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THE EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
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THE EVOLUTION 
 
 OF 
 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
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 S. D. McCONNELL, D.D., D.C.L. 
 
 
 Keto gorfe 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN A, CO., Ltd. 
 
 1901 
 
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 COPTKIQHT, 1901, 
 
 bt the macmillan company. 
 
 NorijJOOtJ 53"S8 
 
 J. a Gushing It Co. — Berwick & Smitll 
 
 Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 
 
TO 
 
 Mv. ®^o^ iFrienti 
 WILLIAM A. READ 
 
 IN RECOGNITION OF MANY KINDNESSES 
 
 AND IN MEMORY OF A SUMMER SUNDAY'S WALK 
 
 AND TALK IN THE WOODS OF MAINE 
 
 »I034 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
"For man is, according to nature, mortal, as a 
 being who has been made out of things that are 
 perishable. But on account of his likeness to God 
 he can by piety ward off and escape from his 
 natural mortality and remain indestructible if he 
 retain the knowledge of God, or can lose his incor- 
 ruptibility if he lose his life in God." 
 
 — Athanasius. 
 
THE 
 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The sphinx, with the teeming breasts of a 
 woman and the cruel claws of a tiger, is the 
 eternal parable of Nature. She is equally 
 equipped to produce and nourish or to rend 
 and kill. Men of all ages have tried to gather 
 from her stony gaze which she means to do. 
 Not a few will turn away with impatience 
 from another attempt to read the eternal rid- 
 dle. "If a man die shall he live again?" 
 is the burden of the old drama of Uz. 
 An endless human interest attaches to the 
 question, so strong that however often it 
 be abandoned it must needs be once again 
 renewed. It beckons while it eludes. There 
 is no reason to believe that men will ever be 
 content to sit down before it or to definitely 
 abandon it as insoluble. Once and again an 
 answer has been found. Plato reasoned that 
 each soul is essentially immortal, being a divine 
 "idea," bound up in the very being of God, 
 
 B 1 
 
2 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 and therefore not dependent for its existence 
 upon any passing association which it may 
 have with matter. This conception has been 
 sufficient for multitudes of men through 
 twenty-four centuries of time. Pythagoras 
 maintained that a man's soul comes to him 
 from the body of some other man or inferior 
 animal which it has just left, and that upon 
 leaving him it transmigrates to another still, 
 wandering through eternity as the transient 
 guest of unnumbered successive bodies. This 
 belief, modified in various ways, has been in 
 the past, and is to-day probably, entertained 
 by the majority of all who have a thought upon 
 the matter at all. The Christian world has for 
 a long time believed that the soul and the body 
 are immediate and simultaneous creations of 
 God, that they live in an intimate partnership 
 during a lifetime, then separate, only to be 
 reunited ultimately in a permanent personality 
 which neither heaven nor hell will ever sepa- 
 rate. Amidst all these, other multitudes have 
 contented themselves, or felicitated themselves, 
 as the case may be, with the conviction that 
 as the beast dies so dies a man. To-day none 
 of these beliefs can be sincerely entertained by 
 any reasonable man. The best purpose which 
 any of them can serve for one is in carrying 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 3 
 
 out Socrates's advice, "for he should persevere 
 until he has attained one of two things ; either 
 he should discover or learn the trutti, or if this 
 be impossible, I would have him take the best 
 and most irrefragable of human notions, and let 
 this be the raft upon which he sails through 
 life, — not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot 
 find some word of God which will move and 
 safely carry him." 
 
 The belief current within Christendom upon 
 the question of the future life remained sub- 
 stantially unchanged during the thirteen centu- 
 ries between Augustine and Darwin. It will 
 not be very difficult to see where, when, and 
 how that belief came into Christianity. Later 
 on I will try to do this. lN"or is it difficult to 
 see that that belief is rapidly, if silently, dis- 
 appearing from among thoughtful men. Nor, 
 once again, will it be difficult to show at least 
 some of the chiefest among the influences 
 against which it cannot persist. This also I 
 will try to do. This having been done, the 
 ground will be cleared upon which to build a 
 faith out of the material which human con- 
 sciousness, human science, and Holy Scripture 
 can furnish. If it then shall appear that the 
 doctrine is not new, but venerable, it may be 
 all the more readily welcomed. 
 
4 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 The Creed says, " I believe in the resurrection 
 of the body." In its earlier and more naive 
 form it says " the resurrection of the flesh." 
 This phrase is capable of a wider and more 
 reasonable interpretation than the words would 
 seem to imply. Such a meaning is very gen- 
 erally read into it. But when the phrase was 
 formulated, it was intended to mean precisely 
 what it says. This is the meaning which it 
 still has for the multitude. It means that at 
 the moment of death the soul and body sepa- 
 rate ; that the body slowly decays and is disin- 
 tegrated ; that the soul goes temporarily to a 
 place of its own where it endures in a state of 
 partial self-consciousness for a long but indefi- 
 nite period; that at the end of that period 
 every body which has ever lived will be recon- 
 stituted, of the same matter, with member, 
 joint, and limb restored ; that each soul will be 
 reunited to its own body; that then comes 
 judgment, reward, and doom. 
 
 To merely state this series of notions is 
 sufficient to show their essential impossibility. 
 When they were first formulated their diffi- 
 culties did indeed appear, but were evaded 
 by arguments Tvhich then sufficed, but which 
 no one now will credit with any valid- 
 ity. Irengeus, for example (" Cont. Heres." 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 6 
 
 y. 2), recognizes the natural impossibility of 
 recovering the atoms of the body from decay, 
 but argues that the body, having been once 
 nourished with the Eucharistic body and 
 blood of Christ, is transformed in quality, and 
 so kept distinguished through all the ages from 
 the matter with which its dust is mingled. Ter- 
 tuUian (" De Kesurrec. Car." vi. 4) faces the 
 obvious difficulty : " Shall the same flesh which 
 has fallen into decay be so expected to recover 
 as that the lame, and the one-eyed, and the 
 blind, and the leper, and the palsied shall come 
 back again, although there can be no pleasure 
 in returning to the old condition ? What must 
 we say of the consequences of resuming the 
 flesh ? "Will it again be subject to its present 
 wants as of meats and drinks ? (Shall it come) 
 from the devouring fires, and the waters of the 
 sea, and the maws of beasts, and the crops of 
 birds, and the stomachs of fishes? Shall we, 
 having lungs, float? Or suffer pains in the 
 bowels, or having organs of shame feel no 
 shame ? Or will the recovery of the flesh only 
 revive again the desire to escape from it?" 
 In reply he contends that the human body, 
 although formed from earth, has in virtue of 
 having become human flesh ceased to be earth 
 and been transformed into a different substance, 
 
6 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 essentially incorruptible, just as gold, although 
 formed from earth has taken on the quality of 
 gold, and gold will remain even though ground 
 to dust and mixed with earth. Origen escapes 
 the difficulty in large part by recurring to St. 
 Paul's dictum that the body which perishes is 
 but the seed from which a new body will 
 spring, asserting that in the old body is some 
 portion, or organ, or piece which will develop 
 as the seed of a plant does when its integu- 
 ments are decayed. This notion of the func- 
 tion of the pineal gland, "the bone Luz," or 
 the OS sacrum^ appears again and again. Hardly 
 anything more than an antiquarian interest, 
 however, attaches to the discussions of Fathers 
 or schoolmen. They were so completely igno- 
 rant of the laws and facts of physical nature 
 out of which the difficulties in the way of a 
 bodily resurrection arise, that their arguments 
 and speculations are only as the serious dispu- 
 tations of children. They had no true concep- 
 tion of the laws and qualities of matter, they 
 knew nothing of that complex arrangement by 
 which matter becomes the basis of life. In a 
 word, the popular notions concerning the resur- 
 rection of the body are simply a survival in the 
 midst of a w^orld which knows of conceptions 
 which were formulated by a world which did 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 7 
 
 not know. But knowledge is a fact to be taken 
 account of. The common man of to-day cannot 
 say, " I believe in the resurrection of the body," 
 unless he either use it as a sacrosanct form of 
 words conveying no intelligible meaning, or 
 else as meaning something different from what 
 the words connote. He may legitimately and 
 honestly use it in either of these ways. Most 
 men do so. But it is surely desirable that he 
 should try to see what, precisely, is the truth 
 which he is attempting to put into words, and 
 why he believes it to be a truth. The knowl- 
 edge which the world now has concerning the 
 constitution of matter, the science of chemistry 
 and biology and psychology, have rendered it 
 quite impossible to believe in any future life 
 which should depend upon any form of reinte- 
 gration of the natural body which has once 
 returned to dust. Dust it is, and to dust it doth 
 return, and the return is final so far as concerns 
 the personality once bound up with it. If a 
 material basis for another life be demanded, 
 as it must be, the requisite body must be 
 sought elsewhere and by other means. No 
 doubt the current speech of man about it all 
 will long remain unchanged. In the region 
 of religion phrases which are at first used as 
 attempts to state truth scientifically become 
 
8 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 sanctified by use and hallowed by association. 
 Little by little they lose the sharpness of con- 
 notation which they at first possess, and become 
 symbols which stand for complex emotions 
 which are awakened by their sound, or for 
 truths which are eternal, but for which no final 
 or adequate phrase can ever be found. "Re- 
 surgam " will still be chiselled upon tombs, the 
 " hope of a joyful resurrection " will still cheer 
 and solace the simple man's dying, the bodies 
 of the dead will be laid in the earth reverently 
 so long as it remains true that the thought of 
 the personality who has left our sight is bound 
 up with that of the muddy vesture of decay 
 which it wore while known and loved. And all 
 this in spite of the categorical assertion of the 
 apostle that this " is not that body which shall 
 be, but some other." 
 
"So with respect to immortality. As physical 
 science states this problem, it seems to stand thus : 
 Is there any means of knowing whether the series 
 of states of consciousness, which has been casually 
 associated for threescore years and ten with the 
 arrangement and movements of innumerable mill- 
 ions of material molecules, can be continued in 
 like association with some substance which has not 
 the properties of matter and force? As Kant said, 
 on a like occasion, if anybody can answer that 
 question he is just the man I want to see. If he 
 says that consciousness cannot exist, except in 
 relation of cause and effect with certain organic 
 molecules, I must ask how he knows that; and if 
 he says it can, I must ask the same question." 
 
 — Professor Huxley. 
 
 10 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 SiNC?E men have known anything, they have 
 known that there is some connection between 
 the mind and the body. The first savage who 
 was knocked senseless by the blow of another 
 savage's club must have learned by that rude 
 experiment that a broken head interrupted or 
 confused his thought. One of the most amazing 
 things, however, in the history of the race is the 
 way in which the significance of this general 
 fact failed to be recognized. There was here 
 one of those vicious circles within which human 
 thought remains for ages confined. For ages 
 it was assumed that mind and body were two 
 separate and independent things, living to- 
 gether, but each with a life of its own. The 
 falsity of this could not be seen until the true 
 relation between them should be discovered ; 
 and the true relation could not be seen until 
 the erroneous assumption was abandoned. So 
 the matter remained from time immemorial 
 until the present century. The soul was be- 
 lieved to inhabit the body as a tenant dwells 
 11 
 
12 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 in a house held upon an uncertain lease. That 
 the two should interact upon each other was 
 no more thought than that a house could affect 
 the character of its tenant. The sum of knowl- 
 edge was that when the house fell into decay 
 or was broken by a catastrophe, the tenant 
 moved away. Aberrations or confusions of 
 the mind were accounted for by the operations 
 of other spirits. Possession, obsession, demonia- 
 cal or spiritual influences, accounted for insan- 
 ity, and the free and independent existence of 
 the mind accounted for sanity. It is true that 
 certain emotions were believed to have their 
 seat in certain organs, as hatred in the liver, by 
 the Greeks, and love in the intestines, as by the 
 Hebrews ; but as for any interplay and mutual 
 dependency between the soul and the body, the 
 idea never occurred, or if it did it remained 
 unfruitful. It is hardly more than a century 
 since the nexus of mind and body began to be 
 studied. When Hartley announced his theory 
 that mental action was dependent upon definite 
 functions of the brain, he met with almost uni- 
 versal incredulity. When Cabanis, half a cen- 
 tury later, delivered his brutal dictum that "the 
 brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile," 
 he shocked society, not because he said a thing 
 grossly, but because he said it at all. The 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 13 
 
 paper read by Gall before the French Acad- 
 emy in 1808 may be called the beginning of 
 the science whose classics Dr. Wundt and Pro- 
 fessor Ladd call " Physiological Psychology." 
 I^ow, it has become part of everyday knowl- 
 edge that mind and body are so essentially in- 
 terrelated that the diverse faculties of the mind 
 are bound up with certain specific portions of 
 the brain and nervous system. This is not only 
 true of the inferior functions, such as sense 
 perceptions and physical memory, but of the 
 supreme faculties as well. Says Professor 
 Haeckel, " Paul Flechsig of Leipsio has proved 
 that in the gray bed of the brain are found the 
 three seats of the central sense-organs, — touch in 
 the vertical lobe, smell in the frontal lobe, and 
 sight in the occipital lobe. Between these three 
 sense-centres lie the three great thought-centres 
 or centres of association, the real organs of men- 
 tal life. They are those highest instruments 
 of psychic activity which produce thought and 
 consciousness." Whatever may be said of the 
 over-fanciful refinement of the anatomist in 
 trying to locate too minutely the nervous areas 
 which are connected with definite psychic 
 activities, the general fact is accepted. We 
 do not now send our insane to be exorcised. 
 "We do not hold a sick man morally responsible 
 
14 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 for his mental or moral vagaries. The whole 
 world allows that physical lesion produces a 
 state of mind. But the implications of this 
 admission are incalculable. Dr. Keene reports 
 this case to me. A lad of fifteen is brought to 
 him suffering from epilepsy. He is a partial 
 imbecile, slavering, violent, obscene, untruth- 
 ful, thievish, a foul travesty of humanity, — a 
 youthful Caliban. Certain physical symptoms 
 point to a pressure upon a certain spot of his 
 brain. An unnoticed and forgotten scar con- 
 firms the diagnosis. The skull is trephined, the 
 pressure is removed, and the epilepsy is cured. 
 But that is the least part of it. His obscenity, 
 deceit, and dishonesty are also cured. Not 
 seven devils have been cast out of his spirit, 
 but a little point of bone had been lifted out of 
 his brain. The result is the same. But the 
 barest recognition of this fact renders neces- 
 sary a new definition of soul. Nor has the 
 matter stopped with a bare admission that the 
 body and soul are more closely related than had 
 been supposed. Ten thousand actual experi- 
 ments have built up the firm belief that every 
 psychic activity, every sensation, every emo- 
 tion, every thought, every act of will or of 
 affection, is correlated with some definite action 
 of the molecules of some specific portion of the 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 16 
 
 nervous system. The " soul " has seemingly been 
 convicted of false pretences. Instead of being 
 an independent entity, living in the body and 
 dominating it, it appears to be but a convenient 
 word to designate the complex sum total of the 
 final and highest output of the organized body. 
 As Haeckel puts it, " all the phenomena of the 
 psychic life are without exception bound up 
 with certain material changes in the living 
 substance of the body, the protoplasm. We 
 do not attribute any peculiar * essence' to its 
 soul. We consider the psyche to be merely a 
 collective idea of all the psychic functions of 
 protoplasm." 
 
 This is the last word of science upon 
 the soul. Nor can -we dismiss or disregard 
 it as being merely the ipse dixit of an ex- 
 treme scientific dogmatist. I^o doubt Pro- 
 fessor Ilaeckel can be fairly so called. But 
 then all biologists, all chemists, all physicists, 
 agree with him up to this point. Whatever 
 we may find the soul to be over and above, 
 this fact we must reckon with, that it is as 
 dependent upon matter for its being as matter 
 is dependent upon it for its organization. And 
 this interdependence of mind and matter exists 
 through every step in the range of living 
 things. In the lowest forms of living creatures 
 
16 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the whole protoplasmic cellular mass is all body 
 and all mind. Without organs or differentiated 
 faculties any portion of it responds to any stim- 
 ulus which may touch it. In the next higher 
 stage the mind begins to be localized. Rudi- 
 mentary sense-organs begin to appear, little 
 protoplasmic filaments and pigment spots be- 
 come the forerunners of the organs of percep- 
 tion. In another stage the nervous system 
 becomes sufficiently organized to show phe- 
 nomena which cannot be distinguished from 
 intelligence. Finally, the highest of all psychic 
 action shows itself by converging all sensations 
 upon a certain specific spot of the nervous sub- 
 stance of the brain, and being reflected back in 
 self-consciousness. There is no break or gap 
 or interruption in the long series of evolution. 
 From the beginning to the end physical prog- 
 ress and psychical progress are bound up 
 together. They do not seem to move always 
 in parallel lines or with an equal pace, but to 
 be interrelated parts of one living, moving, 
 creeping, climbing life. Organized matter 
 seems to be sensitive not only to physical force 
 and chemical affinity, but to psychic attraction 
 and reaction, and these are not two distin- 
 guishable and independent modes of action, 
 but in each kind of action the whole of the 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 17 
 
 being seems to be concerned. Mind, or at 
 least something so much like mind that their 
 phenomena cannot be distinguished, seems to 
 belong to all organized matter down to its very- 
 lowest term. Indeed, the highest intellectual 
 faculties seem to be but aggregations and cor- 
 relations of innumerable primary sensations, 
 and to be dependent upon the action of remote 
 centres, so that " memory " and " volition " may 
 be fairly said to be faculties of each and every 
 microscopic body-cell. The final analysis would 
 seem to be that every particular cell of living 
 matter has its psychic function. The ancient 
 chasm between animal and vegetable life has 
 been long since filled up. The microscope fur- 
 nished the tool. The study of cellular life 
 provided the material. Now it has been estab- 
 lished that the animal and the vegetable are 
 but two bifurcated branches of a tree whose 
 stem and roots are in common. Nor does inex- 
 orable science stop there. The genealogy of 
 the protoplasmic cell itself has been traced. 
 Every multi-cellular organism begins its life as 
 a stem-cell, an impregnated ovum. Even at the 
 beginning the cell has a psychic life of its own. 
 But behind this lie still simpler cell forms. In 
 these we seem to touch the point where the 
 dead and the living meet together. Max Yer- 
 
18 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 worn, after his long study of the "Protists" 
 among the Metazoa, pronounces that in them 
 the psychic life and the molecular movement 
 coalesce. In them he finds "a bridge which 
 connects the chemical processes of the inor- 
 ganic world with the psychic life of the high- 
 est animals." 
 
 Is it possible, therefore, that that mysterious 
 and inscrutable thing which we call " life " is 
 being all the while slowly secreted, as it were, 
 from inorganic matter in the secret places of 
 the earth ? May it be true that the old gener- 
 alization, ex ovum ovo^ will have to be qualified ? 
 May Spontaneous Generation be a fact, after 
 all ? It is true that until very lately the scien- 
 tific world has given an unanimous negative. 
 Twenty-five years ago Professor Huxley de- 
 clared that "the present state of science fur- 
 nishes us with no link between the living and 
 the not living." Professor Tyndall had then 
 demonstrated the faultiness of the experiments 
 upon which Dr. Bastian based his assertion that 
 he had evoked life from inorganic matter. But 
 since that time the chemist and the biologist 
 have done many marvellous things. They have 
 not been able to transform any single atom of 
 dead matter into living, nor is it likely they 
 ever will. But it is a hasty conclusion that 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 19 
 
 because they cannot do it, it is never done. 
 One may well hesitate to believe that the sum 
 total of life has remained unchanged since the 
 creation of the world. God's laboratory of 
 nature is constructed upon an enormously 
 complex scale. Because the chemist with his 
 vials and retorts cannot produce life from 
 lifeless matter establishes no presumption that 
 it is not being done continually in ocean's 
 depth or in that boundless region of the 
 infinitely little beyond the ken of the micro- 
 scope. Above all, it is perilous to build a 
 philosophy or a religious faith upon a founda- 
 tion which would be destroyed if the generatio 
 equivoca should turn out to be a fact. All 
 that Tyndall and Pasteur have said is that no 
 one as yet has produced life except through 
 the agency of antecedent life. 
 
 "There, for the moment, the matter rests. 
 But the end is not yet. Fauna and flora are 
 here, and thanks to Lemarck and Wallace and 
 Darwin, their development through those sec- 
 ondary causes which we call nature has been 
 proximately explained. The lowest forms of 
 life have been linked with the highest in un- 
 broken chains of descent. Meantime, through 
 the efiforts of chemists and biologists, the gap 
 between the inorganic and the organic worlds, 
 
20 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 which once seemed to be infinite, has been 
 constantly narrowed. Already philosophy can 
 throw a bridge across the gap. But experi- 
 mental science, which builds its own bridges, 
 has not yet spanned the chasm, small though 
 it appear. Until it shall have done so, the 
 bridge of organic evolution is not quite com- 
 plete." 
 
 ISTo student of physical science would be sur- 
 prised to learn any day that the last gap had 
 been filled. 
 
" Man is not merely a mortal, but a moral being. 
 If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the 
 path marked out for him by all his past develop- 
 ment. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate 
 had to subordinate everything to mental develop- 
 ment. In order to become human it had to develop 
 the rational intelligence. In order to become higher 
 man, present man must subordinate everything to 
 moral development. This is the great law of ani- 
 mal and human development clearly revealed in the 
 sequence of physical and psychical functions." 
 
 — Prof. John M. Taylor. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Kow the whole line of thought briefly 
 sketched above is absolutely new. Not only 
 were Sts. Paul and Augustine and Thomas 
 utterly unaware of the facts upon which it 
 is based, but so were Calvin and Jonathan 
 Edwards and Dr. Chalmers. JSIo doctrine of 
 the resurrection of the dead or of the life 
 of the world to come, formulated even fifty 
 years ago, can be satisfactory to the man of 
 to-day. The actual amount of knowledge 
 accumulated during those years concerning 
 the nature and laws of life and death, of 
 generation and decay, of force and energy, 
 and their transformation, is greater by an 
 immeasurable increment than the sum of all 
 which preceded. To refuse to take account 
 of it would not only be futile, but would 
 write us down as less intelligent than the 
 Fathers, who availed themselves of all the 
 science they possessed to elucidate and fortify 
 their doctrine. 
 
 But no one ought to overlook or seek to 
 28 
 
24 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 evade the fact that the new biology and 
 physics have overclouded the common hope 
 of life in the world to come. The simple 
 dualism upon which that has heretofore been 
 based is no longer believable by multitudes. 
 The phenomenon of a human personality can 
 no longer be accounted for by the assumption 
 of a temporary union of an immortal soul 
 with a perishable body. The nexus has 
 been seen to be not arbitrary or artificial 
 or mechanical, but organic. This conviction, 
 which cannot be resisted, has over-weighted 
 and sunk in many their belief in the life ever- 
 lasting. To not a few this has been a burden 
 more heavy than would be a judge's doom to 
 death. They see that what they call the soul 
 and what they call the body are so identified 
 in their whole career, from the germ-cell to the 
 grave, that they cannot any longer think of the 
 psychic personality surviving the break-up of 
 the physical organism. When they attempt to 
 do so, they find the same intellectual helpless- 
 ness that they would if bidden to think of 
 shadow without substance or extension with- 
 out form. For them not only has the hope 
 of immortality faded, but the very existence 
 of such a present fact as a soul has become 
 difficult to believe. So correlated are psy- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 25 
 
 chic and physical energy that the soul of 
 man threatens to disappear as an objective 
 entity. 
 
 At this point a serious attempt has been 
 made to find relief by drawing a line through 
 psychic phenomena and labelling those nearest 
 the physical basis " Instinct," and those higher 
 up "Keason." This latter, it is contended, 
 together with the "Conscience" or ethical 
 faculty constitute the soul proper and are 
 peculiar to man. Grant, it is said, all that 
 biology claims concerning the mental life of 
 animals, still, man is marked off by the pos- 
 session of psychic qualities so different in kind 
 from those of the lower creatures that he 
 stands unique in the possession of a soul. 
 This has proven, however, to be only a frail 
 dike set against the incoming of the tide. In 
 fact it has completely broken down before the 
 weight of actual experiment and observation. 
 So long as psychologists confined their re- 
 searches to the human mind this position 
 remained tenable. In 1760, Reimarus pub- 
 lished his "General Observations of the In- 
 stincts of Animals." In it he called in question 
 the validity of the distinction between "in- 
 stinct" and "reason." The time, however, 
 was not ripe, and his discoveries attracted little 
 
26 EVOLUTION OF IMMOETALITY 
 
 attention. But during the last forty years 
 Darwin and Komanes and Sir John Lubbock, 
 Wundt and Biichner and Karl Gross, and Ladd 
 and Moulton and James and their colaborers 
 in America, have conducted experiments so 
 abundant and so careful that the former classi- 
 fication of psychic action into reason and in- 
 stinct has been definitely abandoned. Perhaps 
 it would be more accurate to say that psychic 
 actions may be thus distinguished, but that 
 reason is not confined to man nor instinct to 
 beasts. For example, among Indians and other 
 savages the sense of direction is, so far as one 
 can see, just as much an instinct as it is in the 
 homing pigeon. The faculty, moreover, appears 
 to be of the same kind, and not differing greatly 
 in degree. The wild man will turn his face 
 unerringly toward his lodge, and with only a 
 subordinate regard to the sun and the lay of 
 the land will keep his course through forest and 
 swamp, over mountain and desert, until he 
 reaches his goal. Nor is this the only "in- 
 stinct" of man. The new-born babe knows 
 how to suck. The young mother knows how 
 to hold the babe to her breast. Sex desires 
 know the path to their gratification. The eye 
 knows how to close itself against injury — and 
 such like. 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 27 
 
 But the important fact for our purpose is that 
 those higher faculties of the soul such as reason, 
 choice, number, shame, and duty show them- 
 selves in creatures far below man in the gradu- 
 ated scale of being. We need not stop to note 
 the strange wisdom of the ant and the bee, 
 whose liliputian commonwealths in many ways 
 might be models for human cities. The " rea- 
 son" which they display shows such striking 
 limitations and peculiarities that it may be set 
 aside, if one choose, as purely reflex or auto- 
 matic. A characteristic of reason is to discern 
 an object desired, and to use rational and suit- 
 able means to attain it. A very few instances, 
 chosen almost at random from the mass of 
 experiment and observation recorded, will suf- 
 fice. I begin with an experiment made by my- 
 self. During a hunting trip I was in camp with 
 a friend in the wilderness of the far North- 
 west. A mile above our camp was a beavers' 
 dam. We visited or passed it almost every day, 
 and every day saw the marks of the beavers' 
 nocturnal woodcraft. One day, to see what 
 the inhabitants of the aquatic village might 
 do, we broke a chasm two feet wide in the dam 
 which backed the water up about their sub- 
 merged houses. Next day the gap was mended. 
 In the night the beavers had gone ashore, cut 
 
28 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 down a tree eight inches in diameter which 
 stood more than a hundred feet away from the 
 stream. The trunk of the tree was of no use 
 for their purposes. They felled it to procure 
 the small limbs which grew twenty feet from 
 the ground. The chips showed that they had 
 cut the limbs where they lay into pieces of the 
 proper length to mend the hole in their dam 
 thirty yards distant. Each stick was just suf- 
 ficiently long to reach across the break and 
 allow enough to lap over and hold at either 
 end. These they had put in place, and inter- 
 laced with smaller twigs, tamped with earth 
 and leaves, so that the dam was good as new. 
 Now, note what they had done. First they sur- 
 veyed the break, and saw how, and how alone, it 
 could be mended. Then they sought the suitable 
 material for the repairs. Then they cut down 
 a tree for the purpose of securing the limbs 
 which were in sight, but not within reach of 
 animals who could not climb. Then they 
 ascertained the length required for the pieces 
 they wished. Then they cut them off in situ, 
 and carried them to where they were needed. 
 The ultimate purpose of it all was to save the 
 doors of their houses from being exposed by 
 the drawing off of the water. In what way then 
 does this differ in hind from the reason of a 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 29 
 
 man who builds a house ? The whole perform- 
 ance seemed to us so amazing and incredible that 
 to eliminate the possibility of accident we re- 
 peated it three times upon that hapless village, 
 and always with the same result. 
 
 Take another instance, quoted and verified 
 by Romanes from Thompson. In his camp 
 in the jungle of Tillicherry he had a monkey 
 tied to a long upright bamboo pole by a chain 
 running on a ring, which allowed the monkey 
 to climb to the top, where was a seat upon 
 which he spent most of his time. While he 
 sat here, the thievish crows, which swarmed 
 about, stole his food, which was placed every 
 morning at the foot of his pole. To this he 
 had vainly expressed his dislike by chattering 
 and slipping down in vain effort to catch them. 
 " One morning, however, he appeared to be 
 seriously ill, he closed his eyes, dropped his 
 head, and exhibited other evidences of severe 
 suffering. No sooner were his ordinary rations 
 placed at the foot of the bamboo than the 
 crows, watching their opportunity, descended 
 in great numbers, and according to their usual 
 custom began to demolish his provisions. The 
 monkey now began to descend the pole by slow 
 degrees as though the effort overpowered him, 
 and as if so overcome by indisposition that his 
 
80 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 remaining strength was hardly equal to the 
 exertion. When he reached the ground, he 
 rolled about for some time, seeming in great 
 agony, until he found himself close to the ves- 
 sel where the crows had by this time well-nigh 
 devoured his food. There he lay apparently 
 in a state of complete insensibility. After a 
 little a crow plucked up courage to approach 
 and stretch its neck toward the food. But the 
 watchful avenger seized it with the rapidity of 
 thought and secured it from doing further mis- 
 chief. He now began to chatter and grin with 
 every expression of gratified triumph, while 
 the crows flew around, cawing, as if deprecat- 
 ing the chastisement about to be inflicted upon 
 the captive brother. The monkey continued 
 for a while to chatter and grin in triumph ; he 
 then deliberately placed the crow between his 
 knees, and began to pluck it with the most 
 humorous gravity. When he had completely 
 stripped it, except of the larger feathers in 
 the wings and tail, he flung it into the air 
 from where it fell to the ground with a stun- 
 ning shock. He then ascended his pole, and 
 the next time his food was brought, not a sin- 
 gle crow approached it." ISTow, in what essen- 
 tial particular was the mental action of this 
 monkey different from that of a farmer, with 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMOKTALITY 81 
 
 some sense of humor, who sets a trap for the 
 crows devouring his corn ? 
 
 Once again, selecting from that treasure- 
 house of facts gathered by Darwin. "A 
 troop of baboons were observed crossing a 
 valley in Abyssinia. Some had already as- 
 cended the opposite mountain, and some were 
 still in the valley, when the latter were attacked 
 by dogs, but the old males immediately hurried 
 down from the rocks, with mouths open, roar- 
 ing so fearfully that the dogs quickly drew 
 back. They were again encouraged to the 
 attack, but by this time all the baboons had 
 reascended the heights excepting a young child 
 of about six months, who, loudly calling for 
 aid, climbed on a block of rock and was sur- 
 rounded. Thereupon, one of the largest males 
 came down again from the mountain, slowly 
 went to the young one, coaxed him down, and 
 carried him away, the dogs being too much 
 astonished to make an attack." In what does 
 the action of the baboon differ in kind from 
 that supreme moral sense which moves its 
 possessor to imperil his life for his brother? 
 
 Such facts as the above might be quoted to 
 fill volumes from that mass of literature upon 
 the subject which has been accumulated within 
 a generation. One, however, is as good as a 
 
32 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 thousand. The effect of them all has been to 
 establish the truth of the generalization made 
 by Darwin forty years ago. " The difference 
 in mind between man and the higher animals, 
 great as it is, is certainly one of degree and 
 not of kind. The senses and instincts, the 
 various emotions and faculties, of which man 
 boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even 
 sometimes in a well-developed, condition in the 
 lower animals." And Mr. Darwin lies, without 
 protest, in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 No : the new science and the new philosophy 
 for which his name may well stand as a symbol 
 has been accepted, not only by the world of 
 science, but by the religious world as well. We 
 have reached the point where the old phrases 
 "immortality of the soul" and "resurrection 
 of the body" must take on new meanings if 
 they are to be comprehended, and must deal 
 with new difficulties if they are to be retained. 
 If the truth which these phrases have hereto- 
 fore expressed sufficiently well is to be kept 
 alive among men, its roots must be traced to 
 a reason immeasurably deeper down in the 
 nature of things than is generally realized. If 
 it be the fact, as it seems to be, that belief in 
 a future life is being given up by intelligent 
 men, we may be assured that it is not because 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITT 33 
 
 the " instinct of living " is any less strong in 
 them than in their forefathers. It is not that 
 they desire life less, or because they are more 
 willing to be resolved into nothingness. It is 
 because their hope has met defeat at the hands 
 of other truth which has slowly shown itself. 
 There are multitudes for whom neither the old 
 phrases nor the old arguments will any longer 
 suffice. To clear these away is an ungracious 
 and distasteful task. They are so intertwined 
 with religious sentiment and human affection 
 that to disturb them seems to some little short 
 of wanton outrage. They are formulated in 
 creeds, enshrined in poetry, hymns, and liturgies. 
 They are ingrained in the very fibre of religious 
 faith and are powerful sanctions for conduct. 
 Why disturb them ? The only answer is, it 
 is always best in the long run to know the 
 truth. It is better that the simple Christian 
 within the Church should have his beliefs dis- 
 turbed than that his brother should be shut 
 out of the Kingdom by those beliefs. It is not 
 only better intrinsically, but it is also the mind 
 of Christ, and was His way. The little ones 
 whom IIo warned against offending were those 
 who were kept out of the Kingdom by the 
 inconsiderate action of those within. We need 
 have no fear that belief in " the resurrection of 
 
34 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the dead, and the life of the world to come " 
 will be abandoned, provided only it be conceived 
 of in such a way as will permit it to be cor- 
 related with all else which we know to be 
 true. 
 
" Evolution may be conceived of as resulting in 
 beings capable of proposing to themselves a certain 
 aim, and of dragging nature after them toward it. 
 Natural selection would thus finally be converted 
 into a moral, and, in some sort, divine selection. 
 It can, in effect, produce species and types superior 
 to humanity as we know it; it is not probable that 
 we embody the highest achievement possible in 
 life, thought, and love. Who knows, indeed, but 
 that evolution may be able to bring forth, nay, 
 has not already brought forth immortals?" 
 
 — M. GUYAU. 
 
 86 
 
CHAPTER IT 
 
 Two things are usually taken for granted in 
 all discussions concerning future life. One is 
 the essential immortality of the soul. The 
 other is that the same kind and quality of soul 
 is common to all men. Are these assumptions 
 defensible ? To merely raise the question will 
 seem preposterous to some. Nevertheless, the 
 question must be faced. For the present I 
 postpone any attempt to define sharply the 
 term soul, and use it in its popular sense, which 
 is for this stage of the argument sufficiently 
 definite. 
 
 It is commonly assumed that each individual 
 soul has had a beginning, but is so consti- 
 tuted and compounded of such stuff that it is 
 intrinsically imperishable. This belief lies at 
 the bottom of the current conceptions of Judg- 
 ment, Heaven, and Hell. To many it will be 
 a surprise to be assured that this is not a Chris- 
 tian doctrine at all, but a pagan one. Nor is 
 it now, nor has it ever been, the general belief 
 even in paganism. The great mass of savage 
 87 
 
38 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 and semicivilized men have never had any 
 clear opinion upon the matter either way. 
 Indeed, they do not think of " the soul " at all 
 in the way we do. They often have a sort of 
 vague notion of a shadowy double of the in- 
 dividual which may for a while fiit about his 
 tomb or roam in happy hunting grounds. But 
 they do not possess any such abstract concep- 
 tions as "eternal," or "immortal," or "self- 
 existent." When they advance farther in the 
 path of thought they either think of the per- 
 sonality maintaining a kind of family, corpor- 
 ate perpetuity, as throughout Eastern Asia 
 generally ; or else they think of the individual 
 as seeking to lose his identity, and finally los- 
 ing it in Nirvana, which, for the individual 
 consciousness at any rate, is an end of being. 
 The general thought of intelligent paganisni 
 could hardly be better stated or by a more 
 competent witness than Wu Ting Fang, the 
 present Chinese Ambassador to the United 
 States. 
 
 " What I understand by religion is a system 
 and doctrine of worship. As such it recognizes 
 the existence of a divine supreme being and of 
 spirits having control of human destinies, who 
 want to bring man back from the errors of his 
 ways by holding up the fear of everlasting 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 39 
 
 punishment to him, and by promising him ever- 
 lasting happiness for goodness. One of its car- 
 dinal doctrines is that there is such a thing 
 as life after death. I must confess that the 
 thought of the immortality of the soul is pleas- 
 ant. I wish it were true ; but all the reasoning 
 of Plato cannot make it anything more than a 
 strong probability. I am not aware that in the 
 advance of modern science we have advanced 
 one step more from uncertainty than did Plato. 
 It must not be said that Confucius denies the 
 existence of these things, but regards all specu- 
 lation upon them as useless and impracticable. 
 He would be called an agnostic in these days. 
 
 * What is death ? ' asked a disciple of him, and 
 he replied, *You don't know life yet; how 
 can you know about death?' Such are the 
 guarded words of Confucius on this subject. 
 Life itself is full of mysteries too deep for 
 human thought to fathom. There is no use in 
 trying to tear apart the veil of death to take 
 a peep at the place beyond. No one has ever 
 been able to add one tittle of evidence concern- 
 ing the future of man after death and of the 
 world of spirits. Confucius was therefore right 
 in dismissing these subjects without giving a 
 direct answer. Horace Greeley once said : 
 
 * Those who discharge promptly and faithfully 
 
40 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 all their duties to those who still live in the 
 flesh can have but little time left for peering 
 into the life beyond the grave. It is better to 
 attend to each in its proper order.' This is 
 not an unfair statement of the aim of Confu- 
 cius. Confucianism undertakes to guide man 
 only through this world. His system is accord- 
 ingly intensely human and practical. He does 
 not speculate upon what will be after death." 
 
 The fact is that only in Christendom and 
 Islam is the essential immortality of the 
 individual spirit assumed. To the contention 
 that belief in eternal life has been held always 
 and everywhere, and by all men, the only 
 reply is that the facts are not so. It is as 
 far as possible from being true to-day. The 
 overwhelming majority of men are now, as 
 has always been the case, at too low a 
 stage of intellectual development to com- 
 prehend the thought. The most that can be 
 said is that there is among most people a 
 rather vague and incoherent belief that a tenu- 
 ous kind of existence of the individual will 
 continue for a greater or longer period after 
 death. But it is at its clearest only a phantom- 
 like being, and they do not conceive of it as 
 eternal, nor does the term eternal convey any 
 meaning to them. Moreover, the testimony 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 41 
 
 of the most trustworthy observer is that from 
 among many peoples this whole set of ideas 
 is entirely absent. The Bushman of South 
 Africa, the Yeddahs of Ceylon, the Blacks 
 of Australia, the Diggers of Utah, and such 
 like do not seem to have any more idea of a 
 post-obituary existence than do the beasts of 
 the field. Indeed, the history of thought wit- 
 nesses, as clearly as it can witness to anything, 
 that it is not until a really high stage of intel- 
 lectual development is reached that the idea 
 of any future life emerges, and that a belief in 
 the soul as a self-existent entity is not reached 
 until intellection has well-nigh reached its sum- 
 mit. Not until Democritus and Empedocles, 
 and Plato and Socrates, and Epicurus and Sen- 
 eca, become possible does the idea of immortal- 
 ity emerge. At a date no doubt much earlier, 
 the Egyptians had wrought out scientifically 
 their scheme of the future life ; but they by no 
 means predicated it of all men, but only of the 
 "good," and of those only after they had been 
 rendered immortal by union with Osiris at the 
 trial to which each departed one was at once 
 introduced. The " evil " who failed in the test 
 perished out of existence either at once, or after 
 a lengthened agony. Among the early He- 
 brews the idea was hardly present at all. Says 
 
42 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Grand Rabbi Stein : " What causes most surprise 
 in reading the Pentateuch is the silence it seems 
 to keep respecting the most fundamental and 
 consoling truths. The doctrine of the immor- 
 tality of the soul and the resurrection of the 
 body are able powerfully to fortify man against 
 passion and vice, and to strengthen his steps in 
 the rugged paths of virtue. But one searches 
 in vain for these truths which he desires so 
 ardently. He does not find either them or the 
 simple doctrine of the resurrection of the dead." 
 Among the later Jews, the contemporaries of 
 Jesus, the notions concerning the soul and its 
 destiny were so incoherent and contradictory 
 that it seems hopeless to attempt their recon- 
 struction. Speaking broadly, they did not con- 
 ceive of the soul as an entity separate and 
 independent of the body. The dream of a 
 corporate or tribal immortality which they 
 had held for ages before their eyes had for the 
 most part rendered them careless concerning 
 the destiny of the individual. If " Israel " were 
 to abide to the ages of ages it mattered little 
 what became of his children one by one. The 
 most intelligent and influential section, the 
 Sadducees, were frank materialists. They be- 
 lieved "neither in angels nor demons nor the 
 resurrection of the dead." The Pharisees were 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALriY 43 
 
 divided into paltry schools, and were busy 
 debating such trivial puzzles as to Avhether or 
 not one should rise with his clothes or naked, 
 whether he would burrow like a mole under- 
 neath the earth so as to rise in the sacred soil 
 of Judea, or rise in pagan soil and be instantly 
 rapt through the air to the holy land. But 
 none believed in or expected resurrection or 
 immortality for any but the members of the 
 chosen race. An immortality belonging to 
 man, and based upon the essential deathless- 
 ness of the soul, was utterly foreign to their 
 thought. Dr. Piepenbring states their belief 
 thus : — 
 
 "Along with the doctrine of the resurrec- 
 tion of the dead which arose and was devel- 
 oped among the Palestinian Jews, we see the 
 doctrine of the immortality of the soul take 
 shape among the Jews of Alexandria. It ap- 
 pears for the first time in the apocryphal book 
 of Wisdom. According to this book souls pre- 
 exist, and are confined in the body as in a 
 prison. The souls of the righteous are in the 
 hands of God ; after having passed through 
 the crucible of trial they shine, they judge 
 nations, they govern peoples ; thus the righteous 
 will live forever. The wicked seem to be fated 
 to annihilation. These ideas are still farther 
 
44 EVOLUTION OF IMMOETALITY 
 
 developed by Philo, from whose writings it 
 clearly appears that they were borrowed from 
 Plato." 
 
 I pass over now the teaching of Christ and 
 the ]^ew Testament. That must form the 
 basis of the truth we seek later on, and must be 
 examined more at leisure. The question to be 
 asked at present is, What did the people of the 
 early Christian Church, say during the first four 
 hundred years, believe generally concerning the 
 soul and its possible destiny ? We need not be 
 surprised to find that their beliefs were confused 
 and contradictory. No matter what the teach- 
 ing of Christ may or may not have been, the 
 early Christians came to it with presuppositions 
 and habits of thought already formed. It is 
 never possible for any man to disentangle him- 
 self at once from his old beliefs in taking in a 
 new truth. The most that he can do is to mod- 
 ify those previous convictions of his which seem 
 to lie in immediate contact with the new truth. 
 But underneath those there is the whole con- 
 tents of bis mind. The new truth sinks down 
 amongst these and is colored by them. When 
 he tries to express the truth which he has newly 
 received, he can only do so in the language and 
 thoughts which he already possesses. It re- 
 quires long time for the new ideas either to 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 46 
 
 work over to its own uses the old mental forms, 
 or to escape from them by building up an en- 
 tirely new imagery about itself. The teaching 
 of Christ could not escape this inevitable neces- 
 sity. This is strikingly true of the Christian 
 ideas concerning the significance of His own 
 sufferings and death. These occurred in Judea 
 and were recorded by Jews, but in being trans- 
 mitted through Hebrew minds they received a 
 Hebrew coloring which to a large extent they 
 still retain. The Great Surrender was inter- 
 preted in Hebrew sacrificial terms. The Light 
 of the world shone out through the stained 
 windows of the temple of Judaism. This re- 
 fraction and discoloration must be allowed for 
 by the world which would see the Sun in his 
 glory. The same fact is of even more signifi- 
 cance in the case of the early Christian belief 
 concerning the belief in personal immortal- 
 ity. Both Greek and Roman preconceptions 
 affected this as well as Hebrew ones. A care- 
 ful study of the ante-Nicene " Fathers " can but 
 convince one that in and among them a number 
 of ethnic notions were struggling to express, 
 each in its own terms, the truth which Christ 
 had dropped among them. The early Chris- 
 tians had all been reared either in the religions 
 of Judea or Greece or Rome. Those among 
 
46 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 them who had been reared Jews unconsciously 
 transferred their idea of a corporate or tribal 
 immortality from their old faith to their new, 
 and their imaginations were filled with the 
 hope of a " Second Coming " and a " Kew Jeru- 
 salem." Those who were Greeks brought to 
 the new religion the Platonic idea that the 
 individual soul is indestructible, being in fact 
 an articulate portion of the substance of the 
 mind of God. Those of Eoman antecedents, 
 having no inherited belief in a future life of 
 any kind, were better prepared to comprehend 
 the truth of Christ. The interaction of all these 
 fragments of previous philosophy produced a 
 confusion and uncertainty of mind which was 
 not clarified for five centuries. Then the mas- 
 terful Augustine, the man who fixed the 
 lines in which the thought of the civilized 
 world ran from the sixth century to the nine- 
 teenth, took Plato's doctrine of the inherent 
 immortality of the soul, disengaged it from 
 metempsychosis and transmigration, and gained 
 for it that general credence which it has held 
 to this day. Clement (I. Epis. xxvi.) teaches 
 the resurrection of the good, and proves it by 
 an appeal to the well-known phenomenon of 
 the phoenix rising from his ashes, but seems 
 to have no expectation of future life for the 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 47 
 
 wicked. Justin Martyr in one place (I. Ajpol. 
 xvii.) expects the resurrection both of just and 
 unjust, and proves it by appealing to the recog- 
 nized fact that departed human souls are even 
 now in a state of sensation, as is shown by their 
 being evoked by magi and dream-senders, as well 
 as at the oracles of Dodona and Pytho. In 
 another place, however {Dial. Tryph. v.), he 
 expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic 
 doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenago- 
 ras {De Resurrec.) takes for granted unquali- 
 fiedly the native immortality of the soul, and 
 makes a striking argument for the resurrection 
 of the body. Tertullian in his treatises On the 
 Soul and On the Resurrection of the Flesh 
 gives by far the fullest presentation of what 
 was commonly believed in his circles ; but it is 
 quite impossible to make him consistent with 
 himself or with other Christian writers of the 
 same period. Upon the whole, however, he 
 leaves the impression, afterward confirmed and 
 fixed by Augustine, that he believes the soul to 
 have an independent existence of its own, and 
 to be of its own nature indestructible. The 
 truth of the case seems to be that as the Greek 
 influence gained the domination in the early 
 Church the Platonic doctrine of a natural im- 
 mortality which it brought with it came to be 
 
48 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 accepted. The notion was withstood from the 
 beginning as being subversive of the very essence 
 of Christianity. Theophilus {Ad. Autolyoum 
 ii. 27), Irenaeus {Adv. Ilceres. ii. 34), Clement 
 of Alexandria {The Pedagogues, i. 3), Arnobius 
 {Cont. Gent. ii. 24), and, most weighty of all, 
 Athanasius in his treatise on the Incarnation 
 of the Word of God, all strenuously fought 
 against it as a pagan error which brought to 
 naught the work of Christ. They were de- 
 feated, however, and the conception prevailed 
 which is vulgarly current to-day, of an immor- 
 tal soul and a mortal body, temporarily joined, 
 then severed, then reunited in an imperishable 
 personality. Its currency has probably confused 
 and obstructed the work of Christ among men 
 more than all other obstacles combined. A 
 pagan speculation has masqueraded so long as an 
 elemental Christian truth that now, when the 
 intelligent world is well disposed to receive and 
 comprehend Jesus' revelation of the life to 
 come, Plato stands across the path and is com- 
 monly mistaken for Christ. 
 
" Whenever any scientific revolution has driven 
 out old modes of thought, the new views that take 
 their place must justify themselves by the perma- 
 nent or increasing satisfaction which they are 
 capable of affording to those spiritual demands 
 which cannot be put off or ignored." — Lotze. 
 
 60 
 
CHAPTEK y 
 
 It has been taken for granted during ages 
 that " Man " occupies a unique and solitary 
 place at the head of the rank of living things, 
 with a wide, if not impassable, chasm between 
 him and them. For the purposes of the nat- 
 uralist this is satisfactory. But for the pur- 
 poses of the psychologist it is quite misleading. 
 The classification rests upon physical data solely. 
 Psychic phenomena disregard it utterly. For 
 example : — 
 
 " There are races of existing men whose 
 powers of language seem still in the transi- 
 tion stage between articulate and inarticulate 
 speech. This seems to be the case with the 
 Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa, whose 
 vocal utterances consist largely of a series of 
 peculiar clicks that are certainly not articulate 
 speech, though on the road toward it. The 
 Pygmies of Central Africa seem similarly to 
 occupy an intermediate position in the develop- 
 ment of language. Those who have endeavored 
 to talk with them speak of their utterance as 
 51 
 
52 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 being inarticulate sound. It appears to be a 
 sort of link between inarticulate and articulate 
 speech. In short, the great abyss which was 
 of old thought to lie between the language of 
 man and that of the lower animals has largely 
 vanished through the labors of philologists, and 
 we can trace stepping-stones over every portion 
 of the wide gap." ^ 
 
 The same thing we have above seen to be 
 true concerning reason, memory, sympathy, 
 and love. The simple fact is that in the at- 
 tempt to trace the origin, development, and 
 destiny of the soul the naturalist's classification 
 of " man " and " animal " must be disregarded. 
 In advance one dare not say w^here the line 
 between immortal and mortal creatures will be 
 found. It may conceivably coincide with the 
 one which marks off Genius Homo : Class Mam- 
 malia: Order Primates, or it may be found to 
 run much below that, so as to include many of 
 man's humble kinsmen. Or it may be found 
 necessary to settle upon a line running irregu- 
 larly through and amidst the ranks of man. The 
 soul has its own laws and announces its own 
 requirements. It may turn out that all whom 
 we call men are not Man. For natural science it 
 is true that " God hath made of one blood all 
 1 Morris, " Man and his Ancestor," p. 110. 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 53 
 
 nations of men for to dwell upon the earth." 
 They breed together, and that settles the ques- 
 tion of physical relationship. But there are 
 psychic relationships between man and animal 
 quite as intimate and as real as the physical 
 connection of man with man. Measured by 
 psychic standards, the interval between the 
 lowest man and the highest is a hundred fold 
 greater than that between the lowest man and 
 the highest brute. It may be humiliating, but it 
 is true, nevertheless, that we are far more closely 
 related to the animals on the spiritual than we 
 are on the bodily side. A comparative anatomist 
 would distinguish at sight between the fossil 
 bone of a man and one of a fossil ape. But 
 let a certain action involving thought be de- 
 scribed to him, and he may be quite unable to 
 say whether the actors are men or beasts. For 
 example, here is one related by James Forbes 
 in his " Oriental Memoirs " : — 
 
 " One of tlie females had been killed and the 
 body carried to our tent. Forty or fifty of the 
 tribe soon gathered around the tent, chattering 
 furiously and threatening an attack, from which 
 they were only diverted by the display of the 
 guns, whose effects they perfectly understood. 
 But while the others retreated the leader stood 
 his ground, continuing his threatening chatter. 
 
64 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Finding this of no avail, he came to the door 
 of the tent alone, moaning sadly, and by his 
 gestures seemed to beg for the dead body. 
 When it was given him he took it up sorrow- 
 fully in his arms and carried it away to his 
 waiting companions." Is this a story of mon- 
 keys or of men ? 
 
 What we are seeking is a spiritual organism 
 which would be at once worth keeping perma- 
 nently in existence, and which has been suffi- 
 ciently developed to cohere through and after 
 the shock of the dissolution of its physical basis. 
 If we must predicate immortality of every sen- 
 tient being which possesses reason, affection, and 
 ethical faculty, then we must enlarge the bor- 
 ders of Hades to receive innumerable animals. 
 If we demand a higher psychic basis to make 
 continuous existence possible, then we may well 
 be forced to deny it to multitudes of beings 
 whom we call men. There has seemed to be 
 no deliverance from this dilemma, because we 
 have assumed that the naturalist's classification 
 of man and animal, which is real in the physi- 
 cal realm, is also valid in the psychic sphere. It 
 is difficult to see any sufficient reason for con- 
 tinuing this contention any longer. While it 
 was believed that all mankind were the chil- 
 dren of a single pair, specially created, only a 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 55 
 
 few thousand years ago, the difficulty was in- 
 superable. But now we know better. Geology 
 has unfolded the rocky leaves of earth's history 
 and found man's mark inscribed aeons since. 
 His descent from pre-human and semi-human 
 ancestry is as well established as any human 
 belief can ever be. To say that " Evolution is 
 not proven" is simply trifling with truth. 
 Nothing is ever proven or can be in the sense 
 which that objection demands. But it is so 
 generally accepted that the world of thought 
 and knowledge has ceased even to defend it. 
 Why it should be challenged and resisted it is 
 not easy to understand. Probably it is because 
 it seems to run counter to a set of beliefs which 
 have been read into Holy Scripture. That an- 
 cient and marvellous story of Genesis greatly 
 needs to be rescued from its friends. Read it 
 afresh, and see how generally it corresponds to 
 the facts as they are now known to be. It is 
 the record of a series of selections and rejec- 
 tions, determined in the interest of the slowly 
 developing ethical family. Jacob is selected 
 because righteousness continues in his line, and 
 Esau is rejected. Abraham is selected, and all 
 the splendid civilization of the great plain is 
 allowed to fade from sight and being. Noah 
 is chosen, and the corrupt race of Tubal and 
 
56 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Jubal are allowed to pass away to the music of 
 their own harps and the clinking of their own 
 anvils. Cain and the City which he builded go 
 out in darkness, and Seth, in whose line good- 
 ness grows, is chosen. What else is " Adam " 
 but "a man," in whom spiritual faculty first 
 rose to the capacity to know good and evil? 
 That he was the first and only creature of his 
 kind upon the earth the story in no wise inti- 
 mates. That generations of devout people 
 have so read it is not strange. But that they 
 should insist upon continuing to read it so is 
 strange indeed. The story is as true as it is 
 wonderful. It may well be that there have 
 been innumerable Adams, and that many such 
 are alive to-day. So long as there are races in 
 human form, undeveloped, savage, rude, igno- 
 rant, immoral, naked without being ashamed, 
 so long their path upward to true humanity 
 can only be through the leadership of one here 
 and there who has passed his fellows and caught, 
 at least, a passing glimpse of the tree of life. 
 When such a one has reached this stage of eth- 
 ical knowledge and choice, he must, with more 
 or less sadness, leave the lower innocence of his 
 native Eden. He can no longer have pleasant 
 companionship with those of his kin. And this 
 is true, whether his Eden be by the land of 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 57 
 
 Havilah or in the South Sea, or in the slum of 
 a great city. We must acknowledge and face 
 the fact that for the requirements of soul not 
 all members of Homo Sapiens are men. To de- 
 termine in the case of any individual whether 
 or not he has attained to the possession of a 
 soul capable of continuance is difficult indeed. 
 But it is no more and no less difficult than it is 
 to decide at what point of his embryonic growth 
 he became human from the naturalist's stand- 
 point. The ovum of a man and of a dog are 
 absolutely indistinguishable. The human em- 
 bryo runs through and recapitulates in a mar- 
 vellous way the line of ascent from the low 
 order of life through which the race has climbed. 
 It has been generally taken for granted that he 
 becomes possessed of a "soul" at some point 
 between the instant of the fertilization of the 
 ovum and his issue from the womb. But for 
 this there is not, nor ever has been, a scintilla 
 of evidence. The marvellous insight, which 
 the modern microscope has now made possible, 
 into cell and germ life has made it evident that 
 the very germs themselves have an antecedent 
 history as strange and as complex as that of 
 the embryo. They also move, choose, select, 
 repel, show preferences and aversions, in a word 
 they appear to have personalities of their own 
 
5S EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 as really as does the new-born babe. A new- 
 individual does, indeed, come into existence at 
 the moment of conception. But it is not an in- 
 dependent entity in respect either of its psychic 
 or its physical features, but is the product of 
 the blending of the two parental cells. Each 
 of these cells has a previous personality and a 
 previous history. The biogenesis of the soul 
 cannot any longer be concluded between con- 
 ception and birth. The man with the micro- 
 scope in the laboratory and the experimental 
 psychologist have together traced its path both 
 backward and upward, far enough to make it 
 evident that the narrow limit within which the 
 soul's origin and history has heretofore been 
 confined can no longer contain it. It is already 
 clear that the psychic life which we call soul in 
 man, instinct in the beast, and affinity in the 
 germ cell is the same thing; that it develops 
 according to laws of its own; that it is from 
 first to last correlated with an organized mate- 
 rial structure ; that at certain stages in its -up- 
 ward movement it takes on new and strange 
 forms and qualities which could not at all be 
 predicted from any study of it at a previous 
 stage. But the thing of supreme importance 
 for our purpose is that the upward steps or 
 stages of physical evolution do not at all 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 59 
 
 coincide with the steps or stages of psychic 
 evolution. Keason, of a high order, for exam- 
 ple, is found among the coelentera, seems to lie 
 dormant throughout the reptiles, and shows it- 
 self at unexpected and incalculable places among 
 mammalia. Does reason in man take on any- 
 new quality in virtue of which every individual 
 becomes immortal ? The secret which we long 
 to discover is this : Does the psychic life of an 
 individual at any stage of evolution ever attain 
 to such a high, stable, and independent exist- 
 ence of its own that it will be able to subsist in 
 spite of the disintegration of the physical or- 
 ganism with which it is immediately corre- 
 lated? What are the conditions upon which 
 a survival must depend ? Are these conditions 
 satisfied in the psychic lives to be found among 
 the lower animals ? Are the conditions present 
 in the case of every individual of that race 
 which we call man? Or is the possibility of 
 individual immortality only reached at a point 
 more or less advanced in the progress of man 
 himself ? In fine, is man immortal ? — or is he 
 only immortahlef 
 
" Learn the mystery of progression duly, 
 Call not each successive change decay; 
 But know we only hold our treasures truly 
 When it seems as if they passed away ; 
 
 "Nor dare to blame God^s gifts for incompleteness ; 
 In that want their safety lies ; they roll 
 Toward some infinite depth of love and sweetness, 
 Bearing onward the reluctant soul." 
 
 — A. A. Proctek. 
 
 60 
 
CHAPTER YI 
 
 Just what is it which overweighs today the 
 hope of future life ? "When reduced to its sim- 
 plest terms, is it not that we have found mind 
 to be much more closely bound up with matter 
 than had been supposed ? Underlying the popu- 
 lar belief in a resurrection and future life, there 
 have been heretofore a set of notions, partly 
 scientific and partly theological, which are 
 surely becoming untenable under the influence 
 of increasing knowledge. The uneducated and 
 unthinking man still believes, no doubt, that we 
 are all the descendants of a first man whose 
 body God fashioned mechanically out of the 
 earth's matter, not more than four or five thou- 
 sand years ago, that this body was lifeless and 
 inert until God by a second specific act placed 
 within it an immortal soul. His soul was to 
 his body very much what live steam is to a 
 motionless engine. It was created apart from 
 the body, and complete in itself. It possessed 
 the maximum of intellectual vigor, and was 
 morally faultless. The man thus constituted 
 61 
 
62 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 was perfect, and would have been undying had 
 he not by a wanton choice forfeited his immor- 
 tality by an act of disobedience. 
 
 This conception is so naive and simple, so easily 
 presented before the mind, and has been so long 
 operative, that it is very diificult indeed to dis- 
 engage it. Many a man who has long since 
 dismissed it as impossible still believes it when he 
 is off his guard. But the intelligent world gen- 
 erally has become convinced that the facts were 
 not thus. So far as the body is concerned, at 
 any rate, it has been created by God through the 
 agency of a series of secondary causes well-nigh 
 infinite. It is the last term in a course of evolu- 
 tion which reaches backward in time and down- 
 ward in scale to the lowest cell of primordial 
 life, if not beyond. And the same appears to 
 be true of the mind, which, as we have seen, 
 begins to show its presence in creatures far 
 below man in the ascending scale. The life of 
 the body and the life of the spirit seem to have 
 made their long journey together. And the 
 relation of spirit and body is so intimate that 
 every thought, sensation, emotion, is connected 
 with some specific molecular movement of some 
 portion of the cerebral or nervous substance. 
 The body is an engine which is fed with food 
 as fuel. This fuel is consumed and converted 
 
EVOLtJTION OF IMMORTALITY 63 
 
 into tissues. The phenomena produced are 
 digestion, locomotion, sensation, and thought. 
 Every act of thought or will involves the con- 
 sumption of just so much matter. The length 
 of time required to convey a physical sensation 
 from an extremity to the brain and send back 
 an answer in terms of consciousness has been 
 actually measured. The experimenter in the 
 laboratory has weighed approximately the 
 amount of tissue consumption required in 
 solving a sum in arithmetic, a game of chess, 
 or in an emotion of anger or love. The prac- 
 tical result of all such experimentation and 
 observation has been to make it increasingly 
 difficult to believe that the soul has an inde- 
 pendent existence, and that that existence can 
 survive after the cessation of bodily functions. 
 Those who feel this difficulty the most keenly 
 are often those who most ardently wish for im- 
 mortality. But this wish is overladen by their 
 knowledge. Thus far it has not affected their 
 lives. They love righteousness and hate in- 
 iquity. They are possibly all the more strenu- 
 ous in their obedience to duty because they 
 fear that they might be less so without any 
 ulterior peril. They do not wish to either live 
 or die like the beasts, but they fear they must. 
 They lay their dead away out of sight with a 
 
64 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 regret so keen and so final that they do not 
 care to speak about it. Their loves are all the 
 more engrossing because they cannot see any 
 possibility of the dear companionship continu- 
 ing after the present conditions shall have been 
 broken. They have no quarrel with the simple 
 faith of him who looks confidently for a resur- 
 rection of the decayed bodily form. They 
 rather envy him. Indeed, one of the deadliest 
 temptations is that which solicits one to push 
 all his knowledge away by a violent act of will 
 so that he may believe the thing for which he 
 so greatly longs. The most potent and ele- 
 mental of instincts is here opposed by the 
 highest and best-established knowledge. The 
 hope of immortality is but the instinct of self- 
 protection carried to its highest term. The 
 dread of ceasing to be is common to all sentient 
 beings from the lowest to the highest. But, 
 also, experience has painfully shown that the 
 desire to live is impotent to maintain one in 
 living. 
 
 l^ot a few noble souls have sought relief from 
 this distress by dwelling upon one of those 
 broad facts which the modern study of life 
 has brought out so vividly. It is easy to see 
 that no individual atom of life is altogether 
 wasted in the mighty onflow. "When its in- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 65 
 
 dividual life ceases, it at least enriches the soil. 
 It contributes its mite toward better things and 
 better beings to come after. Nature, the mighty 
 master builder, wastes nothing. Each lower 
 order of life is the scaffold upon which a higher 
 is reared. Each overthrown individual can at 
 least become a grain in the mortar which 
 cements the whole together. Myriads must 
 perish in order that one may live and advance. 
 Should not this thought suffice for any life, 
 some ask? The aspiration need seek no finer 
 expression than that in which George Eliot 
 clothed it : — 
 
 " O may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence, 
 To make undying music in the world, 
 Breathing as beauteous order that control 
 With growing sway the life of man. 
 This is life to come, 
 
 Which martyred men have made more glorious 
 For us who strove to follow : may I reach 
 That purest Heaven : be to other souls 
 The cup of strength in some great agony. 
 So shall I join the choir invisible 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world." 
 
 None could wish to question or cheapen this 
 high thought. But it is more than doubtful 
 whether it can be anything but the thought 
 of a great soul trying to make the best of a 
 
6Q EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 broken hope. The atmosphere of melancholy 
 which envelopes its very phrases is significant. 
 The simple fact is that there is nothing in our 
 experience which gives a sufficient expectation 
 of good in humanity yet to be, to make up to 
 one for the defeat of his own personal existence. 
 "Could we," as Mr. John Fiske says, "but 
 know that our present lives are working together 
 toward some good end, it would be of less 
 consequence whether we were individually to 
 endure. To the dog under the knife of the 
 experimenter, the world is a world of pure 
 evil ; yet could the poor beast but understand 
 the alleviation of human suffering to which 
 he is contributing, he would be forced to own 
 that this is not quite true, and if he were also 
 a heroic or Christian dog the thought would 
 perhaps take away from death its sting." Per- 
 haps. But to gain this solace the poor dog 
 would have first to be convinced that the future 
 man to be benefited would be intrinsically 
 more valuable than a dog, and also that beyond 
 the supposed man there is some good goal to 
 be reached whose achievement would make 
 worth while all that went before. But just 
 this is what is not evident. 
 
 Are God and Nature then at strife, 
 
 That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 67 
 
 So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life ; 
 
 That, I considering everywhere 
 
 Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
 And finding that of fifty seeds 
 
 She often brings but one to bear, 
 
 ♦ * ♦ * » 
 
 So careful of the type ? but no 
 
 From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
 She cries, A thousand types are gone, 
 
 I care for nothing, all shall go. 
 
 No: no succedaneuin will suffice. I wish 
 to live, Ij in my own proper person, with 
 memory, self-consciousness, will, and the love 
 which is a part of myself. No projection of 
 myself into the future as an influence will 
 satisfy the craving. But how can this be if 
 that nexus of sensation, thought, and will which 
 I call " I " is dependent upon the interaction 
 of molecules in organized matter ? 
 
"There are thinkers who, because the phe- 
 nomena of life and consciousness are associated in 
 their minds by undeviating experience with the 
 action of material organs, think it an absurdity 
 per se to imagine it possible that those phenomena 
 can exist under any other conditions. But they 
 should remember that the uniform coexistence of 
 one fact with another does not make the one fact a 
 part of the other or the same with it. The relation 
 of thought to the brain is no metaphysical neces- 
 sity, but simply a constant coexistence within the 
 limits of observation." — John Stuart Mill. 
 
 68 
 
CHAPTER YII 
 
 We have dwelt long upon the newly felt 
 realization of the fact of the reciprocal relation 
 of mind and body. It is time now to turn to 
 the other fact, viz. that mind is something else 
 than the product of organized matter. The 
 living human body is a material machine, 
 weighing a certain number of pounds and occu- 
 pying a certain cubic space. It is acted upon 
 by all forms of physical energy known. Gravi- 
 tation pulls it, heat sets it vibrating, electric 
 energy stimulates it, chemical energy produces 
 its reactions within and about it. Suppose you 
 set apart the food which is to sustain a man, 
 and the air which he is to breathe during a 
 given period. Let the food be weighed and 
 analyzed. It weighs so many pounds, ounces, 
 and scruples. It contains nitrogen, carbon, 
 phosphorus, and what not. The food is intro- 
 duced. Chemical and physical action set to 
 work upon it. It is broken up into suitable 
 form to be carried to every remotest tissue. 
 The lungs take in oxygen, and the red blood 
 
70 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 corpuscles carry it with them in their swift race 
 to the ultimate cells where it is needed. The 
 nerves and brain, bones and tissue, are built up, 
 nourished, and stimulated. But now, if we 
 only have the instruments of sufficient delicacy, 
 we can weigh again the increment of the body, 
 and the excreta, and find again every atom of 
 material energy which entered the body, and 
 account for them in terms of matter. Every 
 unit of heat which has entered the body or has 
 been produced by chemical reaction within it can 
 be accounted for in terms of heat. Every unit 
 of chemical energy which has acted has also re- 
 acted, and can be accounted for in terms of 
 chemistry. !N"othing is lost, nothing lessened, 
 nothing changed. Every unit of physical 
 energy expended at any point in the cycle has, 
 at most, only been changed into some other 
 form of physical energy. In a word, through 
 all the protean changes belonging to the nutri- 
 tion of a living body matter remains matter, 
 and can be accounted for in terms of matter, no 
 scruple of it being lost or unaccounted for. 
 The law of the Conservation of Energy has 
 been satisfied. But at some point in the cycle 
 of atomic flow it has touched that other cycle 
 of sensation, thought, self-consciousness. The 
 matter has not been changed into psychic 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 71 
 
 energy, for it is all accounted for in terms of 
 matter. The most that can be said is that the 
 two cycles touch at points which have been 
 fairly well ascertained. But the unhesitating 
 verdict of physical science agrees with that of 
 our own unsophisticated self-consciousness that 
 we have here two actual and inconvertible 
 realities. Says Professor Huxley, " I know 
 nothing in the name of biology, and never hope 
 to know anything, of the steps by which the 
 passage from molecular movement to states of 
 consciousness is effected." " The two things," 
 said the late Professor Clifford, "are on two 
 utterly different platforms; the physical facts 
 go along by themselves, and the psychical facts 
 go along by themselves." The longing for a 
 larger life, which is now so painfully defeated 
 by the deep realization of the close implication 
 of psychical with physical organization, can only 
 be reenforced by bringing back vividly before 
 consciousness the fact that, after all has been 
 said, mind is essentially something else than the 
 output of organized matter. It does not yet 
 appear whether or not it is immortal in the case 
 of the individual, but it is much to be reassured 
 that whatever may be its future my soul is a 
 reality now. We can listen with serenity to 
 Professor Haeckel when he affirms that "the 
 
72 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 whole marvellous panorama of life that spreads 
 over the surface of our globe is, in the last 
 analysis, transformed sunlight. The progress 
 of technical science has made it possible for us 
 to convert the different physical and psychical 
 forces from one form to another ; heat may be 
 changed into molar movement ; this in turn into 
 light or sound, and then electricity, and so forth. 
 Accurate measurement of the quantity of force 
 vrhich is used in the metamorphosis has shown 
 that it is constant and unchanged." 
 
 That is precisely the point. It is constant 
 and unchanged. When the sun is old and the 
 moon is cold and the stars have fallen, all the 
 sunlight which has ever played upon them 
 could be weighed by one whose scales were 
 great enough, and every impulse of it be ac- 
 counted for in terms of solar energy. But in 
 the course of its stupendous cycle, it had rela- 
 tions with something which utterly refuses to 
 be defined in terms of solar heat or any of its 
 derivatives. That something else is sensation, 
 mind, personality. Professor Haeckel stands 
 alone in his unwarranted dogmatizing. Physi- 
 cal scientists almost unanimously refuse to go 
 with him. They solace us with the assurance 
 that self-consciousness has not misled us by 
 false pretences, claiming to be something when 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 73 
 
 she was not. When the last word has been 
 spoken, it is that physical evolution and psy- 
 chical evolution have moved with linked arms 
 toward a common goal, but that neither has 
 ever been confused with the other. If one will 
 hold this truth before him steadfastly and for 
 a sufficient time, he will realize its strange 
 power to reenforce in him that sense of spirit- 
 ual reality which threatened to be overlaid and 
 extinguished by the weight of the physical 
 universe. 
 
" speaking for myself, I can see no insuperable 
 difficulty in the notion that at some period in the 
 evolution of humanity this divine spark may have 
 acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to 
 survive the wreck of material forms and endure 
 forever. Such a crowning wonder seems to me no 
 more than the fit climax to a creative work that has 
 been ineffably beautiful and marvellous in all its 
 myriad changes." — John Fiske. 
 
 74 
 
CHAPTER YIII 
 
 The problem of immortability, that is, of 
 potential immortality, has been hopelessly ob- 
 scured by the traditional presumption that all 
 those living creatures who are classed as Man 
 on physical grounds are also Man on psychical 
 grounds. This being assumed, the question of 
 a future life becomes one concerning a race 
 and not concerning individuals. This explains 
 why all arguments for immortality have been 
 so unconvincing. They have tried to prove too 
 much. All those considerations which would 
 establish immortality for all men, in virtue of 
 their qualities which they possess as men, are 
 equally valid for many of the lower animals. 
 I wish here to bring forward and call attention 
 once again to the fact, already noted, that the 
 classification of Man as a separate species is 
 made solely upon zoological grounds. It is 
 based upon peculiarities of his skeleton, chiefly. 
 It is a classification good enough for the zoolo- 
 gist, but it is utterly confusing to the psycholo- 
 gist. Those broad lines of demarkation which 
 76 
 
76 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 mark off species from species in the ascent of 
 bodily function, do not at all coincide with the 
 great steps by which mental evolution has 
 climbed. The point at which we shall probably 
 have to look for the emergence of imraortabil- 
 ity is not at that which separates man from the 
 brute, but at that which separates between one 
 kind of man and all the rest. The story is told 
 of a distinguished Frenchman, who, to the long 
 argument of a friend against the possibility of 
 a future life, replied : " You say you are not im- 
 mortal ? Very probably you are right. Prob- 
 ably you are not; but I am." This is much 
 more than a happy repartee. It is essentially 
 the solution of a problem otherwise insoluble. 
 Whatever may turn out to be the difficulty of 
 drawing such a line among men does not concern 
 us at this stage of the argument. It is sufficient 
 for the present to point out that it is far less diffi- 
 cult to draw the line this way than in any other 
 way. It is hardly at all realized how nearly the 
 lowest man and the highest animal approximate 
 each other on the physical side, to say nothing 
 of the more important fact that their psychical 
 qualities overlap. The human race has had a 
 long history, certainly tens of thousands and 
 possibly hundreds of thousands of years. Dur- 
 ing by far the greater portion of this long pe- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 77 
 
 riod he was psychically far nearer to the brute 
 than we realize. There is nothing whatever to 
 indicate that he possessed a moral sense differ- 
 ing greatly in degree or differing at all in kind 
 from that manifested by his infra-humsui an- 
 cestors. He did not know good and evil, and 
 he was naked without sense of shame. But 
 the more important fact is that he still exists at 
 the same low stage of development in very con- 
 siderable numbers. It is essential that this fact 
 should be realized. There is no need to search 
 for the " missing link." The connection of the 
 orders of ascending life is not well represented 
 by the simile of a chain and links. It is rather 
 a line, bearing upward with an immensely 
 eccentric curve. If that curve can be meas- 
 ured in any considerable segment of its length, 
 the rest of it can be calculated, no matter how 
 many gaps be inaccessible. To calculate the 
 equation of a curve it is not necessary to have 
 it in sight throughout its whole extent. Be- 
 tween the lowest man now living and the high- 
 est, there is at least a distance quite as great as 
 that imagined between the lowest man and the 
 highest form which preceded him. "We but 
 faintly realize, either, how low in the scale of 
 being the lowest man is, or how high the high- 
 est is. Types of humanity so low that their 
 
78 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 very existence was unbelievable have lurked in 
 the hidden places of the earth for ages unsus- 
 pected. The stories of the past concerning 
 them were dismissed as myths and legends and 
 childish tales. One of the most wonderful ad- 
 ditions to the sum of the knowledge of the 
 nineteenth century has been their rediscovery. 
 It is a significant coincidence that, just as Dar- 
 win's book on the " Descent of Man" was is- 
 sued, Du Chaillu returned from tropical Africa 
 with his story of the Pygmies. The story 
 seemed so incredible and monstrous that the 
 old Frenchman has lived to this day bearing 
 the stigma of unveracity, though his account 
 has been long since verified. The facts con- 
 cerning this primitive man and his congeners 
 have been well and carefully brought together 
 by Morris in " Man and his Ancestors," which 
 I follow. Dr. Schweinfurth met with them on 
 the Wells Eiver, in four degrees north latitude. 
 The tribe found by him was composed of indi- 
 viduals averaging about four feet in height, 
 none being over four feet and a half, — about 
 the height of an American boy of eight years 
 of age. He describes them as "having large 
 heads, huge ears, and very ape-like faces. Their 
 arms are long and lank, the chest flat and 
 narrow, widening below to support a huge 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 79 
 
 abdomen, the legs short and bandy, the walk a 
 waddling motion, suggesting strangely that of 
 a gibbon. They are also ape-like in their inces- 
 sant grimacing, twitching of the eyebrows, 
 nodding and wagging of the head, and remark- 
 able agility." Stanley describes one of them 
 which he saw, as having " small, cunning, mon- 
 key-like eyes, close and deeply set, protruding 
 lips, prominent abdomen, narrow, flat chest, 
 sloping shoulders, long arms, feet strongly 
 turned inward, and very short lower legs. He 
 was a little over four feet high, of a light choco- 
 late color, with a thin fringe of whiskers, his 
 legs bowed and without any developed calf. 
 His body was covered with a thick, fur-like 
 hair, nearly half an inch long." They wear no 
 clothes whatever, build no houses, cannot count 
 above two, the adults manifest no trace of 
 affection for father, mother, brother, or sister. 
 Their language is undeveloped, consisting of 
 clicks and inarticulate vocals. Two of them 
 were brought to Italy in 1876, where, in the 
 course of several years, they learned to speak 
 and read Italian, and one of them showed some 
 proficiency in music. Their intellectual devel- 
 opment stopped, however, at about the point 
 usually reached by a European child of ten 
 years old, and could not be carried any farther. 
 
80 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Their life period is about forty years, in no 
 case having been known to reach fifty. Their 
 skull capacity is about in the ratio of 27, that 
 of the average American being about 40, and 
 that of the gorilla 20. 
 
 ITow, the zoologist, basing his classifica- 
 tion upon peculiarities of skeleton and in- 
 tegument, will classify them under Homo 
 Sajpiens. But when mental and spiritual 
 standards are applied, what are they? Are 
 they "man" or not? The attempt has been 
 made to account for them as local instances 
 of degeneration from a higher type. This 
 attempt breaks down, however, in face of 
 the fact that they manifestly belong to a nu- 
 merous group, extending geographically from 
 the southwest point of Africa to far Eastern 
 Asia. Tribes evidently akin to them are found 
 in Africa from the Cape to the Sahara, in Mada- 
 gascar, in Malacca and the Andaman Islands, 
 in Ceylon and the Philippines, in India and 
 Borneo. They cannot be explained by any 
 theory of degradation. They need no expla- 
 nation if the simple facts be faced. There is 
 no difficulty in the case except that which is 
 caused by the predetermination to draw a hard 
 and fast line between man and animal, and to 
 range every individual man upon one side of 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMOETALITY 81 
 
 that line, and every animal on the other. If 
 the fact be admitted that, for psychical pur- 
 poses, the line does not run in that place, the 
 perplexity vanishes. But if it be insisted, on 
 the other hand, that either all men are by their 
 constitution immortal, or that none are, then it 
 will in the long run prove more reasonable to 
 deny it of all men than to believe it of all. 
 Beings are living on the earth to-day at every 
 conceivable stage between that of the serai- 
 human Akka, who has no religion, no super- 
 stitions, no developed moral sense, and the 
 enlightened American or European Christian 
 whose sense of moral personality and self- 
 consciousness is far stronger than his sense of 
 physical being. It appears to be most reason- 
 able that at some point, yet to be defined, but 
 between these two extremes, the " power of an 
 endless life " is reached. 
 
"I can believe; this dread machinery 
 Of sin and sorrow would confound me else. 
 Devised all pain, at most expenditure 
 Of pain by who devised pain — to evolve 
 By new machinery in counterpart, 
 The moral qualities of Man — how else? — 
 To make him live in turn, and be beloved, 
 Creature and self-sacrificing too. 
 And thus eventually Godlike." 
 
 — " The Bing and the Book " 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 We have now reached the point where the 
 crucial question must be faced. If we are 
 driven to believe that iramortability may be 
 predicated of some member of the race, or of 
 one kind of men but not of all, then we must 
 ask, Where is the line to be drawn ? Or, to put 
 it in another way, At what point in the upward 
 movement does the individual personality take 
 on those qualities which may enable it to sur- 
 vive the death of the body ? Upon what does 
 immortality depend ? What are its conditions ? 
 How can those conditions be fulfilled? Are 
 they at all under the control of the individual 
 will ? Or is the individual on entering into the 
 eternal life as passive and helpless as he is in 
 being ushered into this world from the womb 
 after the full term of embryonic development 
 is completed? 
 
 Before offering any reply to these questions 
 it will be well to stop long enough to make one 
 88 
 
84 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 or two needful distinctions. In the first place, 
 there have been not a few, both in ancient and 
 modern times, who have maintained the truth 
 of a "Conditional Immortality." But they 
 have in every case assumed that all human 
 beings are by nature on the same level of 
 being, possessed intrinsically of the same qual- 
 ity. If some become immortal and others do 
 not, it is only because immortality is, as it were, 
 impressed upon some from the outside. It is a 
 gift, arbitrarily bestowed. It is because one 
 has been born of the Holy Spirit in baptism, 
 and another has not; or because one has par- 
 taken of the imperishable body and blood of 
 Christ in the Holy Eucharist, and another has 
 not; or it is because one has by a deliberate 
 act of will "accepted Christ" and on the 
 instant been " born again," or such like. The 
 "condition" which the advocates of condi- 
 tional immortality have laid down has always 
 been an extraneous, arbitrary, or artificial con- 
 dition. What we maintain is something differ- 
 ing radically from all these. No doubt each 
 and all of the conditions above named will be 
 found to be concerned, but the distinction it- 
 self is far deeper, more natural and reasonable, 
 even though it be far more difficult to state. 
 Speaking plainly, it is a biological process we 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMOKTALITY 85 
 
 are seeking to trace, and a biological classifica- 
 tion we attempt to discover. It may be that 
 the biological classification we are in search of 
 may turn out to be also a religious one. We 
 believe it will. But it will be religious because 
 it corresponds to an actual reality already exist- 
 ing, and not because of an arbitrary divine 
 arrangement. What we maintain is that, if any 
 human life becomes capable of passing on into 
 another life, with personality intact, it will be 
 because such a life has already reached to a 
 stage of spiritual fixedness and stability which 
 will make survival "natural," and destruction 
 "unnatural" to it, and that such an achieve- 
 ment, if reached at all, must be by an extension 
 of the long path by which the soul has climbed 
 up from the primordial slime. 
 
 Again, it is of the first importance that we 
 should realize the limitations of the problem 
 before us. I have used throughout the term 
 immortality as equivalent to survival after 
 death. It is necessary from this point on, how- 
 ever, either to avoid the word altogether or to 
 reach an understanding as to the sense in which 
 it is used. Speaking accurately, immortality is 
 a quality which can never be predicated of a 
 human soul at any stage of its existence, either 
 here or hereafter. " God alone hath immortal- 
 
86 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 ity" is not only a scriptural, but a scientific 
 datum. " Eternity " is a category of the uncon- 
 ditioned. The soul is an organism. The con- 
 dition of every organism continuing in being is 
 that it shall be able to function, and that it 
 shall correspond to its environment. This con- 
 dition cannot possibly cease to bind in the next 
 life, or in any subsequent life, any more than 
 in this. In this sense we do not seek for im- 
 mortality. Our quest is an humbler yet suffi- 
 ciently momentous one. We simply try to 
 ascertain from the data available whether we 
 can find a means of transit for any human 
 personality from this life to the next one. 
 Whether, if that prove possible, its life shall 
 there be brief or long is a question not now 
 before us. When, if ever, we do face it, we 
 may fairly expect to possess data for its solu- 
 tion which, in the nature of the case, are not 
 now available. With this caution it will prob- 
 ably be more convenient to keep on using the 
 term immortality meaning thereby an exist- 
 ence for the individual, longer or shorter, as 
 the case may be, in the life beyond the present 
 one. 
 
 The world teems with life. The sea swarms 
 with fishes, the land is crowded with plants. 
 Living things populate the surface, creep, and 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 87 
 
 burrow beneath the soil. From the great mas- 
 todon and his huge living children down to the 
 minute germ cell, which the powerful micro- 
 scope can barely discern, life is here in countless 
 forms. Life is everywhere, in every drop of 
 water, in every grain of dust, filling the still 
 summer air with its multitudinous drone, roar- 
 ing in the streets of men's great cities, crowd- 
 ing and choking in the forests of the tropics. 
 Try as we may, we cannot adequately realize 
 its abundance, its multitude, its myriad forms 
 and ways. It emerges silent and unseen from 
 inorganic matter, and crowds every step of 
 the long, strange, tortuous path upward to its 
 supreme manifestation in human self-conscious- 
 ness. When we begin to study and examine 
 its forms, one by one, we are arrested by the 
 significant fact that the ultimate goal of each 
 individual is to pass on to some other the life 
 which it possesses. If it can only reproduce, it 
 is ready to die. Its organs of reproduction are 
 the ones to which all other are ministrant. Its 
 provision of locomotion and digestion are but 
 means to this end. Countless millions in the 
 lower orders of animal life only exist long 
 enough to copulate, and give up their lives in 
 the act. In the vegetable world this is the 
 law without exception. Through stem and 
 
88 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 twig, through leaf and flower, it comes to 
 seed. When it has done so much, it has 
 served its purpose and falls into decay. Then 
 comes into play the inexhaustible ingenuity of 
 devices to begin again the cycle from the seeds. 
 They are not left to chance, or rather the laws 
 of chance are compelled to serve the purposes 
 of life. There are hooks on the seeds to catch 
 on the fleeces of moving animals; there are 
 wings or balloons to float them on the wind; 
 there is toothsome pulp to entice the bird to 
 swallow the indigestible kernel and drop it 
 in suitable soil ; there are a thousand devices, 
 all to the same purpose, which is to guarantee 
 the transmission of life. To the same end the 
 instincts and appetites are subsidized. The 
 " imperious instinct of propagation " dominates 
 all desires, is stronger than pain or even the 
 fear of death. In all except the higher animal 
 forms it is not even left to choice. Reproduce 
 they must, even if it does cost life. In the 
 whole organic world every other consideration 
 is subordinated to the single purpose of keep- 
 ing the stream of life flowing. Even the most 
 complex human society is organized about this 
 supreme necessity. This determination is so 
 inexorable that, lest it might be defeated, a 
 hundred thousand individuals^ are brought into 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 89 
 
 life only to perish, in order to make sure that 
 from among them all one may reproduce. Even 
 in man the provision for reproduction deter- 
 mines the whole plan of his being. His natu- 
 ral term of life is adjusted to the length of 
 time required to reach puberty. When his 
 power to reproduce declines, he begins to die. 
 His intellectual powers are correlated with this 
 movement. His social habits are ultimately 
 fixed with reference to this need. "Be fruit- 
 ful and multiply" is the primordial command 
 stamped upon the very constitution of animate 
 nature. 
 
 But once this truth has gained our assent, 
 it leads us to confront the supreme difficulty. 
 Life seems to be everything, and the indi- 
 vidual nothing. If only the species can win 
 its way forward and upward, the unit seems to 
 be of no value. "We appear to be caught in 
 the current of a mighty moving stream of life 
 which will assimilate our juices and sink us in 
 the slime or fling us dead upon the shore with- 
 out ruth even as without anger. The life is 
 everything; the organism in which the life is 
 for the moment conserved seems to be nothing. 
 Now, if an individual immortality is to become 
 possible, nothing less is necessary than a re- 
 versal of thisfelemental law. It is clear that 
 
90 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 that can only be reached if an individual be 
 found who is intrinsically stronger than his 
 species. Up to this point life sweeps around 
 everlastingly in a closed circle, from seed 
 through plant or animal to seed again, and 
 so about continually. If escape from it be 
 ever possible it must be at a tangent, and by 
 some kind of individual whose life orbit sweeps 
 far enough away from its material centre to be 
 caught in some mighty attraction from beyond. 
 And, to continue the figure, the difference be- 
 tween the individual who passes on and the 
 one who remains enchained within the circle 
 of nature need only be infinitesimal, provided 
 it occur at the right point. An illustration 
 which may serve to make the matter plainer 
 can be drawn from physical mathematics. 
 Take the case of two bodies moving through 
 space. One of them has for its path the ex- 
 tremest conic section, that is, a curve with the 
 greatest possible eccentricity. The path of the 
 other is a parabola. The difference between 
 the two curves is literally infiinitesimal. Yet 
 moving in the one the body must ultimately 
 return to the point from whence it started. 
 By the other it must move out into infinite 
 space. May we not similarly expect that a 
 change correspondingly slight in the psychic 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 91 
 
 movement of an organism may produce a result 
 equally important? 
 
 In the lowest order of life there are really 
 no individuals at all. The amoeba is simply a 
 speck of protoplasmic jelly, uniform and slightly 
 sensitive. It has no limbs, organs, or members. 
 To multiply, it only breaks in two. ^ Each part 
 is as much or as little offspring as it is parent 
 or as it is self. Each half, in its turn, divides 
 again, and so the propagation goes on. It can- 
 not be said that individuality belongs to any 
 of its units, for each unit is divisible, and it 
 is the essence of personality to be indivisi- 
 ble. The thing which cannot be divided is the 
 in-dividual. In the next higher stage of be- 
 ing a sort of compound or communistic individ- 
 uality begins to show, as in sponges, among 
 animals, and through the vegetable world. 
 Each sponge or plant or tree is a group of par- 
 tially independent units deriving their suste- 
 nance in common. !N"ot until a comparatively 
 high stage of evolution has been reached does 
 the actual individual appear " whose life is in 
 himself." Then he appears only to live his 
 little life, beget a child if he can, and perish. 
 The incalculable multitude of living forms 
 merge as it were into a mighty river flowing 
 through the aeons and dropping over the preci- 
 
92 EVOLUTION OF IMMOKTALITY 
 
 pice to death, more numerous than all the 
 drops at lN"iagara. Kor does the spectacle 
 cause moral distress or revolt until the indi- 
 vidual atoms come to be of such consequence 
 that we begin to rebel against the aimlessness 
 of it all. No beast has been defrauded of any 
 due because it has to die. Mere existence and 
 sensation have been for it a positive boon, 
 whether its life has been long or short. This 
 is also true of the brutelike man, and, what is 
 of more consequence, this is his own judgment 
 in the case. He clings to life for its own sake, 
 and the lower in the scale he is the more tena- 
 cious he is. Even Laertes can face the end 
 with a light heart because he has had his life. 
 Kot till humanity reaches the stage of Hamlet 
 does he begin to question whether to be or not 
 to be. "Is life worth living?" is a question 
 which cannot be asked until man has reached 
 a very high sense of the value of the individual. 
 At all earlier periods the reply is yes ; or more 
 likely the inquiry is quite unintelligible. Con- 
 sidering the whole human race from its prime- 
 val brutality until now, it is probable that the 
 overwhelming majority have no unliquidated 
 claim upon existence. They have had the gift 
 of living, and have made of it all that could 
 be made. There is nothing more due. But 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 93 
 
 there are many surely of which something 
 more can be said. Their capacities are wider 
 than their spheres. Their psychical life is 
 stronger than their physical. Their affections 
 are stronger than their appetites. Their spirits 
 hare established so many relations with other 
 personalities, with nature as a whole, with 
 ideals which are more real to their apprehen- 
 sion than is matter itself, with the Infinite 
 Personality whom they feel enfolding them- 
 selves and nature in his arms, that to think of 
 all this coming to naught because the founda- 
 tion of the material body is cut from under 
 it by death, brings to our feelings a sense of 
 distress and essential unreasonableness which 
 is intolerable. Such an one has already learned 
 the secret of going beyond himself by his sym- 
 pathies. He is an individual, as the inorganic 
 crystal is, as the organized germ-cell is, as the 
 brute is, as the animal man is, but he is some- 
 thing more. In common with all these he is 
 under the law which subordinates the indi- 
 vidual to the species and throws it away when 
 it has fulfilled its use of reproduction. But he 
 has, to some degree at any rate, and in some 
 portion of his being, escaped from this law by 
 having come into the possession of certain 
 qualities which cannot be propagated by re- 
 
94 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 production. He did not reach these qualities 
 at the point where he became man by bodily 
 structure, or by the possession of mind, but at 
 an uncertain point high above that of primitive 
 man. But whenever and however this new 
 faculty is reached, we may fairly expect that 
 it will in some way be preserved in being. 
 This certitude does not come alone, or in the 
 first place from religious faith, but from watch- 
 ing IN'ature's ways. One thing the scientist 
 knows right well; that is, that JS'ature does 
 not hesitate a moment to change or to reverse 
 methods which she has used throughout long 
 stretches of time whenever she has something 
 to gain by such reversal. If it shall appear at 
 any stage in the upward movement of being 
 that more is gained by keeping the individual 
 in a continued life than by breaking him up 
 for sake of the species, we may by all anal- 
 ogy expect that Nature will find some way to 
 do so. It would only be to repeat what has 
 been done more than once before. The inex- 
 orable forces of gravitation and chemical affin- 
 ity had their own way in the universe for an 
 eternity, until they were arrested and turned 
 about in the interest of life. Overproduction, 
 death, and survival of the fittest had their ruth- 
 less sway until they were reversed in the inter- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 95 
 
 est of affection. The supremacy of the race 
 at the expense of the individual we may expect 
 to continue just until something in the indi- 
 vidual comes to be of more importance than 
 that law, and no longer. 
 
" Have you done 
 Descending? Here's ourself, — man, known to-day, 
 Duly evolved at last; so far, you say. 
 The sum and seal of beings progress. Good! 
 Thus much at least is clearly understood — 
 Of power does Man possess no particle ! 
 Of knowledge — just so much as shows that still 
 It ends in ignorance on every side : 
 But righteousness — ah, men are deified 
 Thereby, for compensation." 
 
 — Browning. 
 
 96 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 The idea of eternal life has always been asso- 
 ciated with that of moral goodness. Evil and 
 death are the antitheses. Righteousness and 
 long life : sin and disintegration, — this is what 
 men have always believed to be in some way 
 a fundamental truth. But it is greatly to be 
 doubted whether they have realized how true 
 it is. 
 
 In a very real sense a race or a people or a 
 nation is an individual with a personality of its 
 own. The long history of the past is strewn 
 with the dust of extinct peoples. In a com- 
 paratively few instances their rise, climax, 
 decline, and decay lie within the historic 
 period. No doubt these rose from among the 
 ruins of innumerable earlier peoples. "Why 
 have some survived while others perished? 
 "Why do one or two peoples or families of peo- 
 ples to-day feel and show the sense of secure 
 being, while others are slowly decaying under 
 our eyes? Mr. Benjamin Kidd, in his book 
 upon Social Evolution, has shown with singular 
 u 97 
 
98 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 clearness that a people's length of life depends 
 upon its goodness. Not, finally, upon its phys- 
 ical vigor, or its mental advance, but moral 
 goodness. He quotes and indorses Mr. Glad- 
 stone's opinion that the physical and intel- 
 lectual equipment of the average Greek of the 
 time of Pericles was very considerably higher 
 than that of the average Englishman or 
 American of to-day. It is very possible that 
 the Babylonians and Egyptians more than 
 equalled us in these regards. The phallic sym- 
 bols strewing the ruins by the Euphrates, and 
 the abominations sketched at Pompeii, give the 
 clew to their decay. "What prevented the 
 American Indian, in possession since the dawn 
 of time of the most abundant region of the 
 earth, and with his great mental force, from 
 developing a civilization which would have 
 been abiding? What accounts for the deca- 
 dence of Spain, and for the unburied corpse of 
 China ? What explains the ruin of Eome, and 
 Constantinople, and the states of Asia Minor 
 and North Africa? The answer is in every 
 case the same : they perished because they fell 
 short of goodness. No other quality could 
 secure for them continuance in existence. The 
 Teutons have endured, and promise to endure, 
 in virtue of certain racial moral qualities which 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 99 
 
 they developed ages ago, and which have saved 
 them from being brutalized by their own 
 strength, and from sinking down in their stu- 
 pidity. Goodness can thus arrest and turn 
 back for nations the primal law of growth, 
 vigor, and decline. Is it, therefore, too much 
 to believe that it may do the same for an indi- 
 vidual man ? But if anything like this be true, 
 it is clear that our chance of future life turns 
 upon a question of present fact. Does one, or 
 does he not, in any instance possess a moral 
 energy sufficiently strong and coherent to 
 dominate his life? The mere possession of a 
 potential faculty for goodness, or the actual 
 manifestation of a rudimentary ethical sense, 
 will not suffice. Brutes have that much. The 
 races which have perished had that. Only a 
 moral structure developed far enough to take 
 command over the turbulent appetites and 
 errant thoughts will serve the end. Now it is 
 equally clear that some possess this quality, and 
 that some do not. It is a quality of being cor- 
 related to some degree, but not very closely, 
 with intellectual forwardness. A simple hind 
 may be very good, and an undevout astronomer 
 may be destitute of moral sense. We have 
 seen above that there are now living whole 
 tribes of undeveloped savages, who have no 
 
100 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 more moral energy than the brutes, — for it 
 must be remembered that the brutes have some. 
 To raise, concerning them, the question of im- 
 mortality would seem to be essentially irrele- 
 vant or premature. They have not yet really 
 entered into the human life which now is, to 
 say nothing of that which is to come. As in 
 every other stage of biological advance, an 
 individual here and there, no doubt, rises far 
 above either his fathers or his children, and no 
 doubt such an one wins for himself the power 
 of indefinite progress. The place of escape 
 from out the closed ring of what we call nature 
 is not the body, nor the mind, but the con- 
 science. If that gate be not found, or if it be 
 too narrow for egress, there cannot, in the 
 nature of the case, be any thoroughfare. Nor is 
 it easy to expect immortality for multitudes far 
 closer to us than are the Pygmies or the Bush- 
 men. As one wanders observantly and thought- 
 fully amongst the crowds which teem in the 
 purlieus of a great Christian city, as he watches 
 their faces, listens to their meagre speech, pene- 
 trates to the interiors of their shallow lives, 
 realizes their brutality and mischievousness and 
 cunning intelligence, becomes familiar with 
 their desires and ideals of life, above all, as he 
 sees their look of blank insensibility to any moral 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 101 
 
 appeal, he is hard put to it not to ask himself, 
 Are these really men ? I confess frankly that 
 when I have tried to speak to certain kinds of 
 men " of righteousness and judgment to come," 
 I have felt that the effort was little less vain 
 than would have been the same exhortation to 
 my good dog. One can, it is true, make his 
 appeal to the fear of death, and can thus evoke 
 a response in the form of frantic terror. But 
 one can do the same by pointing his gun at a 
 predatory crow. The fear of death and the 
 belief in a future life are two entirely different 
 things, and have no necessary relation to each 
 other. So far as one can see, the fear of death, 
 as an emotion, does not differ either in kind 
 or degree between the natural man and the 
 natural beast. The natural man's Paradise 
 may be edenic or it may be barren and squalid, 
 but he does not come in sight of the tree of life 
 until he leaves it. Myriads still dwell within 
 it, being even now as the "first man" was. 
 "While at that stage, the questions concerning 
 human nature are those which are asked by 
 chemistry, physiology, zoology, and compara- 
 tive anatomy and psychology. Eeligion sim- 
 ply cannot speak at all to him until he becomes 
 as a god, knowing good and evil. When 
 this stage is reached, and not till then, does 
 
102 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 eternal life come within the possibilities. "This 
 is eternal life to know God," and God is appre- 
 hended only through the moral sense. 
 
 We may admit, without hesitation, that it is 
 not possible to define the point at which the 
 capacity of eternal life is reached in the devel- 
 opment of the individual. This does not touch 
 the essential truth. ]N"o physicist can draw a 
 line and say, here inorganic matter becomes 
 organic ; no botanist can say, here vegetable 
 life becomes animal ; no naturalist can say, 
 here the invertebrate ends and the vertebrate 
 begins ; no psychologist can say, here instinct 
 ceases and reason commences. ISTo anthropol- 
 ogist can draw a line below man, or through, 
 men, or in the life of the individual man, and 
 say, here, now, is conscience. But facts do not 
 cease to be because classification is impractica- 
 ble. We may rest this phase of the argument 
 at this point, having in its defence all the broad 
 analogies of nature and the unanimous agree- 
 ment of all the ages. It ought not to be a sur- 
 prise, and it ought to be a relief, if we find it to 
 be also the teaching of Holy Scripture. 
 
"When once this question of the after-life has 
 been opened, it will be discovered that we and our 
 predecessors have been so walking up and down 
 and running hither and thither among dim notices 
 and indications of the future destiny of men as to 
 have failed to see what lies upon the pages of the 
 Bible, open and free to our use. Those who read 
 the Scriptures unshackled by systems must feel an 
 impatience in waiting — not for the arrival of a 
 new revelation from heaven — but of an unfettered 
 interpretation of that which has so long been in 
 our hands." — Isaac Taylor. 
 
 104 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 For very many it would be an inestimable 
 relief to have some definite deliverance of Jesus 
 Christ upon the question before us. Are all men 
 immortal, or are only some? Is a universal 
 resurrection a thing which he takes for granted, 
 or is it not? An explicit dictum of his upon the 
 subject would be for many of us an end of con- 
 troversy. But here it comes to us with a sort 
 of shock to be reminded, not only that he does 
 not say, but that he avows, at the time when 
 he spoke upon the general subject, that his 
 information was limited. " Of that day and 
 hour no man knoweth, not even the Son." It 
 is not impossible, however, for us to find out, at 
 least in a general way, what his attitude was. 
 In the first place, we have a sufficiently full 
 report in the Gospels of what he actually said. 
 It is true that the report is incomplete and frag- 
 mentary, but it is coherent. Then we have in 
 the other portions of the New Testament the 
 interpretation and expansion of his teaching 
 by very intelligent and sympathetic conterapo- 
 105 
 
106 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 raries. Finally and chiefly, we have the account 
 of his own extraordinary career. This last will 
 constitute a chapter by itself ; for the present 
 we shall do better to ask the limited question, 
 What did Jesus, during the period before his 
 own " resurrection," believe and teach concern- 
 ing the future life? The fact that his lan- 
 guage was intelligible to those who heard him is 
 proof that his general presumptions were the 
 same as theirs. But it is a simple matter of 
 fact that he spoke to people who were not 
 believers in the " immortality of the soul." If 
 a previous belief in inherent immortality had 
 been needful to enable them to understand his 
 further teaching in the matter, then he would 
 have been compelled to say so, and thus estab- 
 lish his premises. The point is that he took 
 for his premises the beliefs which his hearers 
 actually entertained. It is at once most neces- 
 sary and most difficult for us to bring ourselves 
 to realize that his hearers did not have at all 
 the beliefs w^hich are taken for granted now. 
 Some of them did not believe in any future life 
 at all. Some of them believed in a corporate 
 immortality for the people Israel, with which 
 individual continuance had nothing to do. Some 
 of them believed in the resurrection of all indi- 
 viduals of the race of Abraham alone. Some 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 107 
 
 looked for the immortality of only the right- 
 eous of that race. But nobody believed in the 
 immortality of every individual human being 
 as such. It is clear, therefore, that when he 
 faced a company of this sort, if what he was 
 about to teach depended for its validity upon a 
 belief in that which is now common among 
 us, the presumption of universal future life, he 
 would have been obliged to say so. But he did 
 not say so. The beliefs actually existent among 
 his hearers appeared to serve his purpose per- 
 fectly well. Moreover, it may be truly said that 
 the assumptions now current would not have 
 served him at all. One of the most difficult 
 things for one to do is to read the true meaning 
 into a word or phrase to which he has long been 
 in the habit of attaching a false or mistaken 
 or secondary meaning. When we find Jesus 
 using such antitheses as "life and death," "eter- 
 nal life and destruction," " living and perish- 
 ing," it is at least prima facie probable that 
 he used the words in their obvious and natural 
 sense. But we have been so long accustomed 
 to think of eternal life as being equivalent to 
 eternal happiness, and the converse, that it 
 will require a strenuous and steadfast effort 
 to see in Christ's words what they meant, and 
 what alone they could have meant, to those 
 
108 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 who heard them. It is conceivable that the 
 meaning of his words was larger than they 
 realized, but they must have meant that much 
 at any rate, and could not have meant some- 
 thing incompatible with that. Another impor- 
 tant thing to bear in mind is that he never 
 deals with abstractions. He has nothing to 
 say about " man," but only about men. He 
 never refers to " the soul," or " the human 
 soul," but always to the soul of some definite 
 individual. He never discusses the question 
 of immortality in the abstract, but only deals 
 with the possibilities and destinies of individ- 
 uals. He never assumes that man is mortal 
 or that he is immortal, he simply points out to 
 the individual which way life lies, and which 
 way destruction. And what is possibly more 
 important for our purpose than anything else, 
 he explicitly declares that many will be con- 
 stitutionally incapable of comprehending him 
 at all. " He that hath ears to hear, let him 
 hear." In other words, he announces that he 
 speaks only to those whose spiritual faculties 
 are sufficiently developed to be able to respond 
 to the stimulus of his truth. 
 
 Bearing these preliminary considerations well 
 in mind, we may now ask, "What did he say? 
 His teaching may be divided in two portions 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 109 
 
 which differ greatly in form, if not in contents. 
 The most prominent, but least clear, is that 
 extended address in apocalyptic form suggested 
 by his disciples inquiring concerning the fate 
 of the Capital City, and recorded at length in 
 the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew, and 
 more briefly by Sts. Mark and Luke. A great 
 difficulty in the way of ascertaining his precise 
 meaning here is found in the fact that the form 
 of the address is evidently not Christ's own. It 
 is framed in that cryptic manner common to 
 the later apocalypses, and derived from the 
 earlier prophetic style.^ Dr. Gould in his 
 " Theology of the New Testament " well says 
 of it: "Simple as are these teachings, Jesus 
 has been subject to the most singular misunder- 
 standings from the beginning. The last things 
 of which he speaks are not the end of the 
 world, but of the age. . . . Whatever was pre- 
 dicted here by our Lord was to take place 
 within the generation succeeding his death. 
 There is a consensus of scholars about this, the 
 only question being whether he made a mistake 
 or not. And it is strongly against the assump- 
 tion that he did make a mistake, that he sets 
 forth in the parables a statement of the slow 
 
 iSee la. 13:9, 10; 24:21-23; Ezek. 32:7-10; Joel 2: 
 10, 30, 31, ; Dan. 7 : 18. 
 
110 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 growth of the Kingdom which clearly contra- 
 dicts the idea of an early coming. Thus, in 
 one sense, the coming of the Son of man 
 occurred at the destruction of the Jewish state, 
 but in another sense it is continually happen- 
 ing, the great crises in the history of the world 
 being really comings of the Son of man." In 
 any case, and whatever it may purport, this 
 last apocalypse of Jesus is so dramatic in form 
 and imagery that not much can be learned 
 from it as to the essential nature and possi- 
 bilities of the individual man. This must be 
 sought from his more definite teaching. 
 
 If one should weave together the words of 
 Christ as they are scattered through the Gos- 
 pels, he would find that he had before him a 
 treatise upon life and death. He would find 
 the conditions set forth upon which continuance 
 in being is possible, the perils to which being is 
 exposed, the means to counteract those perils, 
 and the ultimate issues of living. But he 
 would find that, throughout, the theme is the 
 individual life. The alternatives dealt with are 
 not future pleasure and future pain, but living 
 or ceasing to live. The Gospels are biological 
 altogether. They speak a language which is 
 more intelligible to-day than it has ever been 
 before. The imagery is drawn almost exclu- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 111 
 
 sively from the processes and phenomena of 
 life. The reason is evident: the illustrations 
 are determined by the theme. The question 
 is not of rewards and punishments, but of liv- 
 ing or perishing. Whatever of pleasure or pain 
 is implicated at any point is incidental. With 
 this theme to expound, and speaking only to 
 those who had ears to hear, Jesus found himself 
 in sympathy with his auditors. He begins by 
 stating the situation in terms which the zoolo- 
 gist knows to be true of life at every stage. 
 "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is 
 the gate and broad is the way which leadeth 
 to destruction, and many there be which go in 
 there ; because strait is the gate and narrow is 
 the way which leadeth unto life, and few there 
 be that find it." Of fifty seeds oft nature 
 brings but one to bear. "For God so loved 
 the world that he gave his only begotten Son, 
 that whosoever believeth on him should not 
 perish but have aeonian life. He that heareth 
 my word and believeth on him that sent me 
 hath everlasting life and shall not pass to 
 catastrophe, but hath passed out of death into 
 life. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, 
 and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. 
 Do not be surprised, therefore, when I say unto 
 you that except a man be born from above he 
 
112 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 cannot enter into the Kingdom of God." The 
 place of any creature in the scale of being is 
 determined by its procedure. " For every plant 
 is classified by the fruit it bears. Men do not 
 gather figs from the acanthus nor grapes of 
 brambles. A good plant cannot produce bad 
 fruit nor an evil plant good fruit. But every 
 plant which does not bring forth good fruit is 
 cut to pieces and thrown into the fire." The 
 ethical life follows the analogy of the natural 
 life both in origin and method. "For as the 
 Father quickeneth the dead and maketh them 
 living, so the Son quickeneth whom he will. 
 He that hearkeneth to my word, and has con- 
 fidence in him that sent me, hath aBonian life 
 and moves not to destruction, but hath passed 
 out of the dead into the living. I declare unto 
 you that if a man keep my saying he shall 
 never see death. Leave the dead to bury their 
 own dead, and follow after me." He insists 
 that this higher and more enduring life ought 
 to be achieved at any cost. " For what will it 
 profit a man if he should gain the whole world 
 and lose his psychical life? Or, what shall a 
 man get in exchange for his own soul ? If thy 
 right eye or thy right hand should be in the 
 way, pluck it out, cut it off, for it is better 
 \ that one of thy members should perish than 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 113 
 
 that thy whole body should be thrown into 
 the Jakes." 
 
 These quotations ought to sufl5ce to show his 
 teaching. All the others are variations upon 
 the same theme. His revelation was a revela- 
 tion of possible life. He has neither threats nor 
 promises. He makes his appeal to the instinct 
 of living. If you do thus, and thus, following 
 in my steps, you can secure for yourself a life 
 so prepotent that what you call death cannot 
 ruin it. Blessed are the meek, the pure in 
 heart, the unselfish in spirit, for the new King- 
 dom belongs to them. If you devote your 
 energies to building up your lower life, you 
 will lose everything, because it comes to an 
 end, but if you disregard it in the interest of 
 my eternal gospel of goodness, you will find an 
 aeonian life. What is all this but the annuncia- 
 tion of the last term in the long series of 
 organic evolution? And is it not supremely 
 trustworthy as being the dictum of the final 
 personality who came himself only " in the ful- 
 ness of time " ? 
 
 Now, no doubt, the question will arise. If this 
 be actually the teaching of Jesus, how comes it 
 that it has been so long and persistently mis- 
 conceived? If the teaching of Christ was bio- 
 logical, how has it come to be thought of as 
 
114 EVOLUTION OF IMMOKTALITY 
 
 theological ? If his distinction was between a 
 perishable and an abiding life under conditions 
 now existing, why has it been interpreted to 
 refer to the difference between happiness and 
 agony in a future life to which all men are 
 destined in any case ? It may be replied that, 
 at any rate, he was not misunderstood by his 
 apostles and first interpreters. 
 
" The most common of those feelings which pre- 
 sent obstacles to the pursuit or propagation of 
 truth are Aversion to doubt j Desire of a supposed 
 safe medium; The love of system; The dread of 
 the character of inconsistency ; The dread of inno- 
 vation ; Undue deference to human authority ; The 
 fear of criticism ; Eegard to seeming consistency." 
 
 — Whately, on Bacon's "Essays." 
 
 116 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 The earliest extant literature of Christianity 
 was written somewhere between twenty and 
 forty years' after the death of Christ. In no 
 case can the date of any of these documents be 
 more than approximately fixed. Nor are any 
 of them reasoned and formulated statements of 
 belief. They consist chiefly of certain letters 
 which have remained out of the correspondence 
 carried on by some of his friends when circum- 
 stances had carried them to a distance from 
 each other. This correspondence was often of a 
 personal and intimate nature, and sometimes in 
 the form of letters written by some prominent 
 man to a small group of Christians, with the 
 understanding that after being read they were to 
 be passed on to other groups. In such composi- 
 tion we cannot expect to find any very definite 
 and precise statements of belief. The earliest 
 literature bears much the same relation to 
 Christianity as does the familiar correspondence 
 of Huxley and Darwin and Gray to the doc- 
 trine of Evolution. To attempt to reconstruct 
 117 
 
118 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 a systematic religion or scientific creed from 
 such material is not easy. But here, as always, 
 it is not so much what a man says as what he 
 takes for granted, that enables one to see his 
 real position. The earliest books of the New 
 Testament are the following, and were written, 
 approximately, in the order named. The Epis- 
 tles of James, 1 Peter, 1 John, 1 and 2 Thes- 
 salonians, Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, 
 Ephesians, Colossians, the Gospel of St. Mark, 
 and portions of St. Matthew. It may fairly be 
 assumed that all these were written within forty 
 years after the death of Christ. Now, the 
 question is, do they or do they not take for 
 granted the indestructibility of the soul and the 
 natural immortality of all men ? Of the answer 
 there can be no doubt; they do not. Moreover, 
 such an assumption makes their arguments in 
 many cases unintelligible, and in not a few makes 
 them worthless. It must be borne in mind, 
 moreover, that, though the writers had become 
 Christians, they had not yet worked free from 
 the mass of confused and contradictory notions 
 about the future life among which they had 
 been reared as Jews and pagans. Of course 
 there is not space here to make a detailed ex- 
 amination and collation of the whole New 
 Testament. That would demand a treatise by 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 119 
 
 itself, and would be well worth the doing, pro- 
 vided one could be found to do it who possessed 
 the requisite knowledge and was able at the 
 same time to divest himself of all prejudgments, 
 being content to find out just what the writers 
 do say, and not concerning himself to reconcile 
 them to any doctrine or to each other. 
 
 In general, it may be said, without hesitation, 
 that the New Testament continues the same 
 biolof^ical theme about which the teachinof of 
 Jesus revolved. As a rule, however, their argu- 
 ments do not start, as his do, from the facts of 
 being, but from the fact of his resurrection. 
 The significant thing is that their assumptions 
 are the same as his. Says St. James, " Blessed 
 is the man who survives the moral test, for the 
 issue is life. The lust of the carnal nature be- 
 gets sin, and sin, when it is full grown, endeth 
 in death. For God has made of us " (who have 
 endured the test) " a kind of first fruits of his 
 living things. Whoso lifteth up an evil one into 
 the plane of living saveth a soul out of death." 
 St. Peter exhorts his fellows to " thank God for 
 his great mercy in having re-begotten us into 
 a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 
 into an inheritance incapable of decay or fad- 
 ing, stored up in the heavens for you who are 
 preserved by the power of God for a salvation 
 
120 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 already made and which will be manifest at the 
 last/' "They that walk after the flesh, as be- 
 ing without reason, and born brute beasts, shall 
 in their corruption be surely destroyed." St. 
 John indorses this, declaring that " all that is 
 in the kosmos, the lust of the flesh and the lust 
 of the eyes, is the empty shadow of life, is kos- 
 mic, and the kosmos is perishable, but he that 
 doeth the will of God abideth forever. He that 
 loveth not abideth among the dead, for whoso- 
 ever hateth his brother is a murderer, and you 
 know that a murderer hath no life in him." 
 Neither Sts. Peter, James, or John intimate 
 anywhere in their letters that they have the 
 remotest expectation of continued existence for 
 any except those who fulfil the condition which 
 is the burden of their message. They expect 
 future life solely for those who are, in their 
 phrase, "in Christ," "have passed from dead 
 into living," " have been born again," who have 
 been made "new creatures." They assume 
 throughout that this kind of man has, through his 
 affections and his conscience, reached to a stage 
 of psychical being which differentiates him from 
 the " natural " man. They expect immortality 
 for him, not because he is a " man," but because 
 he has become something more. " They are of 
 the kosmos: we are of God." "They are ani- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 121 
 
 mals, not having the spirit: we look, in the 
 mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, for seonian 
 life." Whether their contention be valid or not, 
 it is surely plain enough. 
 
 The earliest letters of St. Paul are those two 
 written to the little group of converts which 
 he had made a few years previously in Thessa- 
 lonica. By the time when he began to write, 
 the belief appears to have gained general cur- 
 rency among the Christians, that Christ's plan 
 was to reappear while his friends still lived, 
 gather them out of the world, and then make 
 an end of all things, to rebuild the kosmos and 
 open a new regime. They believed the fact 
 of his own resurrection, but they had not come 
 to see the place of that fact in the economy 
 of life's progress. This belief colors all the 
 earlier New Testament writings. It was a 
 naive error which only death and the passing 
 of the years could cure. They believed that 
 they had come into possession of a life of such 
 quality that it would endure, but they saw at 
 the same time that they were growing old physi- 
 cally. Presently the great missionary learned 
 that his Thessalonian converts, whose expecta- 
 tions were the same as his own, were in distress 
 and perplexity because some of their number 
 who, with them, had been waiting the Lord's 
 
f 
 
 122 EVOLUTION or IMMORTALITY 
 
 coming, had fallen asleep. Had they, in conse- 
 quence, missed the immortality which they ex- 
 pected ? St. Paul thereupon writes to reassure 
 them. "What he says and what he does not 
 say are equally noteworthy. He has nothing 
 to say to them about a universal resurrection 
 and immortality. He writes : " I would not 
 have you to be even agnostic concerning them 
 that have fallen asleep, or that you should 
 sorrow as do other people w^ho have no hope 
 for the dead. For as we believe that Jesus 
 died and rose again, so also we believe that 
 God will bring back with him them that have 
 fallen asleep in him. I assure you in God's 
 truth, that we who will be alive at the Lord's 
 coming, will not have any advantage over them 
 that are fallen asleep. For the Lord shall de- 
 scend from heaven, with the voice of the 
 archangel and with the trump of God ; and 
 first the dead in Christ shall rise; and then 
 we that are alive, together with them, shall 
 be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord 
 in the air ; and so shall we ever be w^ith the 
 Lord." He was still of the same opinion when 
 he wrote the Thessalonians his second letter; 
 but as the years went on, and the real teaching 
 of his Master came to be better comprehended, 
 he came to think of the new life less and less 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 123 
 
 in connection with some great kosmic cataclysm, 
 and more and more as the manifestation of a 
 supreme vital force which would continue to 
 operate according to its own laws to the end 
 of the ages. The divine classic is that fifteenth 
 chapter of 1 Corinthians, which has for twenty 
 centuries been read by Christian charity over 
 the dead bodies of saints and sinners alike. It 
 is a marvellous construction of science, poetry, 
 faith, and reason and high aspiration. But it 
 concerns itself solely with the " dead in Christ," 
 that is with those whose spiritual natures are 
 akin to his. The " natural " man is left outside 
 its conclusions by express terms. If any one 
 question this, let him read it, but let him read 
 it all. TVhen he has read that " as in ^ Adam ' 
 all die, so also in Christ shall all be made 
 alive," let him read on, " but each in his own 
 order ; Christ the first fruits, then they that 
 are Christ's at his appearing; and that is the 
 end." The drama is closed and the stage 
 finally cleared before the "natural" man has 
 any place upon it. "That which is natural 
 comes first, then that which is spiritual. The 
 first man is of the earth, earthen : the second 
 man is of heaven. As is the earthen, such 
 are they also that are earthen ; and as is the 
 heavenly, such are they that are heavenly. 
 
124 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 As we have borne the image of the earthy, let 
 us also bear the image of the heavenly. For 
 I declare this, brethren, that flesh and blood 
 cannot inherit the Kingdom of God : neither 
 doth the corruptible inherit incorruption." 
 
 I am painfully aware that all this will seem 
 to some to be an unwarranted attempt to read 
 into St. Paul's words a meaning which they 
 will not bear. I can only urge in reply, that 
 this seems to me to be the natural and obvious 
 meaning, and the only meaning which those 
 to whom the letter was addressed could have 
 found in them. And this conviction is estab- 
 lished by the fact that this meaning squares 
 with the fundamental biological purpose of 
 the Gospel of Christ. The quintessence of 
 the matter is that life in its supreme phase 
 conforms'to the law of life at all its stages. It 
 is a thing to be achieved. At every step there 
 are a thousand candidates who fail for one who 
 attains. Those who attain remain in posses- 
 sion while they fulfil the conditions of the 
 order where they are. Except a molecule of 
 matter be born from above it cannot enter into 
 life. Except the living animal be born from 
 above it cannot become man. Except a man 
 be born again he cannot enter into the kingdom 
 of heaven. That is not first which is spiritual, 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 125 
 
 but that which is natural, and afterward, that 
 which is spiritual. 
 
 The later books of the New Testament, such 
 as the Kevelation of St. John and the apocalyp- 
 tic portion of St. Matthew's Gospel, throw little 
 or no light upon the question before us. "While 
 it is true that they concern themselves with 
 the " last things," it is equally true that they 
 write in a manner which was not intended to 
 be taken for the face of it. The Apocalypse 
 is obscure because it was meant to be obscure. 
 The writers put in cryptogram things which it 
 was not safe for the Christians to discuss openly. 
 No doubt it was generally intelligible to those 
 to whom it was addressed, but the key has long 
 been lost. It is probable that the imagery of 
 the Book of Revelation, colored by the gor-^ 
 geous but fine frenzied imaginations of Dante 
 and Milton, have done more than anything 
 else to shape and fix the popular ideas concern- 
 ing resurrection and the other life. The mis- 
 fortune is that poetry has been taken to be 
 revelation and imagery for reality. But how- 
 ever firmly these Oriental pictures may be fixed 
 in the popular mind, their reality has never been 
 accepted as part of the Christian faith. The 
 creed is content with declaring that we " be- 
 lieve in the resurrection of the dead, and the 
 
126 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 life of the world to come." 'No public creed 
 earlier than the middle of the fourth century 
 contains the clause, "the resurrection of the 
 body." The dramatic framework in which 
 this process is set in apocalyptic scripture may 
 be helpful or may be confusing just in propor- 
 tion as one is or is not able to discriminate 
 between the truth and the imagery. No 
 end of error has been caused by confusing 
 the one with the other. From this has come 
 that series of mental pictures of universal 
 death; an underworld wherein all souls as 
 phantoms Avait through the ages; an univer- 
 sal resurrection; a spectacular judgment; a 
 procession of redeemed to Elysium and of 
 condemned to Tartarus. Unless one's thought 
 can escape out of this Dore gallery altogether, 
 it will seek in vain for a reasonable as well as 
 a religious and holy hope of life beyond. 
 
" One Almighty is, from where 
 All things proceed, and up to Him return, 
 If not depraved from good; created all 
 Such to perfection ; one first matter all 
 Endued with various forms, various degrees 
 Of substance, and in things that live, of life, 
 But more refined, more spirituous and pure. 
 As nearer to Him placed, or nearer tending, 
 Each in their several active spheres assigned, 
 Till body up to spirit work, in bounds 
 Proportioned to each kind." 
 
 — Milton. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 We have maintained that an enduring life for 
 the individual, if attained at all, must be reached 
 through his highest quality. The latest to be 
 developed and the one which dominates all be- 
 low it when it does appear is the ethical faculty. 
 It is the universal agreement that where there 
 is no conscience there is no soul. Its evolution 
 has been slow. Between the point where moral 
 sensibility shows its rudimentary form in the 
 beast to the point where it is regnant in the high- 
 est type of man, aeons lie. Until it is developed 
 there is no avenue leading out from the closed 
 ring of nature. The gateway to the celestial land 
 is conscience. Whenever, and not until, an indi- 
 vidual reaches the point to "know good and 
 evil," he becomes potentially immortal. But 
 this faculty is a very different thing from the 
 intellectual capacity to discern that certain 
 actions are allowed and certain others for- 
 bidden by extraneous regulations. This latter 
 the savage has, and so has my dog. The ethi- 
 cal faculty does not function until it is able to 
 
 K. 120 
 
130 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 respond to ethical stimulation. It must discern 
 the moral quality of action quite independent 
 of prescription. It must be able not only to 
 say, but to feel, " I ought : I ought not." When 
 this stage is reached the possibility begins of 
 some kind of relation with " the Eternal Power, 
 not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." 
 At this point the individual men, knowing good 
 and evil, begin to be as gods, and to take on 
 the image and likeness of God. If any abiding 
 relation with God be possible, it must clearly be 
 through some expansion or metamorphosis of 
 this final element in human nature. This was the 
 " Way " of Jesus. He committed himself unre- 
 servedly to the good. This was his meat and 
 his drink, to do the will of his Father. He does 
 not hesitate to say that if he is not found doing 
 the work of God he is not worthy of credence. 
 Through this nexus he identifies himself com- 
 pletely w^ith God. His very consciousness be- 
 comes merged with the divine consciousness. 
 He loses his sense of human individuality. "I 
 am in my Father and my Father in me," — then 
 he knows his immortality. He is able to lay 
 down his life and to take it up. Destroy this 
 temple of my body if you will, I am able to 
 build it up again. In a word, he effects his escape 
 from the mortality which belongs to men, 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMIVIORTALITY 131 
 
 through the gate of goodness. Then he turns 
 to his hearers and bids them do the same. He 
 makes no attempt to disguise or minimize the 
 cost to those who determine to follow after 
 him. Indeed, he assures them plainly that 
 except a man deny himself and take up his own 
 cross and follow after him he cannot be his dis- 
 ciple. But he affirms that that way, and that 
 way only, life lies. The other way ends, not in 
 penalty, but in disintegration. In this he con- 
 curs in and gives divine sanction to the belief 
 of Genesis, of St. Paul, and of all the ages. Imr. 
 mortality is correlated with goodness. St. Paul 
 after a long and painful life of self-sacrijBcing 
 devotion is content to say for himself, that he 
 neither knows nor cares for anything else but 
 that he may understand Christ, and the power 
 of his resurrection, and to imitate his sufferings, 
 if need be even to death, in order that he might 
 by any means attain to the resurrection from 
 the dead. His fundamental conviction is that 
 escape from the closed circle of natural life is 
 only possible " through Christ." 
 
 At this point we come to face a very obsti- 
 nate difficulty. In the continent of human life 
 Christianity occupies but an insignificant space. 
 It covers but two score out of the thousands of 
 centuries of human progression. Those who 
 
132 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 ever did or could have heard of our Master are 
 but an infinitesimal fraction of the sum total of 
 that mighty host of human beings who have 
 appeared upon and passed off this world's stage. 
 A means of attaining immortality, therefore, 
 which would only be valid after a certain date 
 A.U.C., and within a certain geographical area, 
 could be only a mockery. It would be like a 
 zoology whose laws would hold only within a 
 thiergarten and be inapplicable to the beasts of 
 the field. It would be but little to call such a 
 doctrine unscientific, when we might justly char- 
 acterize it as profoundly immoral. "We are in 
 search of a bridge by which it may be possible for 
 individuals to pass from this present life to an- 
 other. Common equity requires that the hither 
 end of the bridge should be placed within reach 
 of the first man who could walk and wished to 
 cross. "We cannot worthily imagine that the 
 great Architect should have either postponed its 
 construction until countless generations had per- 
 ished on this side the flood, or that he should 
 have placed it in such a position as to be avail- 
 able only to an elect few. Let the conditions of 
 eternal life be as inexorable as they may prove 
 to be. We are familiar with that necessity at 
 every step of the organic movement. No one 
 will gainsay a rigid selection of the individuals 
 
EVOLUTION OF BIMORTALITY 133 
 
 who live out of the multitude who perish. We 
 can see the reasonableness of this, and to some 
 degree, at any rate, the beneficence of it. But 
 the one thing which the moral sense demands 
 is that this selection shall be a natural and not 
 an arbitrary one. Time was when devout men 
 denounced the phrase " natural selection " be- 
 cause they fancied it circumscribed the action 
 of God's intelligence. They had not then real- 
 ized the unspeakable relief it brought to the 
 belief in God's righteousness. Even the gift of 
 eternal life might scarcely be accepted at God's 
 hands if it came tainted with favoritism. 
 " "Whom he would he slew, and whom he would 
 he kept alive," may serve as the conception of 
 God's character current at the court of Belshaz- 
 zar, but the moral sense of to-day can only so 
 conceive of Baal. 
 
 But are we not bound to hold that " there is 
 none other name given under heaven among 
 men whereby they may be saved but the name 
 of the anointed Jesus"? I think so; but I 
 think this fact has wide implications which are 
 seldom realized. If eternal life be in any actual 
 way organically correlated with the Divine Man 
 whom we adore, it must be in some way which 
 is superior to times and dates and missionaries. 
 The great apostle could only be restrained for 
 
134 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 a passing moment within the meagre syllogism 
 that men could not call on him on whom they 
 had not believed, and that they could not be- 
 lieve on him on whom they had not heard, and 
 that they could not hear without a preacher. 
 "But, I say," he bursts out, "have they not 
 heard? Yes, verily, the sound went into all 
 the earth and the words into the ends of the 
 kosmos." If the Christ be the Son of man to 
 any effectual purpose, it can only be because 
 he is some force which is available under the 
 same conditions to all men at all times. The 
 Life of the World must be able and ready to 
 flow at any time or place where a psychical 
 organism is ready to receive it. The theologi- 
 cal schemes of "atonement" give us little or 
 no help toward resolving the difficulty. They 
 are hopelessly artificial and unreal. They all 
 attempt to state the function of the Christ in 
 terms of Hebrew Sacrifice and Koman Law. 
 One could as well construct a zoology in the 
 same terms. Christian thought has been bewil- 
 dered and Christian instinct well-nigh defeated 
 by the centuries of logically coherent but empty 
 systems of doctrine concerning the work of 
 Christ. His terms are biological; theirs are 
 legal. It may be ages yet before we recover 
 from the misfortune of having had the truth 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 135 
 
 of Christ interpreted and fixed by jurists and 
 logicians instead of by naturalists and men 
 of science. It is much as though the ratio- 
 nale of the circulation of the blood had been 
 wrought out by Sir Matthew Hale, or the 
 germ theory of disease interpreted by Black- 
 stone, or the doctrine of evolution formulated 
 by a legislative council. The Christ is inti- 
 mately and vitally concerned with the eternal 
 life of men, but the question involved is of 
 their living or perishing, and not of a sys- 
 tem of judicial rewards and penalties. "When 
 Professor Drummond published his "Natural 
 Law in the Spiritual World," it was the title 
 rather than the argument which gave it its 
 vogue. Before and since that time multitudes 
 of men have been attempting to give utterance 
 to the same conception. Religious thought is 
 striving to escape from the dreary fortress of 
 law to the open world of nature. I venture 
 to think that Darwin and the martyrs of natu- 
 ral science have done more to make the word 
 of Christ intelligible than have Augustine and 
 the theologians. It is little less than marvel- 
 lous, the way in which the words of Jesus fit 
 in with the forms of thought which are to-day 
 current. They are life, generation, survival of 
 the fit, perishing of the unfit, tree and fruit, 
 
136 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 multiplication by cell growth as yeast, opera- 
 tion by chemical contact as salt, dying of the 
 lonely seed to produce much fruit, imposition 
 of a higher form of life upon a lower by being 
 born from above, grafting a new scion upon a 
 wild stock, the phenomena of plant growth 
 from the seed through the blade, the ear, and 
 the matured grain, and, finally, the attainment 
 of an individual life which has an eternal qual- 
 ity. The claim made for the Son of Man is 
 that he has to do with this vital process in 
 a vital fashion from the beginning of the ages 
 to the end of them. This claim may or may 
 not be more difficult for thoughtful men to 
 admit than the claim that he wrought out a 
 means of legal escape for some men from a 
 judicial sentence. But whatever difficulty does 
 attach to it is an intellectual and not an ethi- 
 cal one. It may be incredible, but it is not 
 immoral. Ko one will deny that the wages 
 of lawlessness is death, whatever he may think 
 about eternal life being the gift of God through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 We are now in a position where we may 
 profitably glance at the arguments for "Con- 
 ditional Immortality " which have been at pre- 
 vious times proposed. The belief has always 
 been more or less prevalent within Christen- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 137 
 
 dom. As we have already seen, it was held by 
 most of the early Fathers, though in a very con- 
 fused and contradictory fashion. After the tri- 
 umph of Augustine's legal system of theology, 
 it practically disappeared. But the differences 
 among men, both as to their moral opportuni- 
 ties and their moral natures, is always so palpa- 
 ble that the Christian mind could not remain 
 satisfied with Augustine's mechanical notions 
 of an universal resurrection and a hard and fast 
 division of all men between an eternal heaven 
 and an eternal hell. Out of this revolt grew 
 the highly elaborate, but equally artificial, de- 
 vice of Purgatory. This device remained satis- 
 factory until the authority of the Church, upon 
 which it depended, broke down in the sixteenth 
 century. Thea the old question emerged again. 
 Do the " wicked " live eternally ? And is there 
 no remede for their woe ? On the assumption 
 that every human being is immortal in virtue 
 of his manhood, there seemed to be no escape 
 from a conclusion so dreadful that no man can 
 contemplate it for the bulk of his fellows and 
 still find life tolerable. Judged by any moral 
 standard, the proportion of the "wicked" to 
 the " righteous " is, and always has been, over- 
 whelming. If they are so constituted by na- 
 ture that the poor boon of extinction is forever 
 
138 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 impossible for them, what can be thought of a 
 Creator who wantonly fashions such Franken- 
 stein monsters? Some relief for the imagina- 
 tion and the moral sense must be had at any 
 cost. Some have pleased themselves with fan- 
 cying an universal "restoration" wherein the 
 multitudinous "wicked," having learned good- 
 ness through the experience of asonian suffer- 
 ing, shall win their way to blessedness. But 
 this consolatory belief can only be held at the 
 expense of confusion of thought. "When it is 
 once steadfastly held up before the understand- 
 ing, it breaks up by its essential incoherence. 
 The only alternatives which will bear the test 
 which reason and conscience must apply are 
 either (1) that " death ends all " for every indi- 
 vidual ; or (2) that immortality is a possibility 
 for those individuals to whom it would be a 
 boon. There is much reason to believe that 
 the first alternative is becoming more and 
 more widely accepted, becaqse the second has 
 been so generally forgotten. One wonders at 
 first why the doctrine of conditional immor- 
 tality has been so little operative, seeing that 
 it has had such powerful advocates. When we 
 remember that throughout the Kew Testament 
 the hope of resurrection is invariably based 
 upon a belief in the individual having been 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 139 
 
 previously "united to Christ," and that no 
 other way of "attaining to the resurrection 
 from the dead " is intimated, it is strange that 
 the advocacy of this doctrine in modern times 
 has been so generally brushed aside as a va- 
 gary. In the appeal to Scripture it is sustained, 
 and the decision is concurred in by the logic of 
 the case. It has been maintained by some of 
 the most learned and able men of modern times. 
 Dodwell and Priestley and Whately and Hamp- 
 den and Rothe and Edward White, together 
 with Spinoza and Goethe and Lotze, surely 
 cannot be dismissed as fantastic or whimsical. 
 And yet it must be acknowledged that their 
 arguments have failed to produce any deep or 
 wide impression. The drift appears to be 
 steadily toward a denial of future life to all 
 men as the only practicable means of relief 
 from the intolerable burden which the accep- 
 tance of an eternal heaven and hell lays upon 
 the imagination and the emotion of sympathy. 
 There must be some reason for this. Either 
 the advocates of conditional immortality have 
 introduced some element which renders it im- 
 possible, or they have left out some element 
 which is needful, or they have built upon a 
 wrong foundation. I think they have done 
 all three. 
 
140 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Their fundamental error is one which has 
 been already dwelt upon. In all their philoso- 
 phizing they have dealt with "man" instead 
 of with men. They have assumed that the 
 zoological classification which sets "Man" in 
 a group by himself for physical reasons is 
 a valid classification for psychical purposes. 
 They have taken for granted that the ques- 
 tion of eternal life is the same question for all 
 individuals, and that every individual stands 
 before it in the same position, because he is a 
 "man" in this sense and for this purpose. 
 The real state of the case is, the question 
 only concerns those who have reached the 
 stage of development where it begins to have 
 a meaning. Before the inquiry concerning 
 the future life of an individual can have any 
 cogency, there is a previous question, — Is he 
 living now? This is the point at which 
 the supreme biological classification must be 
 attempted. 
 
 In the second place, because they have 
 assumed that all human beings, as human 
 beings, are in like situation as candidates for 
 immortality, they have been compelled to an- 
 nounce conditions of success which are clearly 
 inapplicable and artificial. Some of the Fathers 
 expect eternal life only for those w^ho have 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 141 
 
 been baptized ; others only for those who have 
 received the "body and blood of Christ" in the 
 holv sacrament. At a later date some make it 
 to depend upon an intelligent acceptance of 
 the historical Christ and an act of faith in him. 
 The learned non-juror, Dr. Dodwell, with a 
 frank logic which one can but admire, writes 
 a treatise to prove "from the Scriptures and 
 the first Fathers that the soul is a principle 
 naturally mortal, but immortalized actually 
 by its union with the divine baptismal Spirit. 
 Wherein it is established that since the Apos- 
 tles none have the power of giving the divine 
 immortalizing Spirit but only the Bishops ! " 
 The philosophers have made eternal life to 
 depend upon intellectual advance, l^ow, these 
 conditions named are so artificial, arbitrary, 
 meagre, so impossible of application for the 
 great multitudes of humanity, so insignificant 
 in comparison of the infinite issue involved, 
 that it is little wonder their exhibition secures 
 but scant attention. What is desired and will 
 be thankfully received is a law of eternal life 
 which will exhibit that majestic sweep of 
 movement, that same naturalness and moral 
 equity, which nature shows, and which will be 
 free from all charge of favoritism as nature is. 
 This law would seem to be clear enough if we 
 
142 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 frankly recognize the facts of life. Immor- 
 tality is a moral achievement, possible where 
 goodness is, impossible where goodness is not. 
 But, if this be so, is it not by that fact 
 loosened from all dependence upon the work 
 of Christ? The answer is, that depends upon 
 what you mean by Christ. If the Christ be 
 figured only as a personage in human history, 
 and his work as occupying a certain place and 
 date in space and time, then the objection 
 would be fatal. Then neither Abraham nor 
 Moses, Job nor Guatama, would owe their life 
 to him. But he did not define himself so mea- 
 grely. He was in the beginning with God, he 
 was "Wisdom in all ages; he was crucified in 
 God before the world was. A believer in the 
 divinity of Christ must not shrink from the 
 implications of his belief. Divinity is not to 
 be brought within the categories of duration 
 and extension. The eternal spirit of life is 
 not functionless until set in play in an upper 
 chamber in Jerusalem a.d. 33. It is not essen- 
 tial that the work done by the Christ should 
 be confined to those who know him by his 
 Judean name of Jesus. "We believe his own 
 teaching to be that the humane element in 
 God is eternal. The phrases used in the l^ew 
 Testament may therefore be regarded as only 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 143 
 
 new names for an old thing. Being "united 
 to Christ," being "born from above," the 
 "life hid with Christ in God," and such like, 
 are but the Christian terminology for phenom- 
 ena which show themselves before and outside 
 of the Christian Era. But they are moral 
 phenomena with which Christ claims a vital 
 connection, even though they be called by very 
 different names from the ones which his dis- 
 ciples use. His contention is that eternal life 
 is attained through goodness ; and that where- 
 ever goodness is, he is. 
 
" Sleep'st thou indeed? or is Thy spirit fled 
 At large among the dead? 
 Whether in Eden's bowers Thy welcome voice 
 Wake Abraham to rejoice, 
 Or in some drearier scene Thine eye controls 
 The thronging band of souls ; 
 That, as Thy blood won earth, Thine agony 
 Might set the shadowy realm from sin and sorrow 
 free?" — Keble. 
 
 144 
 
CHAPTER XIY 
 
 BiBDS which are bred in subarctic regions 
 must perish unless they become able, at the 
 proper time, to cross land and sea to a summer 
 clime. Whether any one of them shall be able 
 to do this, depends upon its growth of wing, 
 its instinct of direction, and its strength to sus- 
 tain its flight. Between the one who can and 
 the one who cannot is a difference of a few 
 millimeters' length of pinion and a few grains, 
 more or less, of nourishment. The transit for 
 the individual man from this stage of being to 
 the one which lies beyond we believe to be 
 a question of the vigor of moral personality. 
 Is there any reason to believe that the passage 
 has ever been effected? A single instance 
 would be worth volumes of argument. It 
 would bring the whole matter out of the ab- 
 stract into the concrete. Moreover, it would 
 transform the whole lives of all those to whom 
 such information might come. If we could find 
 one single case of a man having passed through 
 corporal death, and having thereafter shown 
 
 L 145 
 
146 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 to living man by word or sight or speech that 
 he is the same personality who died, it would 
 revolutionize human life. Above all, if he 
 should give an intelligible account, not of where 
 he has gone to, but of how he got there, the 
 riddle of the universe would be read. It would 
 be as though some one had found a practicable 
 ford across an encompassing river which had 
 always been thought unfordable. It would 
 change the whole temper and manner of life 
 of those who live this side. It would bring 
 hope concerning the fate of that multitude who 
 had essayed the same crossing, and had seemed 
 to have been drowned. 
 
 There are now living several hundred millions 
 of people who believe such a crossing to have 
 been made in one celebrated case. They be- 
 lieve that it occurred two thousand years ago, 
 sometime between a Friday evening and a 
 Sunday morning, in the City of Jerusalem, 
 and that the man's name was Jesus. I under- 
 stand quite well how the scientist and the stu- 
 dent of evidences may feel at this suggestion, 
 like turning away with impatience. The event 
 is so remote, the evidence is so scanty, the as- 
 sertion is so incredible, that busy men cannot 
 be expected to take it seriously. Maybe so. 
 It is more than likely that a very moderate 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 147 
 
 cross-examination would break down every wit- 
 ness, and would show contradictions in the 
 testimony. But still the fact remains that 
 hundreds of millions of people have believed 
 and do believe it to be a real occurrence. These 
 also are people whose average intelligence is, 
 upon the whole, higher than that of any equal 
 number of people in the world. No like num- 
 ber of people approach them in moral earnest- 
 ness or in general truthfulness. This much at 
 least may be said of Christians. If it be ob- 
 jected that their belief in the alleged reappear- 
 ance of Jesus after his death is only an article 
 of faith which they receive after they have 
 on other grounds become Christians, then the 
 question arises, What accounts for Christianity ? 
 The world in Christ's time did not look for a 
 future life of the individual ; to-day it looks for 
 it even more universally than the facts war- 
 rant. What has caused the change of belief? 
 The cause is so evident that no student of his- 
 tory, so far as I am aware, questions it. It is 
 due to the assured conviction of the friends of 
 Jesus that they saw and talked with him, in 
 his own person, after his death. No one now 
 doubts the sincerity of their conviction. It is 
 conceivable that they were mistaken. But in 
 that case we have that stupendous fabric which 
 
148 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 we call Christianity, that complex structure of 
 morals, social order, political energy, and reli- 
 gious power, resting upon nothing. Now there 
 is such a thing as a credulity of scepticism as 
 well as a credulity of belief. The sensible man 
 tries to avoid them both, to look at things as 
 they really are, and in any case to accept the 
 explanation which best explains. Of course, 
 if one take the position that the reappearance 
 of Jesus after his death is an impossibiUty, and 
 that no kind nor amount of evidence would con- 
 vince him, there is nothing to be said except 
 that he is a dogmatist to whom science cannot 
 speak. Let it be well understood right here 
 that the question involved is not of the " super- 
 natural " as opposed to the " natural." If Jesus 
 survived his own death, it was because it was 
 natural for him and such as him to do so. The 
 antithesis of natural and supernatural is a mere 
 imagination. The only true classification is 
 the real and the unreal. Whatever is real is 
 natural, for whenever its reality is established 
 the definition of nature must be extended to 
 include it. 
 
 Assuming the story of the Gospels to be 
 honest, — and I do not know of any scholar 
 who now questions its honesty, — it is clear 
 that between five hundred and a thousand of 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 149 
 
 Jesus' friends who knew him in life believed 
 that tliey had seen hira again after his death. 
 It must be acknowledged that the accounts are 
 confused and in some details contradictory, but 
 in essentials they are clear enough. The dis- 
 ciples were not looking for his reappearance, 
 and were very slow to believe it when it oc- 
 curred. After his execution they gave up all 
 expectation of seeing fulfilled the programme 
 of a kingdom which they had given adhesion to. 
 It is clear alike that they were grievously dis- 
 appointed, and that they believed their disap- 
 pointment to be irremediable. They gave it 
 all up and proposed to go about their business. 
 They thought this had been he who should 
 have redeemed Israel, but he had died and 
 their dream was at an end. If they had fab- 
 ricated the story they would have excused their 
 incredulity by pleading that they had misun- 
 derstood his intentions. On the contrary, they 
 blame themselves for not having at once recog- 
 nized that this was part of his programme. 
 Something happened, suddenly, which changed 
 the whole situation for them, and in consequence 
 changed their whole lives. What was it which 
 did happen ? The vulgar answer is, — the dead 
 body of Jesus came to life again, and their 
 senses convinced them of the fact. But this 
 
150 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 is not the impression, or at any rate is by no 
 means the whole impression, which the story 
 produces when it is candidly examined. It is 
 very curious that in every case the person to 
 whom Jesus reappeared failed at first to recog- 
 nize him. The two Marys say that when they 
 came to the sepulchre early Sunday morning 
 to prepare the body for burial they found it 
 gone, and they saw either one or two luminous 
 apparitions of some sort, — their accounts do 
 not agree, — w^ho in some way conveyed to 
 them the impression that they must go at once 
 and tell John and Peter, the two most intimate 
 friends of the dead man. They say that they 
 were frightened beyond measure, and bewil- 
 dered. It would seem that one of them hur- 
 ried into town to tell what she had seen, while 
 the other, Mary Magdalene, waited hesitatingly 
 to see what farther might befall. While she 
 thus stood, Jesus in some form appeared. She 
 had known him intimately, and had seen him 
 three days before ; but when she saw him now 
 she failed to recognize him, "supposing him to 
 be the gardener." When he spoke, something 
 about him recalled to her his identity ; but when 
 she would have verified her sight and hearing 
 by touching him, he forbade her. When the 
 other Mary told her story to the disciples in 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 151 
 
 the city, they refused absolutely to believe her. 
 At the same time two of them went back with 
 her to see what had happened, but before they 
 reached the garden Jesus met them, spoke to 
 them in his own peculiar way, and made a 
 rendezvous with them later in another prov- 
 ince. The next day, while two of them were 
 on their way to the rendezvous, and were talk- 
 ing as they walked, they suddenly found a 
 stranger walking beside them. He joined in 
 their conversation, stayed with them all after- 
 noon, went with them to their inn, sat down 
 at supper with them ; but when it came to 
 the actual eating he vanished, and as he van- 
 ished they recognized him. The following 
 Sunday night, while a number of his friends 
 were together in an upper room in the city, 
 with the doors carefully barred for fear of 
 being arrested as conspirators, he suddenly 
 appeared among them and asked for food, 
 which he took and ate, and vanished. A week 
 later he did the same thing under the same 
 circumstances; and finding there a friend who 
 had not been present the previous Sunday, and 
 had expressed absolute incredulity, he asked 
 him to touch him and convince himself that it 
 was really he, and vanished. Up to this point 
 they do not seem to have been able to make 
 
152 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 anything coherent out of his reappearances. 
 They were rejoiced at this proof of his con- 
 tinued existence, but they did not connect it 
 in any practical way with the plans which had 
 been broken off by his execution. They clearly 
 believed that he had reappeared, but his ap- 
 pearance had no meaning or purpose for thera. 
 They gradually separated, and those of them 
 who did not live in the city went back to their 
 homes and resumed their several occupations. 
 Some weeks later half a dozen of thera were 
 out in boats fishing in a lake more than fifty 
 miles away. "When they rowed ashore they 
 saw a man standing by a fire of coals on the 
 beach, upon which fire he bade them broil 
 some of their fish and break their fast. Once 
 again they failed to recognize him until he 
 had spoken. But this time he took up again 
 the discussion of his plans concerning the gos- 
 pel of life, gave his disciples their final instruc- 
 tions, and outlined their policy, charging them 
 to reassemble at the capital and wait further 
 developments. Even yet they were perplexed, 
 for " when they saw him they worshipped, but 
 some were sceptical." They obeyed his in- 
 structions, however, laid down their business, 
 and returned to the city. There, six weeks 
 after his execution, he appeared in their midst 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 153 
 
 for the last time, and after a few affectionate 
 words, he disappeared in a luminous cloud, and 
 they never saw him again. 
 
 Now, assuming, as we must, that the story is 
 an honest one, it is a very strange one. If it 
 were told of any ordinary man, we could only 
 look at it a little for its curiosity and then dis- 
 miss it. Two considerations, however, preclude 
 us from dealing with it after this rough and 
 ready fashion. The first is, that it is related 
 to the previous life of a personality which is 
 altogether remarkable. The second is that it 
 has wrought such momentous results in the 
 course of human history. Wherever the story 
 has gone it has transformed human life. This 
 story is the essential element of the Christian 
 Gospel. Its early apostles and evangelists 
 preached in set terms the " Gospel of the Kesur- 
 rection." Their burden was not atonement or 
 redemption or heaven and hell, as is commonly 
 assumed, but the announcement of a possible 
 immortality. This is what gained them a 
 hearing. It was "good news," because first 
 of all it was news. We are in the habit of 
 assuming, mistakenly, that the goodness of the 
 news was to be found in the fact that a way 
 had been opened whereby all men, who must 
 necessarily live forever in any case, might live 
 
154 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 blissfully instead of painfully. But this, in 
 point of fact, was not the case. Men who 
 could comprehend the good news welcomed it 
 with the same kind of eagerness as would a 
 man to-day to whom a plan should be unfolded 
 whereby he could certainly add fifty, a hun- 
 dred, a thousand, years to his natural life. 
 This was the preaching of the apostles, that 
 in the person of Jesus " immortality was 
 brought to light." St. Paul says plainly 
 that if his Gospel should break down at this 
 point it would be worthless. Even though 
 Jesus might have lived and taught and suf- 
 fered, "if he be not risen then your faith is 
 but emptiness." Their argument was that the 
 man Jesus had definitely realized the process 
 whereby a natural human being might attain 
 to the possession of a psychical life so exalted 
 in quality and so tenacious in substance that 
 corporal death could not break it down; that 
 he had achieved it for himself at an incalcula- 
 ble cost ; that he had passed through death and 
 conquered it, having "shown himself alive by 
 many infallible proofs " ; and that in this he had 
 become a kind of first fruits of a human har- 
 vest which might be great or small as the event 
 i should prove. It is probably quite impossible 
 for us to realize with what enthusiasm this mes- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 155 
 
 sage was received by, or how overwhelmingly 
 it took possession of, the minds and imagina- 
 tions of men who before had no expectation 
 of a future life of any kind. The primitive 
 appeal of the Gospel was to the supreme aspira- 
 tion of all organized creatures, the "lust of liv- 
 ing!" It offered extended existence to those 
 who had looked for destruction. This appeal 
 is incalculably more potent than the one now 
 commonly addressed to the desire for happi- 
 ness or the fear of misery. It explains at once 
 the eager welcome given the Gospel in the 
 early ages and the languid acceptance ac- 
 corded it now. It was literally a proffered 
 alternative of life and death. No wonder 
 Paul accounted all things "but dung that he 
 might know Christ and the power of his resur- 
 rection and attain unto the resurrection of the 
 dead." And little wonder that men to-day who 
 have fallen into the way of thinking that they 
 are immortal anyway, will snatch at the pleas- 
 ures of the life which now is, and trust to good 
 fortune to escape any very intolerable misery 
 in that to come. Upon this attitude it is hard 
 to see how the gospel of deliverance from pen- 
 alty can make much impression. To obey it 
 involves cost, lays on a cross. To disregard 
 it opens the door to present pleasure. The 
 
156 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 allurement of a present pleasure is usually a 
 more potent stimulus than the apprehension 
 of a remote pain. But if it be true that the 
 stake at issue is not either the pleasure or the 
 pain of life, but the life itself, the situation be- 
 comes more tragic. The Gospel contained in 
 the resurrection of Christ is the last term in 
 an evolutionary process which begins with the 
 eternal chaos and reaches its culmination in 
 the man become immortal. The process is as 
 inexorable as it is beneficent. The gift of life 
 is strewn with a lavish hand. But every living 
 creature receives so much as he is able to ap- 
 propriate, and no more. In this there is no 
 inequity. This is nature's way, and nature's 
 way is God's way. This way is the " Way of 
 Life " from the protoplasmic slime to the Son 
 of Man. 
 
" In considering questions of this sort we ought 
 not to listen for a moment to those frequent, but 
 impertinent, questions that are brought forward 
 with the view of superseding the inquiry; such, 
 for example, as these : ' What good is answered by 
 the alleged extra-natural occurrences?' or, * Is it 
 worthy of the supreme wisdom to permit them?' 
 and so forth. The question is one first of testi- 
 mony, to be judged on the established principles of 
 evidence, and then of physiology; but neither of 
 theology nor of morals." — Isaac Taylor. 
 
 158 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 So far as we can see there is not only no liv- 
 ing personality apart from a material organiza- 
 tion, but a " disembodied spirit " is unthinkable. 
 This is true so far as human thought is con- 
 cerned even of God. We cannot formulate the 
 idea of the "absolute God." That concep- 
 tion is no more than an algebraic symbol. In 
 practice we cannot think of God apart from 
 thought of the universe. If we try to do so we 
 are compelled still to keep in mind the universe 
 as the thing outside of which or over against 
 which God is. For the purposes of human 
 thinking, matter is as eternal and as unbounded 
 as God is. This is not to say that it is so " abso- 
 lutely." "We know nothing about " absolute " 
 being. But the practical reason cannot formu- 
 late the idea of a God without a universe, or of 
 a soul without a body. If any one fancy he can 
 do so let him make the experiment. 
 
 This is why the question of the " resurrection 
 of the body " becomes of such supreme moment. 
 The contribution which Christianity has made 
 169 
 
160 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 to belief in a future life really does not concern 
 the spirit, but the body. People had for ages 
 before Christ had a notion of some kind of neb- 
 ulous and phantasmal survival of the spirit, but 
 the belief was at its best practically inoperative. 
 A spirit with no material organ for expressing 
 itself puts to confusion all our ideas as to what 
 a human being is. The body is just as essential 
 a component part of our idea of a man as the 
 soul is. It is as easy to think of the body be- 
 coming immortal without a soul as to think of 
 the spirit becoming immortal without a body. 
 We instinctively revolt against either idea once 
 we get it clearly before the mind. This is the 
 reason why the physiologist finds it so difficult 
 to believe in the immortality of the soul. It is 
 only because he sees more clearly than other 
 men do the constant and essential interdepend- 
 ence of soul and body. The ground of his 
 scepticism is sound. There is no known form 
 of energy separate from matter. The soul can- 
 not flit across the river alone. 'Nov is it any 
 relief to think of it existing even temporarily 
 in a quiescent state while waiting for the body. 
 It cannot wait. An individual life must be con- 
 tinuous or else not be at all. It cannot stop 
 and go on again. The Easter imagery of the 
 egg and the butterfly will not bear scientific ex- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 161 
 
 amination. The caterpillar, the imago, and the 
 butterfly are all included in one cycle, to be 
 sure, but the continuity of the individual is 
 broken at each stage of the progression, and 
 the cycle when completed returns upon itself. 
 It goes nowhere. What we are in search of is 
 a continuous life of the individual. To this end 
 St. Paul affirms that there is a natural body 
 and there is a spiritual body. If so, where is 
 it ? How does it grow ? "What are its quali- 
 ties ? What is its relation to that which we 
 call matter ? What reason has the apostle for 
 making his assertion ? His reason is perfectly 
 obvious. He asserts that there is a " spiritual " 
 body because he has seen one. 
 
 The reports of the reappearance of Jesus may 
 be examined without irreverence because we 
 are so deeply concerned to know the facts and 
 their significance. There is a ndivetS about 
 the accounts in the Gospels which is very strik- 
 ing, and which is greatly to the advantage of 
 one who seeks for the actual facts. They rep- 
 resent the risen Christ as a living man like other 
 men, and at the same time strangely unlike, 
 and they make no attempt to adjust the contra- 
 dictions. He is independent of the laws of 
 matter, and at the same time he conforms to 
 some of them. He suddenly appears in a lighted 
 
 J^-^ OF THE ^^ 
 
162 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 room when the doors are locked, but at the same 
 time they at least think they see him eat and 
 drink. Again, he communicates with them by 
 some kind of spoken language, but is at the same 
 time invisible. He is walking along the road 
 to Emmaus, and presently is standing on the 
 beach of the Galilean Lake, fifty miles away. 
 They see him and take him for a stranger, but 
 the next moment they recognize him. We seem, 
 in a word, to be in the presence of something 
 which is both material and immaterial, some- 
 thing which is cognizable by the senses, and 
 which at the same time plays fast and loose 
 with sense perceptions. There would seem to 
 be only two reasonable attitudes toward the 
 story open to us. Either we may dismiss it al- 
 together as an Oriental fantasy, or we must 
 extend our definitions of nature so as to include 
 its phenomena. Of course one may, if he will, 
 look at it from a distance as a sacred region 
 into which curiosity dare not enter and where 
 faith alone is admissible. But there is such a 
 thing as sitting down at the entrance of a holy 
 ground under pretence of putting off one's shoes, 
 while the real motive is either indolence or fear. 
 If the phenomena under consideration are facts 
 at all, they are facts which are meant for use. 
 We may rightly " have boldness to enter into 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 163 
 
 the holiest, by a new and living way which he 
 hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is 
 to say his flesh." 
 
 The most remarkable feat which modern 
 science has accomplished has been to establish 
 the existence of that strange substance known 
 as the luminiferous or interstellar ether^ the 
 medium through which the "X ray" and wire- 
 less telegraphy perform their work. Its exist- 
 ence had long been suspected, now it is known. 
 Sir Isaac Newton closes his " Principia " with 
 this prophetic paragraph : — 
 
 "And now we might add something concerning 
 a most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in 
 all gross bodies ; by the force and action of which 
 spirit the particles of bodies mutually attract one 
 another at near distances and cohere if contiguous ; 
 and electric bodies separate, and light is emitted, 
 reflected and heats bodies ; and all sensation is ex- 
 cited, and the members of animal bodies move at 
 the command of the will, namely by vibrations of 
 this spirit mutually propagated along the solid fila- 
 ments of the nerves from the outward organs of 
 sense to the brain, and from the brain to the mus- 
 cles. But these things cannot be explained in a 
 few words, nor are we furnished with that suffi- 
 ciency of experiments which is necessary to an ac- 
 curate determination and demonstration of the 
 laws by which this elastic spirit operates." 
 
164 EVOLUTION OF IMMOKTALITY 
 
 Now, this '^ subtle spirit " of Sir Isaac has 
 been shown to be, not spirit at all, but a 
 material medium which fills all space and in- 
 terpenetrates all that we call matter. The 
 "sufficiency of experiments" which Kewton 
 lacked have been made by Struve, Helmholtz, 
 Lord Kelvin, Dolbear, Tesla, Rontgen and a 
 hundred other mathematicians and physicists. 
 The result has been to compel a new defini- 
 tion of matter. Extension, ponderability, form, 
 dimension, and such qualities can no longer be 
 thought sufficient to define matter. " Empty " 
 space can no longer be spoken of, for no por- 
 tion of space is empty. It can no longer be 
 said that "no two portions of matter can 
 occupy the same space at the same time," for 
 they do so constantly. Indeed, it seems to be 
 a very condition of the existence of the matter 
 which we see that it should lie bathed in a mat- 
 ter which we do not see. For the universal 
 ether is matter. As Lord Kelvin has demon- 
 strated, it shows in some ways the phenom- 
 ena of a highly tenuous fluid, in others that of 
 an infinitely dense solid, and in still others the 
 properties of a jelly. It is the medium through 
 which light moves by waves of an ascertained 
 length, electric energy by waves of a different 
 length, heat by still a third, and the energy 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 165 
 
 which we call gravitation by some means not 
 yet ascertained. It has been weighed and 
 measured. A sphere of it the size of the earth 
 would, if compressed to the density of earth, 
 be in size somewhere between a marble and 
 an orange. It is the medium in the opaque 
 flesh through which the invisible rays of light 
 pass to form an X-ray photograph. Its waves 
 flow through so dense a mass of matter as a 
 block of glass, as water flows through a sieve. 
 It is the medium in which the elemental en- 
 ergies of heat, light, electricity, and possibly 
 chemical energy do their work. May not vital 
 energy be concerned with it as well ? 
 
 I venture to say in parenthesis that it is 
 not easy to understand why the physicists are 
 so reluctant to admit the existence of such 
 an objective fact as "Yital Energy." Surely 
 there are abundant phenomena which cannot 
 be forced to come under any other form of 
 energy known. Suppose the phrase is but a 
 name for a set of phenomena whose essential 
 nature is not understood, that much may also 
 be said of all the other categories of energy. 
 
 It is now more than twenty years since two 
 distinguished English men of science. Professors 
 Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, put forth hesi- 
 tatingly a theory of a physical basis of a future 
 
166 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 life. Starting from the evident double truth 
 that all psychical activity is associated with 
 molecular activity in the matter of the brain 
 and nerves, while at the same time physical 
 and psychical phenomena are evidently differ- 
 ent things, they suggest that there may well be 
 a tertimn quid^ a third something, which serves 
 as the nexus between them, and that Ethereal 
 Matter may be such a thing. 
 
 Each thought we think, each emotion we 
 feel, is accompanied by certain molecular move- 
 ments and rearrangements in the brain. The 
 psychical activity actually builds up a physical 
 fabric for itself. But the material fabric is 
 every moment disintegrating, and at death falls 
 into ruin. ITow, suppose that before that ruin 
 befalls, the soul shall have been able to build 
 up, as it were, a brain within the brain, a body 
 within the body, something like that which 
 the Orientals have for ages spoken of as the 
 " Astral Body." Then, when the body of flesh 
 shall crumble away, there would be left a body, 
 material to be sure, but compacted of a kind of 
 matter which behaves quite differently from 
 that which our sense perceptions deal with. It 
 is a material which, so far as science has any- 
 thing to say, is essentially indestructible. It 
 moves freely amongst and through ordinary 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 167 
 
 matter without let or hindrance. It is not 
 difficult at any rate to form a picture of a life 
 based upon its organization. From the indi- 
 vidual spirits of just men made perfect this 
 present '' muddy vesture of decay " has dropped 
 away, leaving them " not unclothed but clothed 
 upon." They are still men. They have rational 
 souls with material bodies fit to sustain and to 
 express their psychical life. The matter of 
 their bodies is obedient to the laws of matter 
 and life, but to the laws of that kind of life and 
 matter. " There are celestial bodies and bodies 
 terrestrial," and each has its own modes of 
 action. Such Ethereal bodies compacted with 
 living souls would of necessity inhabit a uni- 
 verse of their own, even though that universe 
 should occupy the same space that this one 
 does. Neither earth nor fire nor water could 
 in the least impede their movement. In frost 
 and flame they would be equally at home. 
 "With the swiftness of light or gravitation they 
 could speed from where old Bootes leads his 
 leash to where Sagittarius draws his bow in 
 the south. With bodies of such fine stuff com- 
 pounded, and so plastic to the uses of the 
 spirit, their knowledge would expand until 
 nature's secrets should lie open to their eyes. 
 Their senses would be so acute and delicately 
 
168 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 balanced as to be capable of thrills of pleasure 
 so transcendent, and of pain so poignant, that 
 the experience of this present life probably 
 gives us no comparison to estimate them by. 
 Love could have its perfect way where there 
 would be perfect comprehension. In this stage 
 no personality ever knows really very much of 
 any other. Each is shut within a body which 
 at the best can only partially reveal it. Each 
 living soul can but make itself known and can 
 gain knowledge of another only through physi- 
 cal media which are limited by the qualities of 
 the matter which compose them. The mind is 
 continually weighed down and retarded by the 
 thousand ills that flesh is heir to. ^N'o doubt 
 the Ethereal body is also subject to its own ills. 
 But being in close relation to the psychical life 
 and immeasurably better fitted to be the vehicle 
 for its expression, knowledge and love must 
 have opened to them possibilities, not infinite 
 indeed, but so extended that we may not even 
 try to guess their limits. 
 
 All this is based upon two propositions, first, 
 that any possible future life must be an em- 
 bodied life, and, second, that there is such a 
 material stuff as may serve the uses and needs 
 of such a life. It is an hypothesis. But every 
 advancing step of human knowledge has been 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 169 
 
 gained by an hypothesis. If the theory be 
 found to bring into coherence facts which are 
 known to be facts, and make them inteUigible, 
 and lead to the discovery of other facts till 
 then unknown, it slowly changes from an 
 hypothesis to a conviction. Will this one bear 
 that test? 
 
 Let us first see to what extent it fits the 
 language of the New Testament. 
 
 " For we know that if the earthen fabric of 
 our tent be dissolved, we have a building from 
 God, a fabric not made with hands, eternal, in 
 the heavens. For truly in this we groan being 
 burdened, not for that we would be unclothed, 
 but clothed upon, that what is mortal may be 
 swallowed up in life. We faint not, but though 
 our outward man is decaying, yet our inward 
 man is renewed day by day." " All flesh is not 
 the same flesh, there is one flesh of men, an- 
 other of beasts, another of birds, so there are 
 celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial, but the 
 glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of 
 the terrestrial is another. So also is the resur- 
 rection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, 
 it is raised in incorruption : it is sown a natural 
 body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is 
 a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 
 The first man is of the earth, earthen, the 
 
170 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 second man is of heaven. As we have borne 
 the image of the earthen, let us also bear the 
 image of the heavenly." "For the earnest ex- 
 pectation of the creature waiteth for the reveal- 
 ing of the sons of God. For we know that 
 the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in 
 pain with us until now. And not only so, but 
 we ourselves which have the first fruit of the 
 spirit groan within ourselves waiting for our 
 adoption, that is to say, the setting free of our 
 body." "And Jesus was transfigured before 
 them, and his face did shine as the sun, and 
 his raiment was white as the light, and behold 
 there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talk- 
 ing with him." "And it came to pass as he 
 sat at meat with them he took bread and 
 blessed it and brake it, and gave it to them, 
 and their eyes were opened and they knew him 
 and he vanished out of their sight." (Literally, 
 "They gradually ceased to see him.") "As 
 they were looking he was taken up and a cloud 
 received him out of their sight. And as they 
 were earnestly gazing after him as he went into 
 the heavens, behold two men in white vesture 
 stood beside them." " I know a man in Christ, 
 fourteen years ago (whether in the body or 
 out of the body I know not), caught up into 
 paradise, and that he heard things of which it 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 171 
 
 is not permissible for a man to speak." "From 
 henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in 
 my body the marks of Jesus Christ." 
 
 Such quotations might be extended indefi- 
 nitely, but these are enough to show that the 
 companions and survivors of Jesus looked with 
 confidence for a future life of such sort that 
 their spirits would not be left naked, but 
 clothed upon with some kind of material sub- 
 stance which was even then being woven for 
 them in the secret place of their own being. 
 Whether or not the Ethereal stuff which science 
 now knows does or does not prove to be that 
 w^hich may serve for the physical basis of a 
 continued personal life, it may fairly be said 
 that it fulfils the requisite conditions better 
 than anything else which is known. The late 
 Professor Cope in his " Origin of the Fittest " 
 asks, " Is there any generalized form of matter 
 distributed through the universe then which 
 could sustain consciousness?" And answers, 
 " The presumption is that such a form of matter 
 may well exist." 
 
 Mr. John Fiske in criticising this hypothesis 
 has said that " the essential weakness of such a 
 theory as this lies in the fact that it is thor- 
 oughly materialistic in character. By it the 
 putting on of immortality is in no wise the 
 
172 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 passage from a material to a spiritual state. 
 It is the passage from one kind of a materially 
 conditioned state to another." This, I con- 
 ceive, is precisely where its strength resides. 
 It turns away from that phantasmal region of 
 " disembodied ghosts," and looks for the hope 
 of continued existence at the top of the hill, 
 but in the line of the same path up which life 
 has been climbing throughout the aeons. Our 
 souls shrink from disembodied being wath a 
 repugnance which cannot be overcome by any 
 alluring visions. Much as we may yearn for im- 
 mortality, we would rather miss it than possess it 
 under conditions of which w^e can form no con- 
 ception and which terrify by their strangeness. 
 The passage into life at any stage is never ter- 
 rifying to the new creature being born, what- 
 ever pangs it may cost the eternal mother. 
 
 Professor Shaler, Dean of the Scientific Fac- 
 ulty of Harvard, in his book upon "The Indi- 
 vidual," uses these very remarkable words, " A 
 number of men of no mean authority as natu- 
 ralists, some of them well trained in experi- 
 mental science, have, after long and apparently 
 careful inquir}^, become convinced that there 
 is evidence of the survival of some minds after 
 death." This is a conclusion which sensible 
 men will reach very hesitatingly. The evi- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 173 
 
 dence, if evidence it can be called, is found 
 by an analysis of that enormous but unsavory 
 mass of " Spiritism," " Occultism," " Telepathy," 
 " Hypnotism," and such like. It is a material 
 with which sane men are very reluctant to 
 deal. It is so contaminated by fraud, charla- 
 tanry, credulity, and hysterics that one's natural 
 inclination is to pass by it as far on the other 
 side the way as the width of the road will 
 allow. But at the same time it must be con- 
 fessed that there is a growing willingness to 
 admit that there is " something in it." If the 
 subject of supernormal phenomena be brought 
 into discussion in club or drawing-room, and 
 strange accounts are exchanged of alleged in- 
 stances, the chances are that seven out of ten 
 present will end by giving their assent to Ham- 
 let's dictum, " There be a thousand things in 
 heaven and earth not dreamed of in your phi- 
 losophy, Horatio." It is not easy to find even 
 an educated man who will categorically deny the 
 assertion that there are instances wherein one 
 human personality communicates with another 
 without physical media of intercourse. At any 
 rate, the belief in the actual occurrence of hyp- 
 notic suggestion and telepathic communication 
 has come to be quite general. The proof is 
 very difficult to come at. When one arises 
 
174 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 from reading the reports of the " Society of 
 Psychical Research," or the reported experi- 
 ments of Dr. Charcot or Professor Flournoy, 
 he finds himself in a very exasperating mental 
 state. It is not so much that he has found 
 what appears like a fact here and there scat- 
 tered through a mass of fraud and self-decep- 
 tion. If that were all, he could reasonably 
 dismiss the whole matter, saying falsus in uno, 
 falsus in omnibus. But that is not all. He 
 has the impression that he is here in the 
 presence of some kind of natural phenomena 
 which are real, but which are being exploited 
 by the wrong people. He is not much better 
 satisfied when he finishes the report of a " Sey- 
 bert Commission " of lawyers and scientists 
 appointed by a great university to investigate 
 the alleged facts. He feels that here again the 
 question is in the wrong hands. \i the one set 
 are too credulous, the other are too dogmatic. 
 
 The truth would seem to be that we are 
 beginning to take serious account of a set of 
 unclassified psychic phenomena which corre- 
 spond very closely with a newly described set 
 of physical phenomena. The unthinking per- 
 son is prone to regard such things as wireless 
 telegraphy and Rontgen photography as merely 
 inventions or discoveries which are only a little 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMxMORTALlTY 175 
 
 more wonderful in degree than the hundreds 
 which precede them, but not differing from 
 them in kind. This misapprehends their sig- 
 nificance. They are discoveries in an entirely 
 new region. They are doors opened into an- 
 other universe. It is a material universe, to be 
 sure, and one which we now see to have been 
 about us always. Its existence had long been 
 suspected, but there was no proof, and there 
 did not seem to be any reason or faculty by 
 which proof could be made. It is a universe 
 where the ordinary laws of matter are inopera- 
 tive, indeed appear to be non-existent, but of 
 its reality no one any longer thinks of doubting. 
 Now, coinciding with these new and strange 
 phenomena of the physical universe, there 
 appear to be equally strange phenomena of 
 the psychical world. Is it too much to believe 
 that the two are in some way correlated ? That 
 living mind can and does, under certain un- 
 usual conditions, act upon other living minds 
 without the medium of "matter" can hardly 
 be any longer questioned. Whether it be a 
 " departed " spirit touching a living one, or one 
 living one touching another, seems to me of 
 little consequence. The one is antecedently 
 just as credible or as incredible as the other. 
 The conditions of such psychical movement are 
 
176 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 not yet known. Whether or not they ever 
 will be, no one can say, but there seems to be 
 on the part of the scientiJBc world a growing 
 disposition to examine them with a better tem- 
 per than heretofore. ]^ot to speak of Mr. 
 Alfred Wallace, whose dicta in this region can 
 scarcely be taken seriously, such physicists as 
 Crookes, such psychologists as Flournoy and 
 Hyslop and many others equally sane, are ad- 
 dressing themselves to a study of this region in a 
 way from which much may be hoped. So far all 
 indications point to the belief that all such equivo- 
 cal phenomena have their place in a region which 
 is not really "spiritual" in the sense in which that 
 word is usually used, but in one which is " mate- 
 rial," though not in the sense which that word or- 
 dinarily connotes. In a word, the last discovery 
 in physics and the last experimentation in psy- 
 chology seem to be approaching each other. 
 
 The way in which all this concerns our 
 theory of the other life ought now to be evi- 
 dent. If that life be one which involves and 
 requires the interaction of spirit and matter, 
 and demands it at a time when the matter 
 which ordinarily serves the spirit for its ex- 
 pression shall not be available, it is much to 
 be even thus tentatively convinced that spirit 
 can function under other conditions than those 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 177 
 
 which belong to the ordinary life of man. It 
 gives point and direction to ancient and wide- 
 spread, but vague and unfruitful, hopes and be- 
 liefs. As Professor Shaler judiciously says: — 
 " Notwithstanding this urgent disinclination 
 to meddle with or be muddled by the problems 
 of spiritism, the men of science have a natural 
 interest in the inquiries of the few true ob- 
 servers who are dredging in that dirty sea. 
 Trusting to the evident scientific faithfulness 
 of these hardy explorers, it appears evident 
 that they have brought up from that deep 
 certain facts which, though still shadowed by 
 doubt, indicate the persistence of the individual 
 consciousness after death. It has, moreover, 
 to be confessed that these few as yet imperfect 
 observations are fortified by the fact that 
 through all the ages of his contact with nature 
 man has firmly held to the notion that the 
 world was peopled with disembodied indi- 
 vidualities which could appeal to his own 
 intelligence. Such a conviction is itself worth 
 something, though it be little. Supported by 
 any critical evidence it becomes of much value. 
 Thus we may fairly conjecture that we may be 
 on the verge of something like a demonstration 
 that the individual consciousness does survive the 
 death of the body by which it was nurtured." 
 
" All physical science is only a probability, and, 
 what is more, one which we have no means what- 
 ever of measuring. It all rests on the assumption 
 that the course of nature has been, is, and will 
 continue to be, uniform. And yet, no one has 
 ever been able to give any answer at all to the 
 question, What proof have you that the uniformi- 
 ties which you call laws will not cease or alter 
 to-morrow? In regard to this we are like a man 
 rowing one way and looking another, steering his 
 boat by keeping her stern in line with the objects 
 behind him." — Fitzjames Stephen. 
 
 178 
 
CHAPTER XYI 
 
 The individual man is a complex being of 
 spirit and body. Each of them appears to be 
 essential to the very existence of the other. 
 But the body is under a law which has decreed 
 its destruction at three score and ten or there- 
 abouts. The crucial question then is, When 
 and under what conditions does the spirit begin 
 to establish a nexus with a physical basis of life 
 which may be more abiding? The law of the 
 Conservation of Energy does not avail us here. 
 It may very well be that every unit of vital 
 energy residing in any living form may be 
 transmitted into vital energy in some other 
 form when its body becomes no longer able 
 to maintain it. This is sufficient for the lower 
 forms of life. They only seek to keep their 
 species going. But this does not satisfy us. 
 We want the continuous life of the individual. 
 But it is clear that this life cannot begin until 
 the fact of individuality is clearly present. 
 Now, in what does the essence of personality 
 consist? In the lower animals there is really 
 
 170 
 
180 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 no such thing. Each one is but a unit, and the 
 real entity is the herd, the flock, the species, 
 the tree. Where, then, does personality begin ? 
 It can begin only at the point where the sense 
 of relationship with other personalities begins. 
 But this is the place where the moral faculty 
 emerges. The conscience is the faculty which 
 feels the sense of obligation to other personali- 
 ties. It is kept alive by the stimuli which 
 comes from other persons. Its characteristic 
 sensation is sympathy. It lives by going out 
 of itself. Thus by another path we reach the 
 elemental truth that " whoso, saveth his life 
 shall lose it, and whoso loseth his life shall 
 find it." No progression in mere intelligence 
 will fill the requirements. An intelligence of 
 such high order that it might understand every 
 possible relation of the individual would still 
 be utterly different in kind from a moral sense 
 which can feel these relationships. Sensation 
 is the evidence of life. Immortality is always 
 associated with goodness. Until moral sensi- 
 bility become self-conscious, all question of 
 personal immortality is irrelevant, because 
 there is, accurately speaking, no personality 
 to be immortal. Up to that point the individ- 
 ual living creature, whether in "human" form 
 or not, falls short of that essential personality 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 181 
 
 for which eternal life can have any meaning. 
 All that lies below is in the material order, or 
 in the kosmic order, and not in the kingdom 
 of persons. In a certain rough and ready 
 fashion we actually deal with individuals on 
 this basis. "We do not count as persons those 
 whom we cannot credit with moral discrimina- 
 tion. When that stage is reached, however, in 
 the case of an individual, we may fairly expect 
 that he, in virtue of the fact, will enter upon 
 a new phase of being, and by all the analogies 
 of nature we may expect that his life history 
 from that point onward will show phenomena 
 which appear to have little or nothing in com- 
 mon with what preceded. 
 
 In the study of nature, whether organic or 
 inorganic, one of the most amazing things is 
 the way in which every now and then a con- 
 tinuous progress is broken at a " critical point," 
 and is lifted up into an entirely new realm. 
 One of the most familiar instances of these is 
 the behavior of that common substance, water, 
 under the influence of heat. Between 32'' and 
 212** F. it is a ponderable, colorless fluid whose 
 properties are familiar, and whose phenomena 
 are uniform. Suppose that one had never seen 
 it at any temperature higher or lower than 
 these, he would have had no suspicion that it 
 
182 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 could or would behave in any other way or 
 show any other properties. But let him ab- 
 stract its heat slowly down toward the freez- 
 ing point. Until it reaches 32° it is still the 
 same substance about which he had supposed 
 his knowledge to be complete. Thereupon it 
 is suddenly, and for reasons about which abso- 
 lutely nothing is known, transmuted into an 
 utterly different thing. The properties which 
 it possessed an instant before are gone, and a 
 new set take their place. Its whole mode of 
 existence is transformed. It has become a new 
 creation. A still more significant "critical 
 point" is the one where inorganic matter 
 passes into protoplasm. It is true that no one 
 has ever, as yet, seen this transformation occur. 
 It is altogether probable, however, that it is 
 occurring incessantly, that as organized matter is 
 continually falling into disintegration at one side 
 of the process it is continually being re-created 
 at the other. The conditions cannot, or at any 
 rate have not, been produced artificially. All 
 indications are that the process has its place 
 in the realm of the infinitely minute, where 
 the microscope cannot penetrate. But the 
 inorganic can be discerned at the last stage 
 before the transmutation, and the organic at 
 the first stage thereafter, and though the 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 183 
 
 change occurs at a point so fine that it can- 
 not be located, it is still a change which is 
 practically infinite. The same law of move- 
 ment obtains throughout the whole path of 
 ascending being. A long series of movements 
 appear to have settled down to the determina- 
 tion to repeat themselves ad infinitum^ when, 
 presto, it starts not only in a new life but on 
 a new plane. If it shall appear, therefore, that 
 the individual who has reached to the stage of 
 self-conscious moral personality has as a con- 
 sequence come into new relations both to the 
 universe which he inhabits, and to the Supreme 
 Personality of the universe, we need not be 
 surprised. Nor need we be concerned to 
 decide whether the change is "natural" or 
 " supernatural," for all that is is natural in its 
 sphere. It accords with the terminology of 
 Scripture and science both to say that "he 
 has become a new creature," that he "has 
 passed from death unto life," that he has " been 
 bom again," that "he is no longer subject to 
 the law of sin and death." It is probable, 
 moreover, that the subject of this new birth is 
 usually more or less conscious of the fact. In 
 the Christian vocabulary it is spoken of as 
 "Conversion." The term is vague and the 
 emotion ill defined. But some emotion, which 
 
184 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 may be called by this name or some other, 
 seems to be a common experience of all those 
 individuals whose moral sense has awakened 
 to self-consciousness. Even if it be not identi- 
 fied by the subject at the moment of its begin- 
 ning, it lies in the consciousness as an abiding 
 sense whereby spiritual qualities are discerned. 
 If it be asked, therefore, " Who are they among 
 men who are thus born from above ? " the an- 
 swer is, they are all those who are capable of 
 asking that question. JSTo one can interrogate 
 life unless he be alive. To ask the question 
 shows that the inquirer is living. But it must 
 be actually an inquiry prompted from within, 
 and not an echo from around him ; a spontane- 
 ous outreaching of the spirit toward being, not 
 merely a curious question put by the intelli- 
 gence to a spirit indifferent to the reply. 
 Within Christian circles this passage of the 
 individual into a higher plane of being has 
 been traditionally associated with certain ob- 
 jective instrumentalities known as " Sacra- 
 ments." But while in general this association 
 has been regarded as a reality, there has never 
 been any clear agreement as to its rationale. 
 A vulgar and unintelligent opinion has widely 
 prevailed, to be sure, that the quickening into 
 a more exalted life is actually dependent upon 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 185 
 
 the exhibition of the sacrament in every in- 
 stance. But this opinion has never gained for 
 itself the sanction of either creeds or theolo- 
 gians. The most that these have ever affirmed 
 is that there is a constant relation of some sort, 
 not well understood, between the life and the 
 " sacraments where they may be had." In the 
 first and crucial case when an apostle was 
 called upon to express the rationale in action, 
 St. Peter, at the baptism of Cornelius, used this 
 very significant expression, " Can any man for- 
 bid water that these who have received the Holy 
 Spirit, even as we, should not be baptized?" 
 The point to be noted is that the apostle 
 recognized that Cornelius and his companions 
 were already "living." He did not think of 
 the sacrament as the instrument to produce the 
 life, but he did think and act as though it had 
 some actual relation to the life. The other 
 sacrament is always dealt with the same way. 
 It is " bread," to nourish a life already existent, 
 it is " wine," to invigorate an energy already 
 present. The elemental concept of the sacra- 
 mental idea seems to be to emphasize and keep 
 alive the truth that even the most exalted form 
 of spiritual life still has a necessary nexus with 
 matter on the one hand, and that on the other 
 its own essential qualities are moral purity, of 
 
186 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 which water is the counterpart in the physical 
 realm, and sympathetic affection which is best 
 expressed by brethren breaking bread with one 
 another. But in no case has the Christian 
 Church ever asserted or believed that the citi- 
 zenship of the New Kingdom can be populated 
 only by this means. 
 
 There is yet an outlying difficulty which I 
 approach with hesitation because I am not able 
 to see a solution which is altogether satisfac- 
 tory. Throughout this study in spiritual biol- 
 ogy we have assumed that the subjects of the 
 classification which we seek are adult men and 
 women. That is to say, they are individuals 
 who have advanced so far toward complete 
 human development that they may fairly be 
 examined for our purpose. But what of the 
 Infant, the immature, the undeveloped, whose 
 physical life is broken up ? To this it may at 
 least be replied that the marvellous possibili- 
 ties which are seen to lie in the law of hered- 
 ity may well contain all that is needed here. 
 When we consider what actually is carried over 
 from parent to child through the microscopic 
 bridge of a single germ cell, we need not de- 
 spair of heredity doing for the soul as it does 
 for the body. That ethical qualities, when 
 they exist, are transmissible is a common expe- 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 187 
 
 rience. It would at least be no violation of 
 the analogies of Scripture and nature if the 
 child of one who has achieved life eternal 
 should also prove to be immortal. Where, 
 or how, or under what circumstances its devel- 
 opment may take place is the same question, no 
 more and no less difficult, under any theory of 
 a future life. Our theory has in its favor that 
 so far as any answer at all can be given it gives 
 it in terms of processes which we know to be 
 real. 
 
" With increased experience and reason Man per- 
 ceives the more remote consequences of his actions, 
 and the self-regarding virtues, such as temperance, 
 chastity, etc., which during early ages are utterly 
 disregarded, come to be highly esteemed or held 
 sacred. Ultimately, the moral sense or conscience 
 becomes a highly complex sentiment, originating 
 in the social instincts, largely guided by the appro- 
 bation of one's fellow-men, ruled by reason, self- 
 instinct, and in later times by religion." 
 
 — Charles Darwin. 
 
 188 
 
CHAPTER XYII 
 
 The state of being in which men now find 
 themselves is often spoken of as a '4ife of 
 probation." The phrase is quite misleading, 
 indeed, one might well denounce it as mischiev- 
 ous. The crude notion which it represents is 
 that men are allowed in this life a sort of pre- 
 liminary course of action, with a public exam- 
 ination at the end of it, upon the result of 
 which will be determined a final and fixed sta- 
 tus of eternal existence which shall be without 
 any element of probation. The conception is 
 legal and mechanical, and is one which can 
 have no application to vital processes. It is 
 true that this life is one of probation, but then 
 it is true that the next life must also be so. 
 That is to say, living is always " on probation." 
 The living creature at any stage remains alive 
 so long and only so long as it conforms to 
 the conditions of living. An "unconditioned" 
 life for a finite creature is a contradiction in 
 thought. It matters not at all under what cir- 
 cumstances such a life is thought of as unfold- 
 189 
 
190 evolutio:n of immortality 
 
 ing itself, it must still be under conditions. 
 The life of a tree, a beast, or a man, the life 
 here or yonder, can never be otherwise than 
 upon probation. But the terms of the proba- 
 tion are never artiJScial but always natural. 
 They cannot be represented by imagery drawn 
 from the procedure of a trial in a court, but 
 only by biological ideas such as " conformity to 
 environment" and " survival of the fit." This 
 law must needs hold wherever and whenever 
 life is. There cannot but be a " future proba- 
 tion," but it is vital and not judicial. 
 
 It v^rould be much nearer the reality to say 
 that for the individual this life is a time of 
 gestation. This life would seem to bear a rela- 
 tion to the one to come analogous to that 
 which the period of embryonic development 
 bears to this one. The living, individual hu- 
 man form may with truth be regarded as a 
 matrix or womb within which another form 
 may have been quickened and be slowly matur- 
 ing. Indeed, the analogy is so complete as to 
 be startling. The laws and processes of all life 
 are probably better seen in the study of em- 
 bryology than anywhere else. There a life is 
 built up within a life. Its foundation is laid 
 in an already existent life. Its material and 
 psychic stuff is derived through an organism 
 
EVOLUTION OF BIMORTALITY 191 
 
 surrounding it, but are not identical with that 
 organism. It is separable from the parent 
 form, and outlasts it. Its future development 
 may immeasurably surpass the one within 
 which it is for the time pent. We therefore 
 think of the "new man" as one who may 
 perdure through and after the dissolution of 
 the frame which now is, being compounded of 
 psychical and Ethereal stuff, derived through 
 and builded up within the present individual 
 man. He has been begotten in the secret 
 places of the present individual, and death is 
 not his conception but his new birth. 
 
 But we cannot leave the subject here. "We 
 have interrogated nature and revelation to 
 find a place where the individual man may, if 
 he achieve so much, cross over from the life 
 that now is to another. We have become sat- 
 isfied that the passage is possible for those who 
 possess the requisite moral vigor, and that the 
 bridge has in at least one instance been safely 
 passed. We have found reasonable ground to 
 believe that conscious human personality may 
 and does in some way hold commerce with 
 other personalities through channels which are 
 no doubt material, but composed of matter dif- 
 ferent from that with which the laws of physics 
 generally deal. We have seen that this whole 
 
192 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 conception conforms strikingly to the analogies 
 within our present knowledge, and have come 
 to believe that the universe is a more spacious 
 place than had been feared. Admitting it to 
 be true, therefore, that in God's house are 
 many mansions, and that the door by which 
 one passes from his present habitation may 
 swing into another for him who has now the 
 key, one is at liberty to ask, what mode of life 
 may be expected there ? Future life, to be per- 
 sonal life at all, must be continuous with that 
 which now is. One must begin again where 
 he leaves off. But this implies the passage 
 into the other life of men at all stages of de- 
 velopment, provided only they have been devel- 
 oped far enough in any case to make the transit 
 possible. The law of growth and progress, 
 with the concomitant possibility of degenera- 
 tion and death, must be carried over with them, 
 and must hold wherever living creatures are. 
 One may not affirm that the next life is an 
 "endless" one for those who attain it, any 
 more than this one is. It has its own laws of 
 being, and the obverse of every law is a penalty, 
 and the ultimate penalty everywhere is destruc- 
 tion. 
 
 But under the conditions of the Ethereal life, 
 moral development must needs be both more 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 193 
 
 certain and more swift than under those of 
 mortal life. The power of moral choice must 
 remain, and to live rightly still demand the 
 strenuous will. It must demand it all the more 
 there, the life being endued with such indefi- 
 nitely increased capacities. But there can be 
 no breach of personal continuity. Death can 
 only make evident what the actual condition 
 of the individual is. He that was holy is holy 
 still. He that was filthy is filthy still. But 
 there are degrees in moral corruption. It may 
 have been so all pervading in one that physical 
 death only served to break up the body out of 
 which the spirit had long since perished for 
 lack of a suitable home. Or, the new man may 
 pass on carrying with him moral faultiness, real, 
 though not so enwoven with the fabric of his 
 being but that it may be purged and elimi- 
 nated by the discipline of the new life, which 
 lays on few stripes or many, as the need may 
 be. The Ethereal universe shall still hide se- 
 crets which thought will find its joy in discov- 
 ering. Being a human world, the inhabitants 
 thereof can but live humanely. 
 
 " To the lover full function 
 Of an unexhausted joy ; 
 To the warrior, crowned ambition 
 
 With no envy's base alloy. 
 o 
 
194 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 " To the ruler, sense of action 
 Working out his great intent; 
 To the prophet satisfaction 
 In the mission he is sent." 
 
 The gross conditions of material existence 
 which in the present stage drag love down to 
 lust and make of the spirit a bondslave toiling 
 to win bread for the body, shall have been 
 replaced by others so fine and plastic, so 
 responsive to psychic needs, that a progress 
 toward completeness of life is possible and 
 inconceivably swift. 
 
 Or, there may be those who, dazzled with the 
 possibilities of the new life, presently begin 
 to sin magnificently, and the natural conse- 
 quences of violated law there as here shall 
 work their quick destruction, through anguish 
 intolerable, to the complete and awful catas- 
 trophe of the second death. And lying at the 
 end of it all, one seems to catch a dim glimpse 
 of that "far-off, divine event toward which the 
 whole creation moves." To every man who is 
 able to appreciate at all the meaning as well as 
 the mystery of life, God and nature join in the 
 appeal formulated for all time by the Divine 
 Man; — 
 
 " Enter ye in at the strait gate : for wide is 
 the gate and hroad is the way that leadeth to 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 195 
 
 destj^ction, and many there he which go in 
 thereat. Because strait is the gate and narrow 
 is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there 
 he that find it.^^ 
 
" Death for the body with life is combined, 
 Darkness disputes with the light for the mind, 
 While spirit climbs upward, if good it desires, 
 Or, chained to the earth by its sin, it expires. 
 God is our Life, and our Light, and Upraising; 
 Whom God doth uplift shall never cease praising.'' 
 
 — Felix Melancthon. 
 
 196 
 
CHAPTER XYIII 
 
 A PRACTICAL question still remains to be con- 
 sidered. No moral or religious belief can be 
 adopted or rejected without some regard to the 
 effect which it may naturally be expected to 
 produce upon the conduct of those who enter- 
 tain it. How will the doctrine of Immor- 
 tability as distinguished from immortality 
 affect men's moral life? If we say to them, 
 "You are not necessarily immortal, but you 
 may become so if you set about it properly," 
 and if they believe us, will they be the better 
 or the worse for it? Of course the intrinsic 
 truth of the doctrine does not depend upon 
 any such consideration. That must stand or 
 fall on other ground. If it be true, men must 
 adjust themselves to it as best they may. 
 Truth is neither made nor unmade by an esti- 
 mate of its consequences. But, at the same 
 time, when one is endeavoring to determine 
 whether or not such a proposition be true, he 
 cannot but be influenced, more or less, by his 
 judgment upon its practical result one way or 
 the other. 
 
 107 
 
198 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 It is quite commonly taken for granted that 
 a general belief in the necessary immortality of 
 all men, with the proffer of an eternal heaven 
 and the threat of an eternal hell, is essential to 
 the moral order of society. It is unquestionable 
 that this common belief has been a powerful 
 deterrent from evil living at some times and 
 within certain limited areas. It operated thus 
 in Europe during the Middle Ages, and it does 
 so in the territory of Islam to-day. But all 
 will agree that the righteousness thus evoked 
 has been and is of a very unsatisfactory quality. 
 
 "The fear o' hell's a hangman's whip 
 To hand the wretch in order. ' ' 
 
 It has never succeeded in being more than 
 that. Reward and penalty have been exploited 
 to the utmost for moral purposes. The joys of 
 heaven have been painted in forms most attrac- 
 tive and colors most ravishing, the picture of 
 hell with its lurid torments has been drawn by 
 the hands of the world's most transcendent gen- 
 iuses. But the result has always been amaz- 
 ingly meagre in its effect upon men's conduct. 
 While it has fired a few with an ecstatic long- 
 ing and overwhelmed a few in a deadly terror, 
 the great multitude, even while they assent to 
 the truth of the doctrine, live as though it were 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 199 
 
 non-existent. In our own time it may well be 
 doubted whether its effect upon conduct is even 
 appreciable. Forty years ago Frederick W. 
 Kobertson noted that "future retribution has 
 become a kind of figment. Hell is in the 
 world of shadows. The tone in which edu- 
 cated men speak of it still is often only that 
 of good-humored condescension which makes 
 allowances for childish superstition." It is 
 generally allowed even by the most orthodox 
 that the exploitation of a "material" heaven 
 and a "material" hell has been a mistake. 
 But what they do not appear to notice is 
 the fact that when the " material " element 
 is eliminated from the idea nothing is left of 
 it. If it is not material, it is nothing. Its 
 practical effect, where it has had any, has 
 been due to the way in which it has either 
 allured or frighted the imagination. But to 
 do this it must be presented in forms which 
 the imagination can present before itself. If 
 its form be left out its substance vanishes. The 
 attempt to substitute purely spiritual pleasures 
 and spiritual agonies for the crude glories of 
 heaven and the crude horrors of hell must 
 always remain unsuccessful. In point of fact, 
 the whole presentation of future reward and 
 penalty has ceased to move. The awards and 
 
200 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the sentences are felt to be irrelevant. The 
 whole scheme is mechanical and artificial. It 
 rests upon presumptions which are so essentially 
 unreasonable and inequitable that advance in 
 intelligence and moral sincerity renders them 
 intolerable. The classification of " righteous " 
 and " wicked " is the merest figment. No objec- 
 tive fact corresponds to it. If it be assumed 
 that all men without regard to their stage of 
 moral development pass on into another life, 
 which is endless by its very nature, the sense 
 of fair dealing demands that each should be 
 left unclassified and undoomed until the end 
 of his line of moral movement. This is indeed 
 the explicit teaching of Christ, concerning those 
 who are capable of passing on at all. The 
 wheat and the tares grow together until the 
 end of the aeon, and then the wheat is gath- 
 ered into the garner, and the tares are thrown 
 into the fire to be destroyed. But this natural 
 process of life, growth, and development, cul- 
 minating finally in stable being or in disin- 
 tegration, has nothing in common with the 
 scheme of probation, trial, judgment, acquittal, 
 and sentence which has lost what power it ever 
 possessed to influence life. It is the plain fact 
 that whenever the belief becomes current that 
 a future life of some sort is assured for all in 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 201 
 
 any event, men will conclude to wait until that 
 life is reached before beginning any very strenu- 
 ous effort to determine its character. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we follow the teaching 
 of Christ and of nature, we find a moral 
 dynamic which is quite incalculable, and from 
 which there is no escape. Compared with its 
 dire discovery of disaster following in the path 
 of moral offence, the threat of hell is but as 
 the rattling of a medicine man's gourd. Let a 
 man once see that the alternative which con- 
 fronts him at every step of his moral progres- 
 sion is life or death, that his task is, as Christ 
 says, " to win for himself a soul," or, at a farther 
 stage, it is " to save his soul alive," and he will 
 realize that he is face to face with realities and 
 not with an extraneous arrangement arbitrarily 
 established. The appeal is to that deepest, 
 strongest, most persistent of all desires, the 
 love of life. "Skin for skin, yea, all that a 
 man hath will he give for his life." It need 
 hardly be repeated that he cannot die unless 
 he have first become alive. But when once 
 moral consciousness has been reached by the 
 individual, its instinct of self-preservation may 
 confidently be depended upon to induce strenu- 
 ous action to protect itself from death, unless 
 it be misled by some outside assurance that 
 
202 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 death is not for it a possible issue. It may 
 well be that suicide is possible for a human 
 being at every stage of its history, here or 
 yonder. Indeed, it is not easy to conceive the 
 possibility of a conscious personality being kept 
 alive against its own determination to make an 
 end of itself. Such a condition of existence 
 would seem to contradict the very idea of 
 personality. It is possible that God may be 
 no more able to force a man to live than to 
 force him to love. There are places where 
 coercion defeats itself. Certainly it is true 
 now that every man holds in his hand the 
 power to slay himself if he so wills. One 
 wonders sometimes why the power is not more 
 frequently used. Hamlet was mistaken in his 
 explanation, — 'tis not " the dread of some- 
 thing after death, which makes us rather bear 
 the ills we have than fly to others that we 
 know not of." 'Tis not because " resolution is 
 sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 
 The resolve upon self-destruction is reached 
 even more reluctantly by the brutal savage 
 who has no thought of anything lying beyond 
 than it is by the educated man whose imagina- 
 tion is crowded with pictures of post-obituary 
 horrors. The elemental instinct of living may 
 be trusted to keep one from making his own 
 
EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 203 
 
 quietus wherever he may be. The horror of 
 ceasing to be is a far more powerful emotion 
 than the fear of damnation. If fear be needed 
 at all, or be efficacious at all to the evocation 
 of goodness, here is a form of disaster having 
 a potency compared with which the threat of 
 hell is but a bogie to frighten children. Let 
 one think as lightly as he pleases of the joys 
 of heaven or the pains of hell, " the law hath 
 yet another hold upon him." The law is that 
 same inexorable one which operates through- 
 out the whole kingdom of living things. The 
 continuance of any individual in being is depend- 
 ent upon his conforming to the requirements 
 of life at the stage where he is. St. Paul has 
 set out in the most accurate statement what 
 are the laws for the kind of beings which most 
 of us have come to be. When one has reached 
 to that point of moral progress which he de- 
 scribes by the phrase " being in Christ Jesus," 
 he has passed out from under the inferior law 
 binding upon creatures who have not reached 
 so far. " For they that are after the flesh do 
 mind the things of the flesh, but they that are 
 after the spirit the things of the spirit. For 
 the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of 
 the spirit is life. The mind of the flesh is not 
 subject to this higher law of God, indeed it 
 
204 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 cannot be. But ye are not in the flesh but in 
 the spirit, provided that the spirit of God in- 
 habiteth you. If the Christ is in you the body 
 is indeed dead because of sin, but the spirit is 
 life because of righteousness. If the spirit of 
 him that raised up Jesus from the dead be in 
 you, he that raiseth up Christ Jesus from the 
 dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies 
 through the spirit that dwelleth in you. So 
 then, brethren, we are under obligation not to 
 the flesh to live after the flesh : for if ye live 
 after the flesh ye are bound to die, but if by 
 the spirit ye mortify the action of the body ye 
 shall live." 
 
 This is the key to the marvellous welcome 
 with which the world hailed the "good news 
 of the Gospel of Kesurrection " ; to the languid 
 indifference with which the gospel of deliver- 
 ance from hell is received to-day ; to the new 
 enthusiasm for righteousness which might be 
 expected to burst out once more if men were 
 brought to see that holiness is the very path to 
 abiding life. 
 
The Influence of 
 Christ in Modern Life 
 
 Being a. Study of the Ne^iv Problems 
 of the Church in American Society 
 
 By the REV. NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 
 
 Paitor of the Plymouth Church, Brooklyn 
 
 lamo. Cloth. $1.50 
 
 FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 By way of preeminence this era now dosing has been an era of 
 criticism and destruction. Nothing has escaped the crucible. 
 Scholars have carried the method of the laboratory into the library, 
 the gallery, the legislative hall, and even into the temples of religion. 
 Old poems, old histories, old science, old creeds, have been pulled 
 to pieces, and studied part by part. With some the analytic spirit 
 has become a frenzy, and the love of dissection a morbid passion. 
 With others analysis has represented a desire to know the exact 
 facts. Now that the wave of criticism has passed by, changes many 
 and great are found to have taken place. Nothing remains as it was. 
 We have a new chemistry, a new pedagogy, a new psychology. And 
 now that the intellect has completed its analytic work, our generation 
 has come to realize that the heart with its hunger is, as before, unap- 
 peased. Religion is the life of God in the soul of man. The creed is 
 the outer, verbal photograph of that inner, vital experience. Man's 
 interest in those verbal pictures named creeds, unfortunately, seems 
 waning, while his interest in religion is steadily waxing. As Edmund 
 Burke once said, " Man is by constitution a religious animal." 
 
 Now that the destructive era has closed, from the view-point of the 
 new scholarship many are beginning to feel that the critical epoch 
 was, after all, an epoch of mediocrity and second rate intellect. All 
 the great eras in art and literature have been creative eras rather 
 than critical. ... In his preparatory work the youth enters the 
 laboratory to study the human body, counting its bones and study- 
 ing the chemical elements of nerves and muscifS. Later, when the 
 young Romeo meets Juliet, he is lifted into a new realm by the new 
 friendship, and never thinks of reducing the beautiful girl to a group 
 of small jars marked " lime," " phosphate," and " carbon." And 
 there are the best of reasons for believing that in religion the critical 
 epoch has gone and the creative era has come. 
 
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 An Examination of the Teaching 
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 i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 
 
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