and thus made to conflict with them, have 
 generated. Students of the literary records 
 of the teachings of Christ and his apostles 
 should be slow to admit that the religion 
 that has, as matter of history, created the 
 moral view of the universe, can be right- 
 fully employed to support limitations upon 
 its sovereignty that destroy it altogether.
 
 X 
 
 Determinism and Freedom 
 
 HE scheme here outlined may 
 raise against itself the objection 
 that it is a determinism in the 
 interest of universal salvation. As to uni- 
 versal salvation, no scheme is to be iden- 
 tified with that doctrine simply because it 
 faces that way, works toward it as an ulti- 
 mate goal, and even hopes for such an 
 issue from the moral travail of Christian 
 history, unless it shall go a step farther 
 and dogmatically affirm the restoration of 
 all. The dogmatic assertion of the salva- 
 tion of all men is universalism, as com- 
 monly understood, and nothing else is. 
 The interest of the view maintained is 
 concerned, not with matters of fact, not 
 with things which the completed history 
 of the world alone can determine, but
 
 Determinism and Freedom 97 
 
 with purpose, aim, outlook, tendency, and 
 legitimate hope. A protest is hereby en- 
 tered, therefore, against the identification 
 of the scheme here advanced with the doc- 
 trine known as universal salvation. 
 
 As to the charge of determinism, even 
 if it were true, it is difficult to see how it 
 should be theologically objectionable. Au- 
 gustinianism, Calvinism, and Edwardean- 
 ism are all forms of determinism, and it 
 is impossible to name any really great sys- 
 tem of theology that is not open to the 
 same characterization. The trouble with 
 these schemes is not that they are forms 
 of determinism, but that their determin- 
 ism is of an objectionable kind. Where 
 the purpose of God is held to control all 
 things, as in these systems, and where 
 that purpose secures eternal life for some 
 before the foundations of the world, and 
 permits eternal death for others from a 
 similar antecedence in time, the remedy 
 for the evil is not with the Arminian and 
 the Wesleyan in the denial of the absolute-
 
 p8 Determinism and Freedom 
 
 ness of the Divine decree, but in the trans- 
 formation of it into accord with the moral 
 perfection of the Creator. Make the de- 
 terminism universal, a fixed and inclusive 
 purpose and movement for righteousness, 
 a comprehensive device ceaselessly striving 
 to realize itself in the life of the entire 
 human race in this world and in all worlds, 
 and reconstructed Augustinianism, or Cal- 
 vinism, or Edwardeanism must remain for- 
 ever in the best thought of mankind. The 
 question at issue, so far as it concerns the- 
 ology, is not between determinism and in- 
 determinism, but between the moral and 
 the immoral forms of that sovereign con- 
 ception. 
 
 When the student approaches this sub- 
 ject from the side of philosophy, he has to 
 bear in mind that the charge of fatalism 
 may be brought, with considerable plausi- 
 bility, against the system of every philoso- 
 pher from Plato to Hegel. Whenever a 
 thinker begins with the Universal, when- 
 ever the starting - point is found in the
 
 Determinism and Freedom 99 
 
 Absolute, whenever the Divine plan of the 
 universe, of human history, the course of 
 nations, the fortune of families, the career 
 of individuals, absorbs the philosopher, the 
 explication of the grand movement of the 
 idea is sure to open the way for the charge 
 of fatalism. The assumption or the dis- 
 covery of the Infinite, the finding and 
 the working of the Divine plan for the 
 dependent universe, will always wear the 
 appearance of antagonism to the idea of 
 human freedom. 
 
 But after all, appearance is not reality. 
 And subtle, perplexing, ultimately insolu'- 
 ble although the problem of moral neces- 
 sity and moral freedom may be, it is not 
 the blank inconceivability that it is often 
 represented as being. Determinism and 
 freedom come near being but different 
 sides of the same truth. The case in 
 which this general statement may best be 
 tested is the history of mankind. The 
 problem before the mind of the Creator, 
 let it be said, is the movement of the
 
 too Determinism and Freedom 
 
 human race, from potential into actual and 
 perfected manhood. The movement, so 
 far as can be seen, is possible only on 
 three assumptions : first, that God is Infi- 
 nite Reason ; second, that men are essen- 
 tially and permanently reasonable beings ; 
 third, that the goal of the Divine purpose 
 is the highest good of the race. Unless 
 the movement is of the Eternal Reason 
 upon beings essentially reasonable, for an 
 end intrinsically good, it must be a move- 
 ment without law, without justification, 
 uncertain and vain. But beginning from 
 these three suppositions, the reasonable- 
 ness of God, of men in their essential char- 
 acter, and of the goal of history, it does not 
 seem difficult to see that freedom is the 
 same thing as rational necessity, that de- 
 terminism is nothing other than the victo- 
 rious march of the Divine persuasions in 
 behalf of the highest good of mankind. 
 Certainly, as matter of fact, the power to 
 resist temporarily the Divine persuasions 
 is lodged in man ; but this is in conse-
 
 Determinism and Freedom 101 
 quence of the irrationality that he has 
 brought up with him from the animal 
 world ; and in saying that it was fastened 
 upon him by his Maker, the case for 
 freedom is not even damaged. For the 
 power to resist the immediate realization 
 of the best wisdom of the world cannot 
 surely be defined as the essence of free- 
 dom. This is simply the defect of man, 
 the irrationality out of which come all the 
 retarding forces in human society. 
 
 It is, no doubt, the entanglement of the 
 rational and irrational in man that is the 
 sore spot in the history of the race. The 
 conjunction of the two in the human per- 
 sonality is the work of our Maker ; the 
 early entanglement of the two is the 
 outgrowth of that condition ; the chronic 
 and extreme nature of the entanglement 
 is due to the weakness of reason in man, 
 to its failure to refresh itself from God, 
 and build itself upon offered power into 
 practical invincibility. The guilt of man 
 is not primarily for his weakness, nor for
 
 IO2 Determinism and Freedom 
 
 the wrong that is the issue of it ; but 
 for the strength that he refuses to absorb, 
 and for the right that he thereby fails to 
 serve. Reason is self-conscious, open to 
 the influence of the Infinite Reason, and 
 with the purpose for the highest good 
 which is native to it, forever present in it. 
 But in man this rational character is in 
 association with an irrational force, and 
 hence the duel of human history. The 
 presence and persistence of moral evil in 
 the world is proximately due to the failure 
 of the weak human reason to re-create 
 itself out of the Eternal Reason. 
 
 However, to furnish final satisfaction 
 upon the immense problem of the origin 
 of moral evil is not the task of this essay. 
 The question on hand is the nature of 
 freedom as related to determinism. And 
 it must be repeated that determinism sim- 
 ply means that, inasmuch as God is a rea- 
 sonable Being, and proposes for man a 
 reasonable good ; and inasmuch as man is 
 essentially and permanently a reasonable
 
 Determinism and Freedom 103 
 
 creature, it would appear that the Divine 
 persuasions must be finally availing. It 
 is therefore no other than the highest as- 
 sertion of human freedom and the strong- 
 est warrant for the reality of it, to declare 
 one's faith in the continuous progress of 
 God's reasonable and glorious purpose for 
 the race, and to hope and labor for its ulti- 
 mate triumph. The triumph of God's 
 purpose would mean the victory of right- 
 eousness over iniquity, the complete eman- 
 cipation of man from the dominion of the 
 irrational within him, the transformation 
 of his entire personality into the unity 
 and peace of reason, and the enrichment 
 of that personality with the possession of 
 the highest conceivable moral good. 
 
 In this process of transformation even 
 the irrational is converted into a helper. 
 It becomes the limit against which the rea- 
 son pushes itself into clearer self -conscious- 
 ness, the afflicting Philistine that rouses 
 the inward Samson to moral hostility, the 
 devil in hatred of whom the love of good-
 
 Determinism and Freedom 
 
 ness swells to a passion. The force of an- 
 tagonism is thus broken into the service of 
 rational illumination. It is as when the 
 rainbow appears. The white light, in its 
 swift career, runs against the sharp edge 
 of the dark cloud, and out flows the stream 
 of living beauty, as from a celestial wound. 
 And so long as God remains Eternal Rea- 
 son, so long as man continues a reasonable 
 being, and so long as his Maker proposes 
 for him a reasonable good, and moves upon 
 that good in the strength of Divine per- 
 suasions, moral necessity and moral free- 
 dom will mean but different names for the 
 same reality.
 
 XI 
 
 Tbe Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 E come now to the ultimate posi- 
 tion upon which belief in the im- 
 mortality of man stands. That 
 position is often little understood by the 
 unbeliever. Whether he is right or 
 wrong, the affirmative thinker believes 
 that he has transcended himself, that he 
 has gone over to the divine side of the 
 universe, and that he has heard the verdict 
 of the Infinite in favor of man. He lives 
 in the progressive verification of the three 
 great postulates of the endless life, the 
 moral perfection of God, the reasonable- 
 ness of the universe, and the worth of ex- 
 istence. The explanation of his supposed 
 discovery will serve to make plain the final 
 ground of his belief ; at the same time it 
 will be his best defense.
 
 106 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 Probably the deepest wish of a serious 
 mind, in regard to life after death, is for 
 an outside, an unbiased, a higher and 
 wholly competent judgment upon the ques- 
 tion. The believer is afraid that because 
 it is his own case he may not judge up- 
 rightly upon it. This is true of believing 
 human opinion generally. There is at 
 times a profound suspicion against its im- 
 partiality, against its honesty, against its 
 competence. A lawyer does not expect 
 from his excited client a judicial view of 
 his own case. His interests have dis- 
 turbed the balance of his mind, have 
 spoiled the clearness of his vision. A 
 statesman must often revise and some- 
 times reject the notion of the public good 
 framed by his constituents. They have 
 unwittingly identified their own welfare 
 with that of the nation. It is not to be 
 expected that they can take a disinterested 
 view of the situation. And in the same 
 way, a man thinking philosophically upon 
 life after death begins to suspect the in-
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite wj 
 
 tegrity of his own thoughts. His feelings 
 are deeply involved in the question. He 
 loves life, and he loves a few souls better 
 than life. He would like to be able to 
 believe that the goodly fellowships begun 
 on earth are continued beyond the grave ; 
 that the inspiring pursuit of the ideal here 
 is permitted, under fairer conditions, in the 
 hereafter ; that the aspiration for truth and 
 beauty and character that gives dignity to 
 the whole struggle in time is to be satisfied 
 in the Eternal. But precisely because he 
 wishes it he suspects his judgment. The 
 worn faces of those from whom he drew 
 his life, the cry of his children, the voice 
 of youth, and the whole tenderness and 
 prophetic beauty of human existence, ap- 
 peal to him with so much power that he 
 must decide in their favor. 
 
 And so a serious man desires to see 
 himself as others see him, as the universe 
 beholds him, as the Eternal regards him. 
 He longs for a voice from the superhuman 
 world, from the great outside, unbiased,
 
 io8 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 and Infinite Life. He feels that it would 
 be an indescribable comfort if there were 
 any way of interrogating the Almighty and 
 of getting his judgment upon the case. 
 He has become weary of his own thoughts ; 
 he cries out for a word from God. And as 
 the seer when surveying Israel, not on its 
 best side, nor on its worst, but from the 
 elevation where he could see the whole 
 people, when he broke forth in blessings 
 upon them, his outside and prophetic judg- 
 ment must have been of great value ; so it 
 would be an unspeakable satisfaction to 
 man if some one could repeat to him the 
 verdict of the Infinite upon human life. 
 
 Now this is precisely the intellectual 
 attitude of faith. It believes that it has an 
 assurance from the unseen, a judgment de- 
 livered from the other side, an opinion that 
 is favorable, and at the same time final. 
 It is essential that this position be clearly 
 understood. Faith proclaims itself to be 
 the immediate vision of its object. Its 
 great beatitude is, "The pure in heart shall
 
 The Verdict of the' Infinite 109 
 
 see God," not infer his existence, or take 
 it for granted, or prove it by piling proba- 
 bilities to the sky. The pure in heart shall 
 see God, include his being in the rapture 
 of immediate vision. Faith thus finds 
 God, enters into communion with him, 
 substitutes his thoughts for its own, learns 
 to live out of his mind and heart, goes over 
 to his side for the truth, and comes back 
 to support itself by the strength it has 
 found. This is the great note of faith. It 
 carries in its heart the assurance that it 
 has abandoned its original position of iso- 
 lation, ignorance, and fear. It is a sort of 
 solitary Columbus. The great mariner left 
 the old world behind, abandoned its bar- 
 ren security, put out to sea, sailed onward 
 into a long succession of sunsets, crossed 
 at length the unknown deep, found a new 
 world, stored his ship with its riches, and 
 returned with his vast prize. A similar 
 feat faith believes that it has performed. 
 It has a surmise, a dream, a conviction of 
 the living God. It will not rest in its iso-
 
 n o The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 lation and poverty. It abandons its past, 
 sets out in search of the Eternal, goes 
 sounding on its dim and perilous way, 
 sights the Divine Reality at last, lands 
 upon God's side of the universe, enters 
 into a sublime league with him, fills its 
 heart with his judgments, and returns to 
 live and die by them. The thing to be 
 noted is that the intelligent Christian be- 
 lieves in immortality, not primarily because 
 he thinks it is true, or hopes it may be 
 true, or sees no reason why it should not 
 be true ; but because he feels that some- 
 how he has reached the mind of God upon 
 the question. He has carried his case to 
 the Highest, and has had the verdict of the 
 Highest returned in his favor. 
 
 This is the intellectual position occupied 
 by faith, and the next task is to ascertain, 
 if possible, the paths by which the believer 
 leaves himself and crosses over to the Di- 
 vine side of the universe. Columbus had 
 the sea and his ships ; and the believer is 
 not without tides that set toward the Eter-
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 1 1 1 
 
 nal, nor is he destitute of means to ride 
 upon their calm or tumultuous currents. 
 For close at hand are the great instincts 
 that plead for the dignity and permanence 
 of man. There is an instinct that assures 
 every man of the reality of the external 
 world. Analyze that reality as you may, 
 construe it as you please, it is there as 
 reality, attested by a feeling that is uni- 
 versal and practically invincible. Science 
 accepts the external world on the strength 
 of that feeling ; and every form of idealism 
 that is not wild will admit that, however 
 impossible it may be to pass beyond the 
 human consciousness or to recognize in it 
 a reality foreign to its nature, still the voice 
 of another is heard in its halls, the pres- 
 ence of another is beheld in its home. 
 Upon the witness of a feeling, the trade, 
 the science, the whole fruitful movement 
 of the outward life, goes on. The reality of 
 the cosmos is first of all given in feeling ; 
 the intellectual justifications are elaborated 
 from the testimony of that simple and su-
 
 ii2 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 preme witness. A corresponding feeling 
 vouches for the reality of the moral uni- 
 verse and for the permanence of man's re- 
 lation to it. The sense of a universal moral 
 order and its unlimited claim upon the hu- 
 man soul are facts in the feelings, at least, 
 of civilized man. These divinations of a 
 transcendent world, these contacts with a 
 supernal reality, these feelings induced by 
 a presence other than human, are under- 
 neath all belief, are, indeed, the mother of 
 all faith. To their persistence and creative 
 power we owe the great worlds elaborated 
 by spiritual insight. They are the ultimate 
 fountains in our humanity, and wherever 
 they are unchoked they create the river of 
 God. Their true history seems to be that 
 they are in us, yet not altogether of us. 
 They pass through the highways of our life 
 like the wire-paths for the electric current 
 in the street ; they carry forward with in- 
 exhaustible vigor the best work of human- 
 ity. But they do not seem to begin or end 
 with this earth. They are God's lightning,
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 drawn out of heaven, stored in human 
 hearts, and spread through human society 
 to do God's work. Their character bids us 
 look for a worthy cause. These feelings 
 would seem to result within men from the 
 order of their nature, spoken to by God in 
 the night, and answering him in the dark- 
 ness and out of the depths. They would 
 appear to be the tides of our being that fol- 
 low the pull of his power, the secret and 
 sublime gravitation of the heart into faith 
 in response to the call of the Almighty. 
 While the universe is so great, and rea- 
 son in the multitude is so low, these high 
 instincts will continue to be one of the 
 strongest supports of belief in the perma- 
 nence of man. They do not represent our 
 wishes ; they are not here because we have 
 invited them. They represent the Maker 
 of mankind ; they are his ambassadors, and 
 they bring their credentials from the Eter- 
 nal. They are here as the sea is here at 
 the flood, because the universe rolled them 
 hither, because God sent them. Why
 
 ii4 Tbe Verdict of the Infinite 
 should the believer not trust these high 
 feelings that originate, not in his will, but 
 in his nature, these surges from the eternal 
 deep that carry upon their white crests and 
 toss upon their glorious spray the verdict 
 of the Infinite in favor of the life everlast- 
 ing ? 
 
 Kinship with the Infinite, or what in 
 religious phraseology is called sonship, is 
 another path to the Divine side. If a man 
 should meet a being whose language, signs 
 for thought, and symbols for the world 
 were wholly different from his own, with 
 absolutely no point of contact between 
 them, he would never be able to arrive at 
 any knowledge of that being. Kinship be- 
 tween them existing nowhere, it would be 
 impossible ever to come to a mutual under- 
 standing. They would be to one another 
 like the stone faces that stare at each other 
 from the opposite columns of some gate. 
 It would be sphinx looking at sphinx in 
 endless perplexity and everlasting silence. 
 In the same way, if the Infinite by which
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 115 
 
 man's life is surrounded were like this 
 strange being, an absolute and eternal con- 
 trast to humanity, knowledge itself would 
 be impossible. One would be permanently 
 unable to discover anything, to find thought 
 in the heavens above, or in the earth be- 
 neath ; to understand the figure and motion 
 of the globe, the orbits and orders of the 
 stars; to reach any sort of science upon 
 any subject whatever. In that case the 
 universe and human beings would be to 
 one another as Job and his friends : they 
 would sit down in silence, look at each 
 other in dumb surprise, and marvel at the 
 common and eternal perplexity. 
 
 Because we do know men and things ; 
 because the world lends itself to thought, 
 melts into the receptivities of sense, runs 
 into the forms of the understanding, rises 
 into a unity that corresponds to the per- 
 sonal unity of the soul ; because the world 
 is an intelligible world, we believe that it is 
 alive with mind, that it is an expression of 
 the Infinite Mind, and that in reading its
 
 u6 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 order we are reaching his plan. The plan 
 of the human mind in sense, in under- 
 standing, and in the personal spirit, is mar- 
 velously adjusted to the surrounding and 
 infinite universe. If men were not consti- 
 tuted in a certain way the cosmic force 
 could not give them all substantially the 
 same experience in the senses. The " sun- 
 shine is a glorious birth " to the normal 
 human being everywhere ; the sound of 
 the going in the tops of the mulberry-trees 
 repeats its rhythm alike in the ears of 
 prophet and servant ; the rosebush wet with 
 dew sends its perfume into the faces of 
 all ; the fruit that is fair to the eye is dis- 
 covered to be sweet to the taste ; and the 
 solid earth supports the steps of the soli- 
 tary wayfarer and the tread of Caesar's 
 legions. There is thus adjustment between 
 the Infinite Force arid humari sensibility ; 
 there is this universal plan lying in the 
 receptivity, and that plan can be nothing 
 else than the device of our Maker. There 
 is the logical understanding with its forms
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 117 
 
 of thought. The world must be construed 
 as a world of substances, as substances in 
 relation, as substances that precede one an- 
 other, or that coexist, or that follow after. 
 Science is the application of these logical 
 forms to the impressions of sense ; and the 
 fact that they can be so applied shows a 
 universal order in the human intellect, and 
 an answering flexibility upon the part of 
 the cosmos that amounts to a marvelous 
 correspondence. Further, as man cannot 
 rest with mere multiplicity, nor with mul- 
 tiplicity in mere order ; as he must rise 
 to the highest form of unity, that of his 
 own soul, and try to construe the cosmos 
 through personality, he finds that again the 
 universe is tractable and gathers itself up 
 into the expression of one Supreme Intelli- 
 gence. This preadjustment between sensi- 
 bility and the Infinite, between the effect 
 of the Infinite in sensibility and the under- 
 standing, between the unity in the Infinite 
 and the unity in man, is self-evident ; and 
 it vindicates the belief that supports the
 
 / 1 8 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 entire intellectual toil of the race, that at 
 heart man and the universe are akin. Over 
 against the human mind in manifold mani- 
 festations there stands the universe. Know- 
 ledge is possible upon man's part, because 
 there is a mighty characteristic of identity 
 between them. Two idiots might look at 
 each other forever, and neither would be 
 able to make anything out of the other ; 
 and if one were an idiot and one a normal 
 human being, the same hopeless result 
 would follow. Nothing like knowledge is 
 possible between idiots, or between a sound 
 mind and an idiot. And similarly, between 
 an irrational creature and an irrational uni- 
 verse there could be no communion ; nor 
 could there be any fellowship between a 
 reasonable being and a world without rea- 
 son. As Dr. Fairbairn expresses it, " The 
 madman could make nothing of the sane 
 world, and the mad world would drive the 
 sane man mad." 
 
 Now, if the universe and man are at 
 heart akin, if in his inmost being man is
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 119 
 
 the image of his Maker, his son, it follows 
 that when the sonhood in man speaks, and 
 speaks for life everlasting, it is the God- 
 hood in man that speaks and speaks for life 
 everlasting. Sonhood in man is but the 
 expression of the Godhood beyond man ; 
 and when the sonhood declares its judg- 
 ment in favor of the deathless life, that 
 declaration is not of man but of God. 
 When the accredited ambassador speaks, 
 the king speaks ; and when the filial con- 
 sciousness in man attests his immortality 
 it simply records and transmits the verdict 
 of the Infinite. " If our heart condemn us 
 not, we have boldness toward God." l And 
 it must be forever borne in mind that the 
 belief in the divine sonship of man is not 
 something with which theology and religion 
 have alone to do. It is a belief that makes 
 possible the reality of science, the reality 
 of all knowledge whatsoever. 
 
 Still another path to the Eternal is the 
 truth of the ideal and man's answering 
 
 1 i John iii. 21.
 
 i2o The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 capacity. We do not discover our ideals ; 
 they discover us. They take us to the 
 housetop, as Samuel took Saul, and there 
 in the name of the new day that is break- 
 ing they tell us that we are kings. They 
 find us as the same seer found David among 
 the sheepfolds, lost to the dignity of exist- 
 ence under its dead monotony, and they 
 anoint us in the name of the Eternal. We 
 do not create our ideals ; we awake to be- 
 hold them bright with an everlasting light. 
 They do not originate in human hearts ; they 
 rise like the stars out of the Infinite. They 
 are objectively real, mountains at whose 
 base men are born, and whose steeps they 
 are to climb. They are the forms which 
 the ethical character of the Eternal assumes 
 in the human imagination, and their sublime 
 chant is, " Ye therefore shall be perfect, as 
 your heavenly Father is perfect." 1 They 
 are moulded by unseen hands and colored 
 by the light that enlighteneth every man 
 that cometh into the world. Their function 
 1 Matt. v. 48.
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 121 
 
 is like that of the chariot of fire and the 
 horses of fire that descended from heaven 
 and swept the man of God away. They 
 carry men out of their appetites, away from 
 sordidness ; they take them from the trivial- 
 ity and vanity of existence, snatch them 
 from the brute order of the actual, and in 
 fires and splendors and whirlwinds from the 
 Infinite transport them into the realm of 
 duty, the world of moral service and recom- 
 pense, the paradise of truth and peace. 
 And whoever speaks in the name of the 
 ideal speaks in the name of the Highest ; 
 whoever renders the verdict of the ideal 
 repeats the judgment of God. 
 
 At this point it is worth while to consider 
 for a moment the note of permanence in 
 man's existence in this world of change. 
 To those who have looked into the heart of 
 the process of knowledge, and who stand 
 outside the prejudices of philosophy, one of 
 two things seems necessarily true. Either 
 knowledge is a simple fact, incapable of 
 explanation, a sheer and everlasting mys-
 
 122 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 tery, or it is the work and expression of an 
 abiding self. If anything in metaphysics 
 has ever been proved, it is the impossibility 
 of accounting' for perception, memory, im- 
 agination, reasoning, and choice, with the 
 person who perceives, remembers, imagines, 
 reasons, and elects, wholly ignored and even 
 annihilated. Simple obstinacy prevails in 
 all departments of intellectual life, and will- 
 worship has been a great discredit to philo- 
 sophy. Experts engaged in a passionate 
 polemic have too often, in the history of 
 speculation, shown themselves possessed of 
 a marvelous faculty for the evasion of what 
 would seem to be a simple exposition of 
 reality. The evil can be ended only by 
 insight into the business on hand, by ask- 
 ing how the multiplicity in sense, in mem- 
 ory, in imagination, in reason, and in will 
 can be reduced to unity without the activ- 
 ity of the permanent soul. Science, his- 
 tory, art, philosophy, and character are our 
 greater unities, and it passes all comprehen- 
 sion how they can even appear to exist, if
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 123 
 
 they are not the varied expression of the 
 simple, perdurable, creative spirit in man. 
 How the notion of a universe ever dawned 
 upon a life that is a mere multiplicity, how 
 this ultimate and sublime unity ever ap- 
 peared upon the field of thronging sensa- 
 tions and incessant change, must remain an 
 absolute mystery. For after all the uni- 
 verse as it stands in human thought is not 
 given ; it is made. And again, how that 
 which has in itself no unity can yet work 
 this greatest of all wonders, this boundless 
 order that we name the universe, is a puz- 
 zle too hard for man to solve. The old 
 argument for immortality, from the fact of 
 continuance amid change, from the great 
 feature of identity and self -persistence in 
 the unresting flow of consciousness, is good 
 at least to the extent that it carries the 
 highest in man over into the category of 
 the things that abide. The rock that shows 
 its steadfast face above the sea thereby de- 
 clares that it is not a thing of ebbing and 
 flooding tides, of the waste created by form-
 
 124 Th* Verdict of the Infinite 
 ing or the increase brought by dissolving 
 clouds ; it discovers itself as part of the en- 
 during structure of the earth. There would 
 seem to be, in the fact of self-consciousness, 
 a certificate from the hand of the Creator 
 of superiority to the animal orders and their 
 fate. 
 
 In the moral sphere the unity which tKe 
 upright spirit actually possesses, and the 
 unity after which it hungers and thirsts, is 
 still more significant of the class of exist- 
 ences to which it would appear to belong. 
 To entertain a single supreme purpose 
 throughout life, as many good men have 
 done ; to order the entire capacity, so that 
 the greatest possible service may be ren- 
 dered to the elected cause, to Christianity 
 with Paul and Luther, Edwards and Chan- 
 ning ; to the emancipation of England with 
 Cromwell ; to the preservation of the Union 
 of the United States of America with Lin- 
 coln ; to the welfare of single communities 
 with a host of teachers and helpers of man- 
 kind, secures a moral unity for the human
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 125 
 
 career that is impressive indeed. And this 
 unity of device and endeavor is followed by 
 a subjective unity, by the life becoming all 
 of a piece and the piece of the best ; as the 
 apostle expresses it, " the simplicity that is 
 in Christ," a condition of existence where 
 the moral personality is harmonious, and 
 where the harmony is of the Highest. If 
 there be in the universe an Absolute Char- 
 acter, the characters which appear in good 
 men would seem to classify themselves with 
 him, and to reveal his purpose concerning 
 mankind. 
 
 When the fundamental unity of the men- 
 tal life is expressed in the persistent hold- 
 ing, through good report and through evil, to 
 one ultimate and ever-greatening ideal, and 
 in the steadfast and passionate effort at its 
 realization in human society ; when, through 
 these projections of itself in ever-brighten- 
 ing vision and in more consistent and heroic 
 endeavor, the inward man is slowly but 
 surely coming into concord with its su- 
 preme aim, there follows the aspiration for
 
 126 The l/erdict of tloe Infinite 
 union with the Highest, the consciousness 
 of fellowship with God, the note of perma- 
 nence that then marks the soul would seem 
 to be beyond dispute. Human life then ap- 
 pears as if it had gone over to the Divine 
 side of things, as if it had become an abid- 
 ing expression of the Infinite Character and 
 Purpose. It is this capacity t(^ share in the 
 thought of the Highest, this aptitude for a 
 life concurrent with the Universal Life, that 
 is the deepest prophecy of man's immortal- 
 ity. And when the capacity is turned, as 
 in multitudes of cases it has been, into an 
 ineffable experience, it would seem as if the 
 sense of everlastingness which it carries in 
 itself must be trustworthy. Speaking of 
 Dean Hansel's book, " The Limits of Reli- 
 gious Thought," Dr. Martineau writes, 
 "We should rejoice that it had been given 
 to the world if only for the reply which it 
 has called forth from Mr. Maurice, a 
 reply which is not merely the embodiment 
 of a completely opposite conviction, but the 
 insurrection of an outraged faith, the pro-
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 727 
 
 test of a whole character against a doctrine 
 which pronounces that all the springs of its 
 life have been delusions, and which tries to 
 pass off human notions of God in place of 
 God." * The denial of the Divine universe 
 is the denial of that which has been the 
 source of the best life of mankind. It is 
 not simply a polemic against a notion ; it is 
 a contest against the deepest reality, the 
 reality that feeds the character of the brave 
 and good. To tear the religious soul from 
 this ground of its existence is like uproot- 
 ing the tree. It means death. That at- 
 tempt may call forth intellectual defenses of 
 the immortality that is denied ; it must call 
 forth something infinitely deeper, "the in- 
 surrection of an outraged faith, the protest 
 of a whole character." 
 
 It must never be forgotten that humanity 
 is involved in this faith, that humanity is 
 its witness. Upon the great postulate or 
 assumption, in the teeth of much that seems 
 to contradict it, that God is absolutely good, 
 
 1 Essays, Philosophical and Theological, p. 283.
 
 128 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 humanity consciously and unconsciously is 
 making trial of its vast faith. It persists in 
 believing that the universe is reasonable, 
 and that human life in its best achievement, 
 in its best capacity, and in its enduring 
 moral need, is of permanent concern to the 
 Most High. Thus inspired it is working 
 out its own salvation. Through the higher 
 instincts, not of one man, but of all men ; 
 through the kinship to the Infinite, not of 
 single lives, but of all lives ; through the 
 ideals that dawn, not upon a few favored 
 individuals, but upon mankind ; finally, 
 through the great note of permanence in 
 the soul, the universe would seem to be 
 delivering its decree concerning the dignity 
 and destiny of the race. Nor would there 
 appear to be any assignable limit to this 
 witness when humanity as a whole shall 
 acknowledge its chief task in this world as 
 moral, and shall stand to it with something 
 like the full consecration of its power. The 
 ethical constitution of the race is plain, and 
 for the purpose of this discussion it is
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 129 
 
 weighty with prophecy. But ethical expe- 
 rience of an exalted type must be added to 
 ethical constitution. It is hard for the In- 
 finite to speak through his bare device in the 
 moral nature of man, unsupported and even 
 sorely contradicted as it so often is by voli- 
 tion and character. A Beethoven cannot 
 fully reveal himself through musical signs. 
 The wonderful symphonies are indeed 
 there, but they are hidden. The faithful and 
 inspired interpreter must come, and through 
 groups of instruments unseal the fountains 
 of harmony. The moral constitution of the 
 race is but the musical notation. The eter- 
 nal melodies are there, but they are silent. 
 The race must become partner in the moral 
 enterprise, fellow-worker with the universe 
 at its ethical task, if its heart of rhythm and 
 soul of fire are to stand fully revealed. It 
 is this voice that the prophet of to-day waits 
 to hear, the voice like the sound of many 
 waters and mighty thunderings, rolling 
 through all the deeper and greater humani- 
 ties, the voice of the Infinite speaking
 
 The Verdict of the Infinite 
 
 through the race, at length become har- 
 monious with his righteous purpose in his- 
 tory, and registering his decree in favor 
 of the immortality of man.