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 Barton, William Eleazar, 
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MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
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MY FAITH 
 IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 By ff 
 WILLIAM E.’ BARTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 The Life of Abraham Lincoln 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 
 
CorprricHt, 1926 
 By tHE Bosss-Mrrgirt Company 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 PRINTED AND BOUND 
 BY BRAUNWORTH & CO., ING. 
 BROOKLYN, NEW YORK 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The only reason which need be given for the writing of 
 this book is the clear conviction of the author, out of a 
 long experience, that one of the profound needs of the 
 present time is a faith in immortality, reasonable, intel- 
 ligible and free from superstition. Such a faith this book 
 endeavors to assist. 
 
 This volume was written for the comfort of others, 
 and not to express any personal sorrow on the part of 
 the author. From such sorrow his own life had been rela- 
 tively free. A thousand times he had stood beside the 
 grave. For forty years he had preached to others a gos- 
 pel of comfort, and during that whole time death had not 
 entered his own door. On the morning of November 7, 
 1925, when the final touches were put on the manuscript, 
 and the wrapped package lay upon the desk awaiting the 
 expressman to convey it to the publisher, no shadow was 
 seen to impend above his own home. Before the day 
 ended, the wife of his youth, well beloved for forty happy 
 years, lay dead. While no page of this book was writ- 
 ten as an expression of the author’s own grief, the proof- 
 sheets have been read in the shadow of a great personal 
 bereavement. The faith which he has preached to others, 
 the faith which she cherished, is the author’s own comfort. 
 If the pure in heart see God, hers is a radiant vision. 
 
 Wie 
 
‘ 
 
 a 
 
 
 
CONE NTS 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 LG VV OND Sie Mine Utne CUCU Lhe nemo MAE eA eC gf 
 II Tue Founpation or Knownience . . 28 
 PEE CRG DT ANDY ATT FEM Miny Loh ne aCe Te Sam dir ue eine 
 TV Darn eer OM RPE yds a eed Celut s fh aes a 
 VORA HICH TROMGCrOD Ueto eruhial fe aia iinih lek creat od UE GS 
 MAIO Dre Dist or THe LAR TI is)\ eo taheeuine sume Oe 
 Ne HE POW RE HOR) LITE D ite wo Sh tle ae, ta eh aaa 
 MELE SCIENCE) AND: -_MMORTALIDYS Ve 8 OY ee 
 Ae PAY LOSOPHY (AND ME ATT ED iithan cu uaa el LOO 
 X <IwMmorrarity In tHe Otp Testament. 171 
 XI Immorrauiry In tHE New Testramentr. 183 
 XIT Can Wet Communicate with tue Dreap? . 194 
 Ad RUNTOVTH DO UINE THER MOST) (00 fr Nos. eis | ae 
 XIV May We Pray vor Our Deap? . . . 252 
 
 XV HEAVEN } DMRS otal AC NRE? iittele Orem Thi Sep 
 
; Ly a 
 ie sakes 
 BA\e * re y) 
 
 ¥ 
 
 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 

 
MY FAITH 
 IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 I WONDER 
 
 i rinp myself living in a highly improbable 
 world. I was not consulted in advance about the 
 matter of my coming here to live. If I had been, 
 I think I should have come. I am certainly glad 
 Iam here. I am glad of every year I have lived, 
 and glad that I still am living. I am in no haste to 
 leave; if I could continue to live for another hun- 
 dred years as happily as I have lived for something 
 less than my first hundred, I should be willing to 
 sign on the dotted line an agreement to accept the 
 added century and more of life in this world, and 
 J should be happy in the prospect. On the other 
 hand, I am not mourning on account of the im=- 
 
 11 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 probability of such an opportunity. I am here, 
 and glad I came, and content to stay as long as I 
 can be happy and useful, and then move on. 
 
 It is not the kind of world I should have made 
 or expected. I have never admitted that I could 
 have made a better one, but it has sometimes seemed 
 to me that, although professional optimists, of 
 whom I am almost one, may declare that this is the 
 best of all possible worlds, it might have been pos- 
 sible to “mold it nearer to the heart’s desire.” It 
 certainly is not a perfect world. Some of us have 
 spent a good many years serving as members of 
 charitable, educational and philanthropic commit- 
 tees trying to make it better, and I expect to keep 
 on doing so. Meantime, I do not complain, but I 
 wonder. 
 
 When I speak of this world, I do not mean this 
 ponderable globe, but that part of it which enters 
 into my experience and vision, plus whatever I am 
 able to know and see in the limited part of the vis- 
 ible universe that I happen to notice and think 
 about. ‘This world, so limited and defined, is 
 filled with material for wonder. If I were map- 
 ping the constellations, I should not be content to 
 
 12 
 
I WONDER 
 
 imagine that one group of stars outlined a bear 
 and another a scorpion and another a pair of 
 twins; I should look around until I found a few 
 stars that might make for me an interrogation 
 point. 
 
 Tt is not alone the stars that cause me to wonder. 
 I find equal cause for wonder in much smaller and 
 nearer objects. I can say with Tennyson, that if I 
 understood all the answers to all the questions and 
 wonderments that are conjured up by the “flower 
 in the crannied wall,’ I should know the whole 
 story of the universe. Tennyson did not know; he 
 wondered. I do not know; I wonder. 
 
 I must not cheapen this word “wonder.” It 
 must not be used for mere conjecture or super- 
 ficial uncertainty. I must not say, “I wonder 
 when George will come,” or, “It is a wonder the 
 baby did not break his arm when he fell down- 
 stairs.” George will come when he comes; I should 
 like to know when, but that is not a matter for won- 
 der. I am glad the baby was hurt no worse, but, 
 given the baby’s height and weight and the density 
 of his tissues and the flexibility of his cartilaginous 
 bones and the thickness of the stair carpet, it was 
 
 13 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 not possible for the baby to be either more or less 
 hurt than he was. We must save the word “won- 
 der” for things that are really wonderful. Tor 
 these lesser matters a cheaper word will suffice. 
 
 I wonder what is the nature of matter. ‘This 
 table is made of oak, and this book of paper, with a 
 eover of cloth; the electric light is a matter of glass 
 globe and copper wire; but what is the basic reality 
 that inheres in wood and paper and cloth and glass 
 and copper and mountains and mole-hills and con- 
 stellations and nebulez and other things? What is 
 the common element inherent in and _ inclusive 
 of all these and other materials? I have read 
 various learned treatises in reply to this in- 
 quiry. I am not unfamiliar with certain theories 
 of realism and idealism behind which the philos- 
 ophers and scientists have concealed a pitiful scrap 
 of their ignorance. I am not asking for the fig 
 leaf of their nomenclature, nor the assumption that 
 when a Greek word is made into a scientific name 
 the question is answered. I also know Greek, or 
 once did, and can make names to hide my own igno- 
 rance; but I am here and now confessing it, and 
 with it 1 am confessing the ignorance of all the 
 
 14 
 
t WONDER 
 
 others. All of us together do not know a millionth 
 part of one per cent of what there is that might be 
 known. We do not “guess at half and multiply by 
 two.” We guess at a millionth and there are not 
 figures enough for a denominator of our ignorance. 
 What is matter? Or, to use a plural noun with a 
 singular verb as the Greeks sometimes did, what is 
 things ?* 
 
 Our definition of particular things is a summary 
 of certain perceived qualities: “The rose is red; the 
 violet is blue; sugar is sweet,” and so on. 
 
 But the quality of redness is not in the rose. The 
 petals of the rose are so constituted as to reflect to 
 the eye certain red rays of light. These rays are 
 absorbed and not reflected by the leaves, which are 
 therefore called by another color. But when we 
 say that the leaves of the rose-bush are green and 
 the petals red, or that the grass is green, and that 
 the sky is blue, we know better than to suppose that 
 we are speaking of qualities eternally inherent in 
 the leaf and petal, grass and sky. I have seen 
 
 “There is a little book of popular essays for young people, 
 issued in England in 1911, the author apparently a physician, 
 entitled J Wonder. It was published by Macmillan, and if still in 
 print may be read with profit. I can not think it had a large 
 sale, as I have seen only one copy, which I have. 
 
 15 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 grass that was not green, and yet was undeniably 
 grass; and I have seen the sky when it was not blue. 
 The color of the sky and the color of the grass are 
 in the eye that receives reflected rays of light of 
 those particular colors. I do not know what the 
 real color of the grass or sky is. I wonder. 
 
 Yet, if that were the whole of the problem, I 
 could afford to let it go, and for practical purposes, 
 I do not consider it. The green of the grass, and 
 the blue of the sky are “good enough for me.” But 
 when I am seeking to know what things is (not 
 what particular thing as distinct from other things, 
 are but what all things is) I must not let myself be 
 deceived by appearances which I know are decep- 
 tive. I wonder what is the nature of matter. 
 
 I learned years ago that matter is composed of 
 molecules, and that molecules are made up of ho- 
 mogeneous and indivisible units, far too small for 
 the microscope to disclose, and called by a Greek 
 name “atoms” which simply means “can-not-be- 
 cut.” But now I am told that each atom is a solar 
 system with a central positive electron and a num- 
 ber of negative electrons moving about it. I am 
 willing to believe it, though it requires great faith. 
 
 16 
 
I WONDER 
 
 But I do not know yet what matter is or what 
 things is. I wonder. 
 
 I live in a world of movement and energy, which 
 seems to move more or less by method. If I eat a 
 peach and toss the stone out of my window, I do so 
 in expectation that outside the window, where the 
 force of my arm conveys it, the stone will be taken 
 in charge by another form of energy, which doubt- 
 less is operative inside the window as well as out, 
 and that the stone will not keep on going in the di- 
 rection in which I toss it, and will not fall up, but 
 will fall down to the ground and disappear harm- 
 lessly among the pine needles. By way of express- 
 ing my expectation that it will fall down and not 
 up I say that the law of gravitation pulls it down. 
 This is as good a way of disposing of the subject as 
 any, and it disposes of the troublesome question 
 very much as I dispose of the peach-stone, by giv- 
 ing it a name and tossing it out of the window. 
 But if I cared to plant the peach-stone I might ob- 
 serve other forces than gravitation at work. What 
 is force? Yes, I wonder what kind of force that is 
 which we call life. 
 
 The wonder of life! I have seen it come and 
 
 17 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 go—the flower bursting from the bud; the seed 
 pushing through the turf and strugghng to the 
 light; the bird picking its shell, and I wonder. 
 Who told the seed that if it pushed through the 
 soil it would find light? Who told the bird that 
 picking was the way to get out? Who told the bird 
 that there was any way out? I wonder, I wonder! 
 
 I wonder what that force is which is not convert- 
 ible into any other force, yet which is one of the 
 mightiest of all the forms of energy—the force of 
 life. I am not entering into any biological discus- 
 sion as to vitalism and the various forms of nega- 
 tion or qualification which some of them employ. 
 I wonder what life is. I wonder what mind is! 
 
 I pause for a moment to listen to the comment of 
 Mr. Gadgrind; “What’s the use of wondering? 
 All I wonder is where my next meal is coming 
 from. All this talk about wonder seems to me un- 
 profitable.” 
 
 Go, Mr. Gadgrind, and get your next meal. But 
 stay, even you must wait a little longer. This thing 
 we call wonder is not so unprofitable as you sup- 
 pose. If wonder is waste energy, why wonder 
 about the meal? And if you are to wonder, why 
 
 18 
 
I WONDER 
 
 not wonder about something greater? That clever, 
 if sometimes wearisome essayist, Chesterton, was 
 never more true than when he said, “The world will 
 never starve for want of wonders, but only for 
 want of wonder.” When Emerson said that “won- 
 der is the seed of science,” he was hardly more than 
 paraphrasing Socrates, whom Plato quotes as hav- 
 ing said that “wonder is the sole beginning of 
 philosophy.” 
 
 Wonder is one of the most precious things in the 
 world. It is the foundation of knowledge and the 
 soul of all that can be called success. Eiven if you 
 only wonder where you can sell another bushel of 
 potatoes, you are turning a cheap form of wonder 
 to profit. There are many men like the lout of 
 whom Dryden wrote: 
 
 Long stood the noble youth oppressed with awe, 
 And stupid at the wondrous things he saw. 
 
 We shall not be quite so stupid if we have mind 
 enough to wonder. Among those extra-canonical 
 “sayings” of Jesus which have some degree of right 
 to be considered genuine utterances of the Lord, 
 is one that reads, “He that wonders shall reign; 
 and he that reigns shall rest.” 
 
 19 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 How long am I to wonder in this fashion? I 
 could go on forever, wondering, wondering; but I 
 should like to wonder as profitably as possible. 
 The world in which I live has been created with 
 great ingenuity, apparently to make me wonder. 
 
 No one of the fundamental mysteries has ever 
 been removed. ‘The mystery of matter, the mys- 
 tery of time and space, the mystery of life, the 
 mystery of mind, the mysteries of pain and death, 
 all are with us as they have been always. Nor is 
 there any relief in turning from the mysteries of 
 vast proportions or immeasurable distances to 
 those that are smaller in bulk or closer at hand. A 
 recent minor poet has thus written of the cloud in 
 the sky and the flower in her hand: 
 
 I see the giant stalking in the sky, 
 
 The giant cloud above the wilderness, 
 
 Bearing a mystery too far, too high 
 
 For my poor guess. 
 
 Away I turned me, saying, “I must seek 
 
 In lowlier places for the wonder-word. 
 
 Something more little, intimate, shall speak.” 
 
 A bright rose stirred. 
 
 And long I looked into its face to see 
 
 At last some hidden import of the hour. 
 
 And I had thought to turn from mystery, 
 
 But O, flower! flower! —Acnus LEE. 
 20 
 
I WONDER 
 
 There is no escape from mystery. But if we can 
 not push it far from us, we may at least hope not to_ 
 be crushed under its weight, or lie down in supine 
 and hopeless refusal to think. If we do not accept 
 the challenge which life’s mysteries present to us, 
 then, in the midst of life, we are in death. 
 
 I do not eovet that frame of mind which permits 
 a man to go through life seeing wonders and never 
 wondering. I have no sympathy with the man who 
 would yawn at witnessing the creation of the world 
 if he were to see it a second time. ‘The normal man 
 will say with Wordsworth: 
 
 My heart leaps up when I behold 
 A rainbow in the sky. 
 
 So was it when my life began; 
 
 So is it now I am a man; 
 
 So be it when I shall grow old, 
 Or let me die. 
 
 The man without this sense of wonder need not 
 pray to die, he is already dead. Within him some- 
 thing very precious has died for which nothing can 
 compensate. I behold a rainbow or a dew-drop 
 and I wonder. 
 
 I wonder at the infinitely great in nature, and 
 the infinitely small, Everything is wonderful. 
 
 21 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 But let me instance just one more object of 
 wonder. 
 
 I might wonder at the mystery of pain; I might 
 wonder at the presence of evil in a world made by a 
 good God. I do wonder about these things, but 
 now especially I am wondering about death. 
 
 Long ago I stopped wondering about death as a 
 fact in human experience. 
 
 I shall not argue about it now. Itishere. It is 
 a fact which sooner or later we shall all face. A 
 man must either suffer many sorrows and then die, 
 or die young. What is death, and why is it? 
 
 I wonder if there is life after death. I know that 
 millions of men and women have asked the same 
 question, some of them with less experience than I. 
 For while I have never been dead, I have seen 
 much of death. I have stood beside a thousand 
 graves and tried to speak words of comfort to a 
 thousand different groups of weeping friends. 
 They have wondered, and have asked me again and 
 again what I believe about life after death. 
 
 I have a faith that to me is unspeakably pre- 
 cious; it is of this faith I write. 
 
 “Tf a man die, shall he live again?” 
 
 I wonder; I also believe. 
 
 aa 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Ir 1s affirmed by one of our poets that ignorance 
 is sometimes bliss; if that be true, this should be a 
 blissful world, for we are very ignorant. When 
 we say we know a thing, we usually mean that we 
 believe, hope, or imagine it is true. We have to 
 assume something in order to have ground on 
 which to stand while we begin to explore and inves- 
 tigate. But let us begin as nearly as possible at 
 rock bottom. Apart from the things that we be- 
 lieve, hope, or imagine to be true, what do we 
 know? 
 
 We do not know that there will be a to-morrow 
 nor can we prove that there was a yesterday. It 
 would trouble us to demonstrate that there is a 
 to-day. For all that we can prove, the world was 
 created this morning, or is not yet created. 
 
 Very well, then, let us begin by denying every- 
 
 23 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 thing. Let us not admit that anything exists. We 
 will not admit that there is a world or a Bible or a 
 God or any matter or force or mind. 
 
 But stop; there evidently is mind. I can not 
 deny everything without thinking, and where there 
 is thought there must be a thinker. I am thinking, 
 perhaps foolishly, but still thinking. When I say 
 “JT deny that I am here,” I know that I affirm that 
 I am here denying it. A famous philosopher 
 named Descartes once began in that way, denying 
 everything, that he might clear the ground and 
 start at the bottom. He put his first affirmation in 
 a brief Latin sentence, Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, 
 therefore I am.” 
 
 I am! What an affirmation! God said to 
 Moses, “Go say to Pharaoh, I am hath sent me.” 
 And here I am, saying the same thing of myself, 
 “T am.” Let me make much of this brief moment 
 of isolated glory, for it will not last long. For this 
 quarter second of speculative thinking there is 
 nothing else in the universe than a thinking, doubt- 
 ing, denying I. “I deny that I am, therefore I 
 am.” lone on this dizzy pedestal of denial I 
 stand, kicking it down in the very act that raises me 
 
 24 
 
THE FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 to the top of it, and having to admit that my very 
 denial is a declaration that my denial is untrue. 
 
 I can not deny everything without laughing my- 
 self out of court. “I think, therefore I am,” and to 
 think negatively is Just as sure proof as to think 
 affirmatively. I no longer say, “I deny, therefore 
 TY am,” but, “I affirm, and in the act of affirmation 
 I declare that I am here.” 
 
 But immediately I am conscious that I am not 
 alone. If I say, “I am here, and nothing else is,” 
 and as I write down my own existence as the one 
 article of my creed, I reach for pen and paper and 
 face the fact that pen and paper are just as tan- 
 gibly present as I am, and so are the floor, the ta- 
 ble, the chair, the window and the earth, the trees, 
 the lake and the sky. 
 
 I need not stop to enumerate them—I am here 
 and I am not alone. Let me go forward this one 
 step, grouping everything outside myself into one 
 category, yet even in that act finding that I can 
 not wholly shut myself out of this other classifica- 
 tion, and let me call this group of pen and paper 
 and chair and table and earth and lake and sky by 
 some elastic name, however inexact—I know that 
 
 25 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 there is a world, and that I am in it and a part 
 of it. 
 
 This did not take us long, but it goes over the 
 essential ground which philosophers have to trav- 
 erse when they speak of “the subjective’ and “the 
 objective.” The baby makes the same discovery 
 when he finds that the pink toes under his petticoat 
 are a part of him in a sense in which the petticoat is 
 not. He has made a profound discovery, the mu- 
 tual limitations and essential relationships of the 
 subjective and objective. 
 
 We are getting rather deep into ractap hee 
 and are willing. We can go no deeper, nor can 
 any one else. We began by denying everything, 
 and we have already come a far cry from that. 
 
 Now I discover that the not-me part of this 
 world is divided into two parts, the like-me and the 
 unlike-me parts. 
 
 I raked the falling leaves of late summer and 
 filled a wheelbarrow with them. My little grand- 
 daughter stood by, expectant. She had reason to 
 believe a free ride awaited her. She said, “Grand- 
 pa, the wheelbarrow is full; there is not room for 
 one more leaf,” 
 
THE FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 “There is room for just one more leaf,” I said, as 
 I caught her up and seated her on top. “There is 
 room for a little leaf from the tree of life.” 
 
 To which she responded, “This little leaf can 
 walk and talk.” 
 
 So it ean, thank God! “We all do fade as a 
 leaf,” even as Isaiah said, but some leaves can walk 
 and talk and some can not. My little grand- 
 daughter, and her brother, and her father and 
 mother, and her grandmother, all belong to the 
 like-me class, and so do the butcher and the baker 
 and the candlestickmaker and the iceman and the 
 milkman and the school-teacher. 
 
 T am not the only one of my kind. I am not so 
 eminent in my isolation as I thought. There is a 
 world, [ am a part of it, and I have company. 
 
 IT am shut in a very beautiful prison, with five 
 windows. There is a wide window I call sight, and 
 one somewhat narrower but still of good width 
 which I call hearing; another that I call touch;.a 
 narrow one that I call taste and a very tiny aper- 
 ture that I call smell. All the knowledge I have of 
 the world outside myself is gained through one or 
 more of these five windows. 
 
 27 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 I can not see all of myself nor do any or all of my 
 five senses constitute my best knowledge of what I 
 callme. I do not think of myself as the man I have 
 heard singing bass or talking about books and bag- 
 pipes and cabbages and kings, or the man I have 
 seen in the glass, but as the man I know in my 
 thinking and in my purposes and my emotions. [ 
 see a hollyhock that I planted, and I remember 
 that I planted it; I admire its color and decide to 
 plant another one. In this swift process I move in 
 a vast threefold orbit. I think about the hollyhock, 
 and feel a sense of joy in it; I make a plan about 
 it, and in all these things relating to the hollyhock I 
 know not only the flower but myself. I can think; 
 I can enjoy; I can plan, and all these in my rela- 
 tion to so small a thing as a hollyhock. 
 
 We began by denying everything, and we are 
 far enough along to admit the five senses, the pro- 
 cesses of the mind, and the existence of things out- 
 side, some of which things are people. Some leaves 
 on the tree of life can walk and talk. That is 
 enough about things, including such things as my- 
 self. I am now ready to go further. I soon accept 
 as undeniable axioms such declarations as these: 
 
 28 
 
THE FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Out of nothing, nothing can come. 
 
 Every effect has a cause, and every effect be- 
 comes a cause. There may have been, and I think 
 must have been, a first cause, but I do not see how 
 there can ever be a last cause. 
 
 Things exist; something must always have 
 existed. 
 
 That which first existed must have had in it the 
 potency of all that now exists. Nothing can have 
 evolved in the development of the universe which 
 was not potentially present when the universe 
 began. 
 
 Thinking did not begin with me, nor with other 
 feeble thinkers like me. There has been thought 
 from the beginning; there must be a great Thinker. 
 
 We may go further and say that the fact that 
 there is love is proof of a great Lover. 
 
 I am writing these words on a typewriter. It 
 has the name of the maker stamped on the front; 
 but if there were no such name there, I should 
 know that it had a maker. No one could make me 
 believe that forty pounds of steel junk had been 
 _ dumped into my study and that it climbed upon the 
 table and made itself into a typewriter. The man 
 who made this typewriter knew something about 
 machinery; he knew the English alphabet; he 
 
 29 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 made large, plain white letters on the black keys, 
 and those letters correspond to letters on the type 
 bars. ‘This machine did not happen. It was made 
 by some one who had in mind just such uses as I 
 put it to. 
 
 Things do not happen. There is a cause for 
 every effect. 
 
 There was a great First Cause. 
 
 There is a present Greatest Cause. 
 
 In different languages they call Him by differ- 
 ent names. | 
 
 In my country we call Him God. 
 
 I have no quarrel with people who prefer 
 another name, but that is the name [ shall use. 
 
 These are the facts we assume: That you and I 
 are here; that I wrote this book and you are read- 
 ing it; that we are both interested in the same prob- 
 lems of life and its meanings, and that we both be- 
 lieve in what we call the law of cause and effect and 
 ina mighty and purposeful and friendly God. 
 
 I am giving this outline, not as a demonstration, 
 but as a swift review of the processes by which I 
 arrive at the beginnings of an inquiry into the 
 question of life after death. 
 
 I have no purpose to argue with the reader, or to 
 
 30 
 
THE FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 force him to adopt my conclusions. I am not seek- 
 ing to compel him to agree with me. I am simply 
 trying to find ground solid enough and large 
 enough for us both to stand upon while we consider 
 the problem of life and death and the life to come. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 FACT AND FAITH 
 
 In THE world where we are resident we are con- 
 fronted by certain undeniable facts. One of these 
 is death. Hach season the leaves fall and the grass 
 withers in the frost. ‘Those forms of vegetable life 
 that lve through the winter do not survive for 
 many winters. Even the great trees of the high 
 Sierras, the oldest forms of life upon this planet, 
 live but a trifling thousand years or such a matter. 
 The coal we burn is dead trees. The rocks under 
 our feet are filled with fossils of life that existed 
 uncounted centuries ago. ‘The earth is a great 
 graveyard. 
 
 As the leaves die, so do the birds and the beasts 
 and the fishes. No single form of life on this globe 
 continues in any one individual. Tennyson thought 
 of Nature as careless of the individual but careful 
 of the type: 
 
 32 
 
FACT AND FAITH 
 
 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 must go.” 
 
 In one of his delightful poems, Clover, Sidney 
 Lanier gave utterance to a feeling which must 
 come now and then to every thoughtful man, as he 
 views the apparent remorselessness of the mech- 
 anism of life. He drew a charming picture of a 
 clover-field, and fancied every head of clover a hu- 
 man head, the head of an artist, a musician, a poet; 
 they were all blossoming beautifully when along 
 came that which he called the Course-of-Things: 
 
 Now comes the Course-of-things, shaped like an 
 Ox, 
 
 Slow browsing o’er my hillside, ponderously— 
 
 The huge-brawned, tame and workful Course-of- 
 things, 
 
 That hath his grass if earth be round or flat, 
 
 And hath his grass if empires plunge in pain, 
 
 Or faiths flash out. This cool, unasking Ox 
 
 Comes browsing o’er my hills and vales of Time, 
 
 And sicklewise, about my poets’ heads, 
 
 And twists them in, all, Dante, Keats, Chopin, 
 
 Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, 
 
 Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, 
 
 And Buddha, in one sheaf—and champs and 
 chews, 
 
 
 
 <) €2 
 eres 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 With slantly churning jaws, and swallows down; 
 Then slowly makes advance to futureward, one 
 inch. 
 
 So many clover-heads gulped down! So little 
 progress! 
 
 When Christian missionaries made their way to 
 England in 597, and journeyed as far inland as 
 Northumberland, they came to the domain of King 
 Ethelbert. It was a serious question with the king 
 whether these men should be allowed to teach a re- 
 ligion different from that which had been taught 
 in the realm. It involved many religious, social 
 and political uncertainties. He called a council of 
 his nobles and chiefs. ‘There was diversity of 
 opinion. Then an aged chief arose and said: 
 “The king will remember that now and then as the 
 king sits at night with his men, a little bird will fly 
 in at a window, and across the room, and out agam 
 through an opposite window into the night. From 
 the darkness it comes, and into the darkness it goes, 
 and it is for a brief space only in the light between. 
 Such is the spirit of man. If these men can tell us 
 concerning it, whence it comes and whither it goes, 
 let us hear them.” 
 
 34 
 
FACT AND FAITH 
 
 They were heard. Britain heard their message. 
 America heard it. Successive generations have 
 heard it and there is need that they shall still hear. 
 For the spirit of man continues to make its swift 
 flight through the narrow interval of life between 
 the two great areas of darkness and silence. If 
 there be any voices that can tell us whence this life 
 comes and whither it goes, let us listen to them. 
 
 Now in this world where death reigns in every 
 domain of animal and vegetable life, as well as in 
 the constitution of the planet itself, we find this re- 
 markable fact, that there exists a belief in life be- 
 yond death. How, in such a world, could such an 
 idea have entered any mind? ‘The sum total of 
 experience would appear to be against it. We 
 need not be disturbed by the various forms which 
 this belief takes, or the varying and contradictory 
 reasons which men give for their belief that death 
 is not the end of life. It may be that one man be- 
 lieves that this world is so well governed that 
 another world is implied in the very goodness of 
 this one, while another may believe that this world 
 is so bad that another world is necessary to adjust 
 the dislocations and staggering inequalities of this: 
 
 35 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 both believe in immortality. We are not con- 
 cerned with which gives the better reason for it, or 
 whether either reason is good. Perhaps we might 
 even say that the worse their logic the better for the 
 purpose of our present inquiry. Men of widely 
 different views on different and related matters 
 somehow agree in their faith that there is life after 
 death. 
 
 Nor is it anything adverse to our present in- 
 quiry that in all nations men shape their heaven in 
 accordance with the condition of their own life on 
 earth; it would be very natural that it should be so. 
 If the Eskimo could be shown to believe in a 
 heaven of hot fires and abundant whale-blubber, 
 and a Hottentot in a heaven of snowdrifts and ice 
 cream soda, their beliefs would still be of present 
 interest, not for the correctness or incorrectness of 
 their mental pictures of heaven, but for the fact 
 that both these people believe in a heaven of some 
 kind. We are not now seeking to determine how 
 far any nation or tribe or sect holds the most ra- 
 tional or worthy idea of life after death; we are 
 content with the discovery that such belief is very 
 general. 
 
 36 
 
FACT AND FAITH 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 
 
 I have heard that wherever the name of man is 
 spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; 
 it cleaves to his constitution. 
 
 It has been affirmed by some but denied by oth- 
 ers, that no nation or tribe has been found that 
 does not believe in life after death. Whether the 
 belief is absolutely universal is not of great impor- 
 tance; it would be very strange if it were so. Per- 
 sonally, I should be surprised if it were so, and I 
 think it quite possible there are tribes so low in 
 intellectual and spiritual development that no such 
 belief exists among them. I could not name such 
 a tribe and say that I knew it to be so. I think I 
 have not visited any tribe of which this might be 
 affirmed. Having sailed around the world and 
 back again, I do not remember having encoun- 
 tered any people who did not believe in a hereafter. 
 The simple American Indian burying a bow and 
 arrows with the dead warrior for use in the happy 
 hunting-ground, and the Pharaohs of Egypt erect- 
 ing pyramids to protect their tombs, or hewing 
 deep tunnels in the side of the cliffs that their 
 bodies might be preserved to a life beyond death, 
 
 37 
 
J 
 
 MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 do but illustrate, each in his own way, a fact so 
 nearly universal that for our present purpose it 
 matters little, if at all, that there may be some ut- 
 terly savage groups, completely destitute of any 
 such faith. 
 
 And now the question arises, how did men get 
 that faith? Here again I shall not be appalled if 
 I am told that in many lands the origin of this be- 
 lief is associated with gross superstition; it could 
 hardly be otherwise. I am familar with the teach- 
 ings of learned men as to how modesty, chastity, 
 monogamy, law, order and morality arose from the 
 dust and bore flowers. For faith in life beyond 
 death I should not expect a much higher origin 
 than can be traced for other doctrines which be- 
 long to a slowly developed civilization. 
 
 What concerns and profoundly impresses me is, 
 that in a world where death is universal, a belief in 
 life after death is almost, if not quite, universal 
 also. That fact, whatever its explanation, is one of 
 profound significance. Indeed, I shall go further, 
 and shall say that faith in emmortality is even more 
 astonishing than the fact of immortality. 
 
 Let me illustrate that statement. Suppose I had 
 
 38 
 
FACT AND FAITH 
 
 power to transform a frog into a bird, and wished 
 to prepare the frog in some degree for what I was 
 about to do. It is easy to imagine how I could per- 
 form the transformation, granted I had the power 
 which the illustration assumes; but how could I 
 possibly make the frog understand, being a frog? 
 
 Is the illustration grotesque? Let it be so, if it 
 makes clear my meaning. It is much easier for me 
 to imagine myself touching a frog with a wand and 
 telling him to fly, and seeing him rise on newly 
 created wings, than it is to conceive of any method 
 by which I could educate him in froghood for the 
 high privileges of birdhood. 
 
 Now if there be a wise and good and Almighty 
 Father in Heaven, it is certainly possible for Him 
 to grant eternal life to his children; but how can it 
 have been possible for Him ever to have given to 
 them the faintest glimmering of such a future? It 
 seems so utterly inconceivable that one is tempted 
 to declare it impossible. But just before we do 
 this, we encounter the fact that men very generally, 
 and in all conditions of society and civilization, 
 have received in some way, an intimation of 
 immortality. 
 
 39 
 
 s 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 The fact, if it be a fact, that God has eternal life 
 in store for his children, is less wonderful than their 
 faith in it. And I have some inclination to believe 
 that the faith is evidence of the fact. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 THERE have been, and doubtless still are, some 
 men too honest to admit a belief in immortality. 
 We may recall the letter of Thomas H. Huxley to 
 Charles Kingsley when the latter had written to 
 comfort the great scientist in a time of deep sor- 
 row. Huxley appreciated the well-meant en- 
 deavor, but answered that he could not arbitrarily 
 divide his mind, giving one part of it steadfastly to 
 scientific pursuits and the other to the indulgence 
 of a hope for which he could find no scientific ev- 
 idence. We can and must respect that spirit. Here 
 is a man who needs comfort, and denies himself be- 
 cause he will not accept it at the sacrifice of truth. 
 I have known such men, and I have honored them 
 even while I have deplored what seemed to me a 
 deficiency in their spiritual development. Let it 
 be granted that now the hope for immortality is 
 
 Al 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 greater than the actual belief in immortality. That 
 is what might be expected. 
 
 A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what’s heaven for? 
 
 Tf any man shall say that faith in immortality is 
 too stupendous for his acceptance, I will not con- 
 demn him. I wonder that there are not more such 
 men. The fact of death is so ineluctable, and faith 
 in immortality seems so out of character with con- 
 ditions of life as we have them. I observe with 
 great interest that St. Paul did not denounce men 
 who lack such faith, nor call for their expulsion 
 as heretics. In writing to the Corinthians he de- 
 manded that the church in Corinth should expel 
 from its membership an immoral member; in deal- 
 ing with other members who lacked faith in the life 
 to come, he made no such suggestion. But he was 
 not content that those who doubted so precious a 
 truth should be left in their doubt. Lovingly, 
 patiently and without reproof, he set himself to 
 the task of showing to those whom he addressed 
 that the hope of immortal life is reasonable, and 
 that he who denies himself this comfort and inspi- 
 
 42 
 
THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 ration deserves, not denunciation as a heretic, but 
 friendly guidance and instruction. 
 
 Certain thinkers, or men who suppose them- 
 selves to be thinkers, have prided themselves on 
 such proof as they were able to adduce that man is 
 a body and possessed of no soul. Professor 
 Momerie well said of such: 
 
 “In the whole history of thought there are no 
 grosser instances of slipshod reasoning and patent 
 fallacies than those in which so-called ‘exact think- 
 ers’ have sought to rid us of our souls.” 
 
 I have a bit of sedimentary rock from a very low 
 and ancient bed, and in it the fossil of a trilobite. 
 The trilobites were abundant when there was not a 
 backbone on earth. We find their fossils in the 
 Cambrian rocks, and less abundantly up to the 
 Carboniferous. ‘The man who could find a living 
 trilobite would get his name into many scientific 
 books; but the trilobite itself would be good for 
 nothing. Nature has forgotten that experiment. 
 Yet there was a time when the earth and the ful- 
 ness thereof was the trilobite’s, and it seemed that 
 all that could be necessary was for trilobites to 
 grow larger and thicken their shells, that no other 
 
 43 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 form of life would ever rule the earth. But one day 
 there appeared some courageous type that said, 
 “T will risk the damage to my outer and unpro- 
 tected self and use the material of the outer shell 
 for a backbone within.” It was a perilous thing to 
 do; but Nature rather admired the audacity of the 
 undertaking and ran a quivering thread of nerve 
 along the bone, and made a little knob of nerve at 
 its upper end; and the backboned creature began 
 gradully to use the bunch of nerve instead of a 
 shell, and the nerve became a brain. ‘This was Na- 
 ture’s reward for the courage of the absence of the 
 shell. And thenceforth the world was given over to 
 the dominance of the creature without shell, but 
 with a stiff spine and a brain. And Nature’s ex- 
 ploration in the direction of the trilobite proved a 
 blind alley. 
 
 So interested did Nature become in the creature 
 with the backbone, she gave him large attention; 
 and, indeed, there are few things more interesting 
 to this day than backbone. Nature then began 
 making coal for coming life possessing brains and 
 backbones. And there the trilobite fossils cease. 
 So far as we can see, the progress of the trilobite 
 
 44 
 
THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 ended without permanent advance along that line 
 toward a dominant type of life. 
 
 The trilobite escaped some perils by remaining a 
 trilobite, but the end of that choice was death. The 
 creature that made the perilous choice of a spine 
 chose the immediate hazard, but the final way of 
 life. 
 
 Some one has written most interestingly of the 
 moment of supreme peril in the life of the mos- 
 quito. It is when, having passed through several 
 changes to adapt its life to the water in which it is 
 born, it leaves the water behind. It finds itself pos- 
 sessed of wings and an instinct to use them, and 
 makes its way out of the water. It has never been 
 on land, and no mosquito has returned from the 
 shore to assure its companions in the water-world. 
 Its wings are wet and untried; there is no one to 
 teach it how to use them; there is no one to help it 
 up the bank; it faces a most appalling peril, one 
 fatal to millions of mosquitoes. But all the mos- 
 quitoes that survive are those who make the 
 venture. 
 
 Now that is an analogy for faith. For here I am, 
 an inhabitant of the world in which I was born, 
 
 45 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 feeling wings that have never been spread, and 
 impelled by an inward impulse toward a life which 
 faith alone reveals, and I make that venture of 
 faith. I dare declare myself a child of the God I 
 have never seen, and a citizen of the heaven where 
 T have never been. I choose to climb the banks and 
 leave the lower level for that of faith. The choice 
 is not without its perils, but it is that which gives 
 my soul companionship with God. It is the might- 
 iest moment in the evolution of the soul—the mo- 
 ment in which it accepts its high-born destiny by an 
 act of faith in the unseen. Some men have faltered 
 and fallen back, but the career of those who have 
 succeeded is the history of the spiritual progress of 
 the human race. 
 
 There is no known process by which the soul can 
 reach its spiritual heritage by passivity. We may 
 not sit idly and await our transformation into the 
 divine image by processes external to ourselves. If 
 we are saved into our spiritual heritage it will be 
 because God has appointed us heirs of salvation, 
 and ordained the means for our evolution into the 
 liberty of the glory of the children of God; and be- 
 cause we respond to the act of God by a mighty 
 
 46 
 
THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 effort of faith by which we apprehend and appro- 
 priate our divine heritage. 
 
 The earlier theories of evolution assumed that 
 the progress of the world was by exceedingly slow 
 and painfully laborious process. This is still partly 
 true; but the advancement of life is also by oppor- 
 tune and decisive leaps and bounds. There are sud- 
 den and immediate transitions by which a form of 
 life rises instantaneously to claim a higher sphere 
 as its own. The experience of the mosquito Is re- 
 peated in varying forms in the metamorphosis of 
 other types; and it is analogous to spiritual trans- 
 formation in which faith faces its problems and its 
 privileges. The evolution of the human soul is an 
 appeal to faith in an umsgen God, a hazardous pil- 
 grimage toward an unrealized destiny. All about 
 us are the evidences of our relations with the world 
 of matter, but within us is the impulse of the in- 
 dwelling God who made us in his own image. ‘The 
 triumph of faith in human life, causing men to 
 assert their divine heritage, is the supreme fact in 
 evolution, and is analogous to a thousand facts 
 which have marked the progress of life from its be- 
 ginnings. It is the triumph of “resident force” ° 
 
 AT 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 over an environment of the material. It is the 
 determination of the being made in the image of 
 God to declare himself related not alone to the dust 
 but also and supremely to the Deity. 
 
 There is no adventure so thrilling and hazardous 
 as that of the soul in its quest of truth. The quest 
 lies along no royal highway, straight and plain; it 
 lies through regions as trackless as the path to the 
 poles, and marked with the tragedies of men who 
 have become confused, lost their way, and died in 
 the wilderness. It is almost a wonder that man- 
 kind has not agreed to write “No Thoroughfare” 
 at the beginning, and give up the quest. It would 
 seem so much easier to take the world at its face 
 value, its present cash value, and cease bothering 
 about the meaning of things. But the soul of man 
 rises to the challenge of the universe, and goes forth 
 to find the meaning of things, and at the heart of 
 that meaning he has good right to hope that he may 
 find an eternal goodness. 
 
 It is not an easy quest. Do not deceive yourself 
 on that point. | 
 
 Men are incurably religious. They will still 
 make the perilous adventure of faith. They will 
 
 AS 
 
THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 send forth their souls into regions dark and fear- 
 haunted, where there are no sure marks to guide 
 them, and they will not come back, but will press 
 on with ardor and glad heroism, determined to find 
 a reason at the bottom of things, and that reason 
 rooted in eternal goodness. 
 
 But the land through which they have to travel 
 is not wholly a wilderness. ‘There are wells here 
 and there in the desert, and there is manna. Here 
 and there is a landmark erected by a brave soul who 
 has made some satisfying discovery; and on one 
 high peak, where it catches the first light of dawn 
 and holds it longest into the gloom, stands the 
 Cross of Christ, and the light that illumines it 
 streams from an empty tomb. 
 
 If our faith in immortality were really false, we 
 should wish to know it. The sooner we get down 
 to rock bottom the better. If the world is hope- 
 lessly bad, let us face the fact. If Pontius Pilate 
 represents the last word in civil government, and 
 Annas and Caiaphas are the real typical priests, 
 and the voice of the people is not the voice of God, 
 but the yell of the mob crying “Crucify Him!” let 
 us know it. If death ends all, and even the Holy 
 
 49 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 One of God still sleeps in Joseph’s tomb “in the 
 lorn Syrian town,” let us not delude ourselves with 
 any false hopes. We can know the hard truth bet- 
 ter than we can afford to hug a delusion. 
 
 But if these hopes are false hopes, what hopes 
 are true? What hopes have better right to be true 
 than these? What may more fittingly declare the 
 justice of God and the sure reign of righteousness 
 than this? 
 
 We are mistaken about so many things related 
 to the making and government of the world, it is 
 well for us not to be too dogmatic concerning mat- 
 ters on which we merely speculate; but it is a sig- 
 
 | nificant fact that our faith in immortality is bound 
 up with our belief in the divine benevolence. The 
 | hope of immortality where it exists is inseparably 
 bound up with the faith that goodness is at the 
 | heart of things. It is our faith in goodness that 
 gives us faith in immortality. It is that same good- 
 ness that alone could make immortality worth hav- 
 ing. We dare not affirm that life would be a fail- 
 ure if it had no continuance beyond the grave, but 
 we are fully justified in declaring that life after 
 death is a precious corollary of our faith in the 
 goodness of God and of the value of life. 
 50 
 
THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 Life might be good, and not continue forever. 
 God might be good, and have larger plans than 
 that any one man should live eternally. But our 
 hopes of life after death are inseparably related to 
 our faith that God is good. Men will not believe 
 in immortality, and in the face of the contradic- 
 tions of life can not well believe in immortality, un- 
 less they first believe in the goodness of God. Not 
 only so, but immortality on any other hypothesis 
 would be not a blessing but a curse. If God be not 
 good, we dare not risk another life if we can avoid 
 it. And if God is good, it is not easy for us to 
 imagine how that goodness can be compatible with 
 the wasteful and reckless destruction of that which 
 has cost Him most and has in it largest possibil- 
 ities of worth to Him. Goodness and immortality 
 stand or fall together. And they stand. 
 
 The blossom is not censurable for not being 
 fruit; yet it would be a rash blossom that would 
 deny its own capacity of growth into fruit. The 
 worm is not at fault for not being a butterfly, but 
 the worm is justly censurable if it denies itself 
 Whatever luxury and nobility of spirit may be pos- 
 sible to it in the contemplation and hope of being a 
 
 51 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 butterfly some time. Whether any such prophetic 
 premonition can come to a worm, we may not 
 know. If into the mean little soul of the worm 
 there can enter now any suggestion of what it is to 
 be, the most foolish and utterly stupid thing the 
 worm can do is to deny itself the assurance that one 
 day it shall take to itself a form of beauty and the 
 power of flight. We can imagine it a mirth-pro- 
 voking experience for the worm to proclaim such 
 an astounding faith. All the testimony of the 
 senses would be present to deny it. ‘The owl in his 
 wisdom might well be expected to hoot at it, and 
 every atheistic goose to greet its proclamation with 
 hissing contempt. There would be no worm pres- 
 ent to testify that it had ever seen a worm evolve 
 into a butterfly. Yet if the worm with the aspiring 
 soul were a truly wise worm it would trust its in- 
 tuitions, its inspirations, its faith. It would say, 
 “T intend to be just as good a worm as a worm can 
 be, but I am more than a worm; I possess the 
 promise and potency of becoming a butterfly. 
 Nay, even now, in my soul, I am a butterfly.” 
 
 We know another thing, that the worm that de- 
 nies to itself the validity of this impulse of immor- 
 
 52 
 
THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 tality is forever and hopelessly lost. That is to say, 
 the worm that refuses to enter the chrysalis gets 
 killed by the frost. The worm that thinks it not 
 worth while to bury itself in a dark little place of 
 its own spinning, but to live on in its wormhood, 
 remains forever a creature of the dust, a thing to 
 be trodden on and finally to perish in the cold. It 
 is his trust in this which may be called his instinct 
 of immortality that preserves his life at all, and 
 preserves it to the coming glory of his later and 
 more beautiful existence. 
 
 But there is still a further thought: 'The worm 
 that hath this hope in him is not wholly a worm. 
 You can not justify yourself in any scientific clas- 
 sification which disregards the fact that this pro- 
 phetic hope establishes his genus among butterflies. 
 It is not simply that he is to become a butterfly; 
 even now, while he crawls, every scientist on earth 
 will agree to his classification among the forms of 
 life that have in them inherent capacity for flight. 
 That is to say, we may affirm that any worm that 
 hath this hope in him hath butterfly life. We may 
 use, and the Bible does use, the present tense. It 
 does not say “shall have,” but “hath.” There is no 
 
 53 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 mistaking the emphasis upon the present tense. It 
 is strictly accurate and scientific. The instinct that 
 is to drive the worm into the chrysalis must be reck- 
 oned with in a scientific study of the worm, and it 
 compels his classification with the winged and 
 beautiful forms of life. He that believeth hath the 
 glorified life. 
 
 Let us make it as plain to ourselves as we can 
 that this prophetic instinct in the worm that impels 
 it to weave and enter the chrysalis does more than 
 relieve the monotony of wormhood with a pleasant 
 illusion of something that the worm does not know 
 very much about. It is the thing that makes con- 
 tinuous and glorified life attainable, and it already 
 makes the worm necessarily classifiable as some- 
 thing above a worm. It would be the most irra- 
 tional thing possible for a worm to deny the 
 authority and validity of that dim but potent hope. 
 And if that would be folly for the worm, how much 
 more so for us! By the grace of God, we are not 
 worms. We are more than creatures that grovel in 
 dust. And one of the things that make us so is the 
 compelling power of this hope. 
 
 The hopes that elevate us above the dust, that 
 
 oA 
 
THE QUEST OF TRUTH 
 
 lift up our heads and give wings to our most enno- 
 bling and God-like aspirations, these are the hopes 
 which we have good right to possess. We need not 
 be too economical of them. They are a valid part 
 
 of the equipment which we bring to our quest of 
 truth. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 A RIGHTEOUS GOD 
 
 Be iEF in immortality has for its inevitable basis 
 some such foundation stones as these: 
 
 This world is to be interpreted as intention. It 
 is the product of intelligence and conscious 
 purpose. 
 
 The universe is friendly. ‘There is in it a Power 
 that possesses the quality of love. Love makes the 
 mother bird capable of risking her life for her nest; 
 love inspires the music and the blossom; love is at 
 the core of things. 
 
 There is behind the phenomena of nature, and 
 operative through nature, including the nature of 
 humanity, a Power which is parental and personal. 
 There is a mighty and a righteous God who cares 
 what happens to his creation, and is great enough 
 to accomplish what He knows to be best. 
 
 I find no rational basis for faith in immortality 
 in any form of atheism. Unless there is a God who 
 
 36 
 
A RIGHTEOUS GOD 
 
 loves, and has taught us to love; unless there is a 
 God who possesses life, and has given us life, then 
 I think faith in immortality is probably a delusion. 
 As a matter of fact, I think people do not believe 
 in immortality unless they believe in God. We 
 must believe in a God who is strong enough to ac- 
 complish his will, else we shall sigh with Tenny- 
 son’s King Arthur: 
 
 O me! for why is all around us here 
 
 As if some lesser god had made the world 
 
 But had not force to shape it as he would? 
 
 And we must believe in a God with goodness 
 
 equal to his power. We can not be happy in the 
 contemplation of a God who is driving a pitiless 
 Juggernaut over the suffering generations, work- 
 ing out a majestic program in which love has no 
 part. Tennyson grew furious when he contem- 
 plated this possibility: 
 
 No more! A monster then, a dream, 
 
 A discord; dragons of the prime, 
 
 That tear each other in their slime, 
 
 Were mellow music matched with Him! 
 
 Thomas Hardy has considered the possibility 
 
 that mortal man may be more just than his Maker; 
 
 57 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 that the creature may have evolved above the 
 moral level of the being who created him; that man 
 may have higher moral views of God than God 
 himself possesses: 
 
 Strange that ephemeral creatures who 
 By my own ordering are, 
 Should see the shortness of my view, 
 Use ethic tests I never knew, 
 Or made provision for! 
 
 Yes, that would be strange, so strange that we 
 have little occasion to consider its possibility. 
 
 It is hardly conceivable that God would make 
 creatures so much better than Himself that their 
 perfection would mock his imperfection. It is not 
 worth much time arguing that an immoral God 
 would create morality, or that a God not Himself 
 immortal would or could have bequeathed as a leg- 
 acy which He never had, the gift of immortality to 
 man. 
 
 There is no blackboard demonstration of the 
 goodness of God; one must accept it on faith or die 
 a coward. ‘There is no way of making the matter 
 perfectly sure. A man must be one 
 
 Who trusts that God is love indeed, 
 And love creation’s final law, 
 
 58 
 
A RIGHTEOUS GOD 
 
 Though nature red in tooth and claw 
 With ravin shrieks against the creed. 
 
 If he is not willing to risk that venture of faith, 
 he will hardly arrive at a belief in immortality. 
 
 Those who are without God are without hope in the } 
 
 world. 
 
 But let no man affirm too soon that he does not 
 believe in God. Some men say they do not believe 
 when they mean that they are bewildered or that 
 they are seeking for more light. Let no such man 
 call himself an atheist, for he is not. 
 
 There is one wide department in theological sci- 
 ence called Teleology, which means reasoning from 
 adaptation to creative purpose. It is an argument 
 which, standing in the midst of creative energy, 
 reasons forward with the good which is operative 
 in the world to its logical result, and backward to 
 the inferred intent of the Creator of that good. It 
 assumes that agencies converging to a definite and 
 rational result are the manifestation of intelligent 
 purpose. There are forms of the teleological argu- 
 ment which are obsolete because they attempted 
 too much. But the major premise of the teleolog- 
 ical argument is sound, namely that order implies 
 
 59 
 
 * Sete 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 purpose; and the minor premise is the working 
 principle of science, that the methods of the uni- 
 verse are orderly and rational and consistent. 
 
 I have a portrait of the President of the United 
 States, woven in silk. JI have seen the looms at 
 work weaving patterns of this character. They are 
 amazingly intricate, dropping a strip of perfo- 
 rated cardboard for each thread carried by the 
 shuttle, and compelling fascinated attention by 
 their bewildering ingenuity. The pattern is woven 
 wrong side out, and the nature of the pattern is not 
 always evident to the unskilled visitor. But any 
 guess as to the pattern being woven is also a guess 
 at the intent of the maker of the machine. That is 
 the important point just now; the one end involves 
 the other. We stand midway of the process, 
 watching the mechanism of hfe. And when we 
 learn a little of the end of life we have learned 
 something also of the purpose of the God from 
 whom life proceeds; and when we have learned 
 something of the character of God we have some 
 knowledge of the end toward which God works. 
 
 As I watch the loom, I may be confused and 
 wonder whether the intelligence is in the machine 
 
 60 
 
A RIGHTEOUS GOD 
 
 or the maker or the operator. But in time I shall 
 come to some definite opmion. The maker has 
 wrought his own intelligence into the machine, and 
 imparted a knowledge of his purpose to the opera- 
 tor; and so the maker, the weaver, and the ma- 
 chine conspire to a common and a definite end, an 
 end which I may see if I am patient, and which in 
 the case of my illustration, is the portrait of the 
 President. 
 
 Life is such a machine, and I am myself the 
 weaver as well as the journeying inquirer. And 
 the answer to my puzzled inquiries is that life is 
 working out a picture, a fabric, a product, an end. 
 I see it wrong side out and I see it in the making; 
 but there is the pattern, not stamped upon life 
 with some foreign substance, but woven of the very 
 stuff of human life. And I become assured that it 
 is weaving out of the warp and woof of common 
 manhood a transcript of the character of God as 
 seen in the face of Jesus Christ, and reproduced in 
 the lives of humble men and women. That is 
 enough; and I may go on, like Oriental workers in 
 suk, spinning as I walk; for I know the end for 
 which it is designed. 
 
 61 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 In the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia a 
 little company gathered about a man who took 
 from his vest-pocket a little box whose cover was a 
 silver three-cent piece, and which contained a min- 
 iature steam engine. Its base was a gold half-dol- 
 lar, and its boiler contained a dozen drops of water, 
 more or less; but he lighted the tiny alcohol lamp, 
 the water boiled, and the microscopic engine 
 worked. He set it down on the base of the great 
 Corliss engine that operated all the machinery of 
 the Exposition, and the two ran side by side. The 
 machinery of man is too clumsy for such an engine 
 to share with the great Corliss the labor of operat- 
 ing the Exposition. But with God it is not so. It 
 is permitted me to run a tiny thread to the great 
 band-wheel of the universe, and yoke my energy 
 with God’s. It is not much, to be sure; and the few 
 drops of alcohol in my lamp are burning fast; but 
 I am not merely a part of the machinery that is be- 
 ing run; I am a part of the power that operates 
 and controls. ‘This is the end for which life was 
 made. ‘This is a part of the structural plan of the 
 universe. ‘This is the destination toward which we 
 journey. 
 
 62 
 
A RIGHTEOUS GOD 
 
 There is in the life of man a kinship with that of 
 God which enables the mind of man to discern the 
 purpose of God, and in that purpose to know the 
 end. This is the needle of human certainty that 
 points unerringly toward the pole of God’s own in- 
 tent. We can follow the needle when we can not 
 see the stars. The road whose end is unseen is not 
 an endless road. We walk by faith, not by sight, 
 but we are not lost. We sail by “dead reckoning,” 
 but we are not derelict. We make our journey 
 with inward assurance that we are following to the 
 right end. 
 
 A visitor with no particular mechanical genius 
 or interest, wandering listlessly and _ wearily 
 through a great building in a World’s Fair Eixpo- 
 sition, will be likely to stand for a moment or two 
 and regard with interest some particularly huge 
 and complicated mechanism into which disappears 
 a considerable quantity of raw material, as cotton 
 thread or white paper, but of which no more is seen 
 than that these things are swallowed up amid the 
 clatter and whirr of the machinery. It will be the 
 good fortune of some of these people as they pass 
 along beside the great invention to see the finished 
 
 | 63 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 product come out in woven cloth or imprinted 
 newspapers. In that moment the observer has a 
 momentary thrill like that of a discoverer, and 
 says, “Why, it is weaving cloth,” or “It is printing 
 paper!” but the man in charge if he overhears, can 
 hardly answer otherwise than, “Of course it is: that 
 is exactly what it was made for.” 
 
 The world is a mighty press or loom into which 
 goes the raw material of life, and concerning whose 
 processes and results there is more or less bewilder- 
 ment and uncertainty. There is a current phrase 
 which speaks of it, or of one man’s part in it, as 
 “the grind,’ and so mechanical is the thought of the 
 age that the term is not without its appropriate- 
 ness. But it has been given to some fine souls to 
 discern the meaning of life’s mechanism in its fin- 
 ished product, and they find this meaning so large, 
 so exalted, that they can not restrain the discov- 
 erer’s shout of “Eureka!” It is to these men that 
 St. Paul addresses the confidant affirmation of the 
 truth: “Now He that wrought us for this very 
 thing is God.” Have you discovered that man has 
 before him a high destiny? St. Paul answers that 
 it could not be otherwise. God hath wrought us, he 
 
 64 
 
‘A RIGHTEOUS GOD 
 
 declares, for a mighty and triumphant purpose; a 
 purpose disclosed in our present possession of the 
 Spirit of God, by whom the work now in progress 
 is to become complete. Hear these exalted words 
 of his concerning the Godlike character to which 
 we are ordained, and the glorious immortality to 
 which we are bidden to aspire. ““Now he that hath 
 wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also 
 hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.” 
 
 The glory of the series of world’s fairs which has 
 erected one “white city” after another in various 
 parts of our country has not caused some of us to 
 forget the old exposition which annually for a 
 series of years took place in Chicago. There I first 
 heard Theodore Thomas in the old exposition 
 building many years ago. 
 
 One day there came a village pastor to see the 
 great exposition in Chicago, in its then new build- 
 ing on the lake front; and having a bent for me- 
 chanics, and some experience and skill, he soon 
 sought the machinery; and, wondering that ma- 
 chines so many and varied should be running with 
 power from a single source, he found his way to 
 the engine room. 
 
 65 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 And what do you think he said when he saw the 
 great engine? 
 
 He said, ‘I made it!” No; he was not insane, or 
 deceiving. And the discovery was as complete a 
 surprise to him as to those who heard him. 
 
 He examined the massive giant from end to end; 
 there was no doubt about it; 1t was his very own. 
 He had crept through its bulky boilers before they 
 had a single flue; he had crawled beneath them 
 when they were first set up; he had witnessed and 
 superintended the casting of every part; he had 
 overseen the adjustment of every bolt and valve 
 and rod; it was his own! 
 
 As a boy he had been bred a mechanic, and had 
 become a skilled machinist in a New England ma- 
 chine-shop. His firm established a branch house 
 at Buffalo, and put him in charge of it. The great- 
 est single work of the branch under his administra- 
 tion was the building of a powerful engine for the 
 Adams mill on North Clark Street in Chicago. 
 Trusted with the responsibility of so important a 
 work, he spared no effort to do it superbly well; 
 and when the engine was ready to be set up he 
 came to Chicago and built the engine into its place. 
 
 66 
 
A RIGHTEOUS GOD 
 
 In time he took a course in theology and entered 
 the ministry, and became a pastor in Illinois. The 
 Chicago fire had laid the city low, and the large 
 mill had been destroyed; that chapter of his experi- 
 ence seemed to have left no memorial; it was, ex- 
 cept to himself, as if it had not been. But when 
 the debris of the fire had been cleared away, the 
 fine engine was found but little injured. And so 
 when George Huntington, then pastor of the First 
 Church in Oak Park, visited the exposition, he 
 found his own engine which he supposed perished; 
 found it still strong and steady, and doing a bewil- 
 dering variety of work far beyond the dreams of 
 the man who made it. 
 
 After the road of life comes to what seems to us 
 its abrupt termination; after the wreck and disas- 
 ter of what we call death; the motive power of our 
 present life will abide, indestructible. And I think 
 we shall stand in heaven bewildered with wonder- 
 ing joy when we discover that the structure of 
 life’s mechanism is adapted to almost infimitely 
 varied and celestial uses. We shall say with Paul, 
 “Now he that wrought us for this very thing is 
 God.” | 
 
 67 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DUST OF THE EARTH 
 
 WE ARE made of the dust of the earth, We 
 know the chemical ingredients. We daily replen- 
 ish by our eating the dust which we as constantly 
 wear away. We are told, and I presume it is true, 
 that so rapid is the attrition of this dust within us 
 that as often as once in seven years an entire 
 change takes place, and that no human being has 
 in his body a particle of blood or bone or fiber 
 which helped to compose his body seven years ago. 
 To dust we shall return. We shall not be long 
 about it. I have had but little experience in the 
 removal of bodies once interred, but I have seen 
 enough of it to know that a very few years suffice 
 to leave of any man very little dust that can be dis- 
 tinguished as having ever belonged to him. 
 
 Moreover, the processes of our birth and devel- 
 opment, the means of sustaining life and of its re- 
 
 68 
 
THE DUST OF THE EARTH 
 
 production, all deal with facts so elemental, so close 
 akin to the soil and smut that there is very little 
 opportunity for any one to think of himself in 
 terms of too great exultation. But if He who 
 made us of the dust is God, then the very dust 
 takes on new significance in that fact. 
 
 I dined one night with Professor T. C. Cham- 
 berlin of the University of Chicago, and I asked 
 him, ““What is the dividing line between Geology 
 and Astronomy?” If I had been just a little more 
 ignorant than I am, I might have supposed that 
 the business of the geologist stopped with the sur- 
 face of the earth; but I knew better than that. 
 
 He did not hesitate a minute. He knew just 
 how far his science had property rights. He said 
 that it ended at the point where the earth’s attrac- 
 tion equaled that of the sun; the point on the one 
 side of which a body would fall to the earth and on 
 the other side toward the sun. He said that point, 
 which varied more or less with the three unequal 
 axes of the “spheres of control,” had a minimum 
 radius of 620,000 miles. 
 
 I asked, ““That is all settled, is it?” 
 
 He said, “The precise distance in miles varies, 
 
 69 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 but the point when the earth’s attraction equals 
 that of the sun is the line of division between the 
 astronomers and the geologists.” 
 
 Now, the geologist deals with a science that is of 
 the earth, earthy and of the rocks, rocky. His 
 business is strictly underfoot. And yet when you 
 tell him to keep his feet on the earth, here he is de- 
 manding 620,000 miles up in the air as belonging 
 also to his science. 
 
 If the geologist whose science sends him around 
 wrth a hammer knocking off pieces of rock de- 
 mands 620,000 miles of room above his head for 
 his science, I shall not heed for a minute the advice 
 of those who admonish me to keep always on the 
 level of the ground. I will not saw off my vision on 
 the level of my eyes, or reserve Just room enough 
 to wear a silk hat without bumping into imprac- 
 tical theories. I am a child of earth, but I am also a 
 child of God. 'The science with which I deal re- 
 quires as its very base line all that the geologist 
 counts his own; and if I get as much as that, I think 
 I shall claim more. For all worlds belong to God; 
 and if God is my Father, what is God’s, is mine. 
 
 I also know about another line, that between 
 
 70 
 
THE DUST OF THE EARTH 
 
 earth and sky. That line is not some hundreds of 
 miles up in the air; it is the level of the ground. I 
 walk and move in the sky. My feet are on the 
 ground, but my head is not on the earth. When I 
 swim in the little lake under my windows I have 
 my body in one element and my head in another. 
 So when I walk, my feet are on the ground, but the 
 region where my head is, is as truly sky as is the 
 space between the stars in the cluster of the 
 Pleiades. 
 
 A few years ago there appeared in the news- 
 papers a poem by James Oppenheim entitled 
 Earth’s Song. It is not in any sense a religious 
 poem. It is a strong appeal based on the very sub- 
 stance of things in Mother Earth that have entered 
 into the life of man, to rise above dust and be the 
 crowning wonder of creation. In it the old earth 
 remembers her girlhood, when warm and young 
 she felt the love-warmth of the sun and thrilled 
 with the pain and joy of motherhood, longing all 
 the while to be 
 
 A planet disclosing to skies my glorious ones, 
 A world that should lead all the worlds, all the 
 
 planets and suns; 
 71 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 and how she put more and more of her life and 
 hope into each successive form of life to which she 
 gave being, weeping over some of the pitiful dumb 
 animals that as yet were her only children: 
 
 And I aged with despairing ages, till strange chil- 
 dren walked 
 
 On the radiant hills, and in strange ways they 
 talked. : 
 
 My poor, dim children! Then with my might of 
 mights, 
 
 Caught in birth-throes, caught in a fire of the 
 heights 
 
 Of creation, I strained through that life to my top- . 
 
 | most span, 
 
 And lo, on my breast lay my one sheer miracle— 
 Man! 
 
 How the Earth-Mother gloried in that child of 
 her old age—that miracle of maternity! How for 
 
 the first time she felt on her bosom a child that 
 could really know and understand and aspire! 
 
 Man that could answer me back from the hush 
 where I dwelt, 
 
 Man that could think in his brain all the passion I 
 felt, 
 
 Man that could light all my peaks with his laughter 
 and song, 
 
 Man that could live and could love and could 
 dream and could long. 
 
 72 
 
THE DUST OF THE EARTH 
 
 How much of the stuff of earth and sky had 
 gone into the making of this man! 
 
 O man, if you could but know what a glory you 
 are! 
 
 Into you went the fire of the sun, my star; 
 
 Into you went the millions of ages of me! 
 
 Into you went the millions of ages to be! 
 
 How shall we answer the yearning of the ages 
 for the expression of their finest aspirations and 
 deepest longings in a manhood and womanhood 
 that can know and feel and love as we are capable 
 of knowing and feeling and loving! 
 
 We are made of the stuff of the glorious earth 
 and the beautiful sky. We are children of star 
 dust and sunlight. Into our being has gone the 
 material of the stars and suns. 
 
 Aye, more than this, we are children of parental 
 love from the beginning of time. Into our mirac- 
 ulous lives God has put the yearnings and patience 
 and suffering hope of the ages. Into our lives 
 have gone the prophetic smiles of mothers, and the 
 honest toil of strong fathers since the first man and 
 woman walked the earth. There is not a genera- 
 tion that has lived on earth since Adam was created 
 
 73 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 to whom we are not debtors. Shall we repay this 
 investment in our lives with only such return as 
 men found possible in less favored ages? Shall we 
 even be content to fall somewhat below their heroic 
 and strenuous endeavor? 
 
 We are children of God. Into our lives has gone 
 the sacrificial love of our heavenly Father, and the 
 redemptive ministry of Christ. We have inherited 
 the travail of the ages. With more of meaning 
 than Napoleon before the battle of the Pyramids 
 we may cry aloud to our souls, “A thousand centu- 
 ries look down upon us.” 
 
 We are made of the dust. ‘That is good material. 
 My friend, Professor Frost, of the Yerkes Observ- 
 atory, explained to me the mysteries of the spec- 
 trum as the astronomer is able to isolate the light of 
 a single star, and to determine accurately just what 
 elements there are in process of combustion. He 
 told me, as we stood beside the massive telescope, 
 that this universe is really a universe; that the 
 same essential elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen 
 and the rest, which are the basis of our solar sys- 
 tem, are the material bases of all the suns which his 
 great telescope, pointing its long interrogation- 
 
 74 
 
THE DUST OF THE EARTH 
 
 point night by night out among the stars, can dis- 
 cover. He added that most of these same elements 
 are in our own bodies; we are made of the best 
 stuff in the universe. 
 
 That is a fine discovery. We thrill with all the 
 fire of all the suns. We are akin to the dust and to 
 the Deity. Angela Morgan has expressed this in 
 one of her uplifting poems: 
 
 I am aware, 
 As I go commonly sweeping the stair, 
 Doing my part in the every-day care— 
 Human and simple my lot and share— 
 I am aware of a marvelous thing: 
 Voices that murmur and ethers that ring 
 In the far stellar spaces where cherubim sing. 
 I am aware of the passion that pours 
 Down the channels of fire through Infinity’s 
 doors: 
 Forces terrific with melody shod, 
 Music that mates with the pulses of God. 
 I am aware of the glory that runs 
 From the core of myself to the core of the suns, 
 Bound to the stars by invisible chains, 
 Blaze of eternity now in my veins, 
 Seeing the rush of ethereal rains 
 Here, in the midst of the every-day air— 
 I am aware. 
 
 795 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 I am aware, 
 As I sit quietly here in my chair, 
 Sewing, or reading, or braiding my hair— 
 Human and simple my lot and my share— 
 I am aware of the systems that swing 
 Through the aisles of creation on heavenly 
 wing; 
 I am aware of a marvelous thing— 
 Trail of the comets in furious flight, 
 Thunders of beauty that shelter the night, 
 Terrible triumph of pageants that march 
 To the trumpets of time through Eternity’s 
 arch. 
 I am aware of the splendor that ties 
 All the nee of the earth with the things of the 
 skies, 
 Here in my body the heavenly heat, 
 Here in my flesh the melodious beat 
 Of the planets that circle Divinity’s feet. 
 As I sit silently here in my chair, 
 I am aware. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 I sHOULD like to begin this chapter with an accu- 
 rate definition of life. That would go far toward 
 making the book immortal, for I do not know any 
 dictionary which contains such a definition. When 
 a learned lexicographer defines life as “the sum of 
 those forces which resist death,” he is simply say- 
 ing that he does not know how to define life except 
 in terms of its apparent opposite. And when he 
 comes to define that opposite, he would have to re- 
 turn and say of death that it is that which opposes 
 life. And so we should find ourselves midway 
 between the two, with no definition of either. But 
 we know what life is, even if we can not define it, 
 and, as we are to consider the power of life, it 
 would be well if we could define the word power. 
 
 Not only is it difficult to define the word, 
 “power, it is not easy even to define the idea with 
 
 77. 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 entire clarity. The Century Dictionary devotes 
 some three columns of closely printed matter to 
 the attempt. It tells us that power is an endow- 
 ment of a voluntary agent whereby it becomes pos- 
 sible for that being to do or effect something; or, a 
 property of an inanimate thing whereby it is pos- 
 sible for it to modify other things. Negatively, 
 and as the first definition, it is “such an absence of 
 external restriction and limitation that it depends 
 upon the inward determination of the subject 
 whether it will or will not act.” Very well; but, 
 the external restriction being removed, what is it 
 in the animate or inanimate object which causes 
 the subject to act? What is power? What is grav- 
 itation, chemical affinity, electricity, sex-attrac- 
 tion, the ability of a maple tree to lift in the course 
 of a season ten tons or a hundred tons of water, to 
 say nothing of changing that water into sap and 
 the sap into wood-fiber, leaf and blossom? The 
 Encyclopedia Britannica has an interesting and in- 
 tricate discussion on the transmission of power, but 
 nothing about the nature of power itself. What is 
 power? And in what sense is life, power? 
 Machinery does not produce power; on the con- 
 78 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 trary, it consumes power. ‘The best. locomotive 
 wastes more than ninety per cent of the power that 
 is resident in the coal. Machinery merely trans- 
 mits or utilizes power. What is power itself? 
 This universe appears to be throbbing with 
 power of several kinds. ‘The kinds of power may 
 be classified according to several categories; but 
 viewed in one way there are two kinds, the kind 
 that pulls and the kind that pushes. ‘There is at- 
 traction and there is repulsion. Who knows what 
 either of them is or why it operates?) We know of 
 some forces which are convertible into each other. 
 We behold a flash of lightning, and define its en- 
 ergy as light. A tree is struck, and we discover 
 the energy of lightning displayed as force. We 
 place our hand on the wood that has been rent, and 
 find it hot, and we learn that heat as well as light 
 and force are potentially present in the lightning’s 
 flash. We may repeat the experiment with the 
 electric wire in our room. It is possible to screw in 
 a bulb that will give light, or the attachment of an 
 electric iron that will develop heat, or the motor of 
 a sewing-machine that consumes power. One kind 
 of energy along the wire is thus convertible. In 
 79 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 the chemical laboratory other transformations be- 
 come possible. 
 
 But what of the controlling agent in all these ex- 
 periments? Power is manifested which produces 
 all these modes of energy, but there is no known 
 way by which such energy can be produced by 
 forces apart from antecedent energy. 
 
 Life itself is a power. 
 
 The question is hotly debated among physicists 
 and biologists whether we are able to pass from the 
 non-living to the living world without a break. 
 There are eminent men who believe that, strictly 
 speaking, all matter is alive. They hold that the 
 laws of crystallization, and of atomic energy dis- 
 play agencies which are logically to be classified as 
 living forces. If so, the universe is Just so much 
 more wonderful than we have supposed; nor are we 
 at all disturbed by their discussions. We still won- 
 der with John Burroughs at the power and per- 
 sistency of life: 
 
 When for the third or fourth time during the 
 spring or summer I take my hoe and go out and 
 cut off the heads of the lusty burdocks that send 
 out their broad leaves along the edge of my garden 
 
 or lawn, I often ask myself, “What is this thing 
 80 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 that is so hard to scotch here in the grass?” I de- 
 capitate it time after time and yet it forthwith gets 
 itself another head. We call it burdock, but what 
 is burdock, and why does it not change into yellow 
 dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is so con- 
 stant and so irrepressible, and before the summer 
 is ended will be lying in wait here with its ten 
 thousand little hooks to attach itself to every skirt 
 or bushy tail or furry and woolly coat that comes 
 along, in order to get free transportation to other 
 lawns and gardens, to fresh woods and pastures 
 new ? 
 
 It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, 
 and how does it differ from a mechanical and non- 
 living thing? If I smash or overturn the sun-dial 
 with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things 
 stay smashed and broken, but the burdock mends 
 itself, renews itself, and, if I do not watch out, will 
 surreptitiously mature some of the burs before the 
 season is passed, 
 
 Evidently a living thing is radically different 
 from a mechanical thing; yet modern physical sci- 
 ence tells me that the burdock is only another kind 
 of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity 
 of the mechanical and chemical principles that we 
 see in operation all about us in dead matter; and 
 that a little different mechanical arrangement of 
 its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock 
 or into a cabbage, into an oak or into a pine, into an 
 ox or into a man. 
 
 Apart from all technical definitions with which 
 81 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 we have no quarrel, there is such a thing as vital 
 force. A titled woman in Germany, having no 
 faith in immortality, had the courage of her con- 
 victions, or the lack of them, and caused herself to 
 be buried in a tomb of masonry covered with a 
 heavy stone slab, on which was inscribed a declara- 
 tion of her opinion that was the end for her. She 
 was mistaken. A tiny seed found lodgment in the 
 mortar, took root that fed upon her body and grew 
 to a tree that burst the slab asunder. I have seen 
 a photograph of the tree growing from this tomb 
 proclaiming nature’s own refutation that death is a 
 finality or the tomb impregnable. 
 
 Just as surely as the tree has inherent in its life 
 the power of lifting water and transforming it into 
 sap and wood-fiber and leaf and blossom, so has the 
 spiritual life its own lifting power. It can raise 
 men out of despondency, desolation and sin. It 
 can lift and transfer them and make them sons of 
 God. It can give them a hope which is more than 
 a gentle and pleasurable sensation; a hope that is 
 alive and full of dynamic vigor. 
 
 It is a hope that is as certainly capable of trans- 
 forming life as an alkali is of modifying an acid. 
 
 82 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 “Every man that hath this hope in him, purifieth 
 himself, even as He is pure.” It is a hope that 
 makes life more worth living, and that robs death 
 of its terror. It is the power of an endless life. 
 
 The lifting power of life 1s marvelous, whether 
 manifest in the tree lifting tons of water, or in man 
 lifting his own weight in walking; but the most sig- 
 nificant fact about the power of life is not its abil- 
 ity to lift but its ability to select and direct. Doctor 
 William Hayes Ward, toward the end of his long 
 and fruitful life, published a book entitled, What 
 I Believe and Why. In this he says: 
 
 It is of the very essence of life that it gives guid- 
 ance, is purposive. ‘This separates it from mere 
 physical forces, such as the attraction of chemism. 
 It has a previsioned end to achieve. It aims to cre- 
 ate a man, a tree, then to keep them repairing 
 themselves or growing to an ideal perfection. Out 
 of the common sap the atoms distribute themselves 
 after a preconceived scheme to organize into bark, 
 wood, leaves, petals, stamens, pistils, seeds, Just as 
 we knew they would when we planted the peach 
 stone. This is very purposeful life. Life chooses, 
 sorts, selects, directs, sees and reaches a distant 
 aim. Whence comes this outreaching, selective, di- 
 recting power? 
 
 ‘The mere biologist does not try to answer this 
 
 83 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 question. He is content to see it, to state its laws 
 and give names to the usual processes of life, and 
 then he too often thinks that the naming of a law is 
 an explanation of its force. An apple falls to the 
 ground. We ask “Why?” and we are told that the 
 attraction of the earth draws it. Attraction is from 
 the Latin word attraho, meaning to draw; and so 
 we are told that drawing draws it and get nowhere. 
 We have simply given a general name to a familiar 
 fact, but why the apple falls to the earth, we have 
 not learned. So vitalism, or vital force, is but a 
 name we give to an observed order of process. It 
 explains nothing. Its marked character is its fore- 
 sight. 
 
 That interesting, provocative and depressing 
 book, The Education of Henry Adams, has an il- 
 luminating chapter on “The Dynamo and the Vir- 
 gin.” It is a kind of foot-note to the author’s 
 effort to discover a dynamic theory of human 
 history. What is the motive power of society? He 
 says that he haunted the French Exposition of 
 1890, “aching to absorb knowledge and helpless to 
 find it.” In that same fruitless quest he had gone 
 through Harvard, had studied law, had taught 
 History, and apparently his education had made 
 him increasingly ignorant. The sum total of igno- 
 rance which he accumulated during a life of study 
 
 84 
 
 a 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 was colossal. In this Exposition he became might- 
 ily interested in the dynamo, particularly in its 
 application to the use, the beginning, of the auto- 
 mobile. He also learned about radium, which as he 
 said, “denied its God,” or what to a certain scien- 
 tific friend of his was the same thing, “denied the 
 truths of his science” in which all forms of energy 
 were supposed to have been tabulated and defined. 
 Neither in science nor in history was he able to 
 discover a sequence between cause and effect, be- 
 tween the springs of human action and recorded 
 fact. Certain superficial relations were apparent, 
 but what and where was the power? 
 
 In the Exposition stood a notable work of 
 American art, the General Sherman statue by 
 Saint Gaudens, which now stands at the entrance 
 of Central Park in New York. There was the lean, 
 lithe, nervous, determined man; and under him was 
 the thin, wiry, swift, capable horse that bore him 
 “from Atlanta to the Sea”; and before this group 
 was the female figure, a Winged Victory. “For a 
 symbol of power, Saint Gaudens instinctively pre- 
 ferred the horse. Doubtless Sherman also pre- 
 ferred it. The attitude was so American that, for 
 
 85 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 at least forty years, Adams had never realized that 
 any other could be sound taste.” Adams said that 
 Saint Gaudens, who was with him in Paris, “could 
 never discuss or dilate upon an emotion, or suggest 
 artistic arguments for giving to his work the form 
 which he felt.’ ‘The two went to Amiens and 
 looked at the Cathedral, and Adams reflected that 
 that magnificent temple represented the triumph 
 of a power beyond that which Sherman’s horse 
 could represent, and which Saint Gaudens felt but 
 could not articulate, when he placed the symbolic 
 figure in front of the swiftly moving steed. The 
 worship of the Virgin built Amiens. Artists of 
 this generation, even those like Saint Gaudens at 
 Amiens, and Matthew Arnold at Chartres, “felt a 
 railway train as power; yet they, and all other ar- 
 tists, constantly complained that the power em- 
 bodied in a railway train could never be embodied 
 in art. All the steam in the world could not build 
 a cathedral. ‘That called for worship, it might be 
 superstitious worship, but it was worship express- 
 ive of a power above and beyond that of the 
 dynamo.* 
 
 
 
 *The Education of Henry Adams, pp. 387-8, 
 86 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 The more intimate and closely reasoned studies 
 of life which have characterized our time have com- 
 pelled a new and more careful analysis of the phe- 
 nomenon of death. And we make this discovery, 
 that death and hfe are not complete opposites. We 
 do not speak with entire accuracy when we say that 
 a lifeless thing is “dead as a door-nail.” A door- 
 nail is not dead, for it has never lived. Death is not 
 to be affirmed of a thing that has not had life. 
 Death is itself a phenomenon of life, the final phe- 
 nomenon, as it appears to the observer, but even so 
 a less instantaneous and single matter than has 
 been supposed. Life continues, so recent scientific 
 tests affirm, in certain organs after the death of 
 the body. Particular organs have been removed 
 from a dead body, and have manifested the power 
 of life for variable periods. Death is a thing to be 
 predicated only of things that have lived; and of 
 its totality and finality we can not afford to be dog- 
 matic. We have much to learn. 
 
 It is not in its biological but in its ethical and 
 spiritual aspect we are concerned with these mat- 
 ters of life and death. We deal with it as a 
 universal experience with important spiritual im- 
 plications. 
 
 87 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Death is an event which every man must face as 
 a certain experience of his own. It is the great 
 leveler. It is like the flood of Noah’s day; there is 
 no man tall enough to rise above it. 
 
 For the vast majority of mankind, death has no 
 especial significance. For very many it is a very 
 stupid and commonplace event. They simply lie 
 down and stop breathing. Some may be longer 
 about it than others; some groan, some lie quiet; 
 but all die. 
 
 But now and then there is a man who makes 
 some death significant. He may do this in one 
 way or in another. Abner died as the fool dieth. 
 Others have died likewise. In that fashion they 
 wrenched death from the commonplace and flung 
 life away to the accompaniment of folly. 
 
 But other people have succeeded in dying nobly, 
 immortally. It is not wholly the manner of their 
 death. Jesus and the two robbers had an identical 
 experience so far as the crucifixion went; but his 
 cross was not like theirs. Somehow, Jesus was 
 able to meet death in a way that robbed that great 
 enemy of his victory. Jesus made death 
 significant. 
 
 88 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 It is the glory of the soldier who fights for a 
 great cause that he is able to utilize an experience 
 which he must share with all sorts and conditions of 
 men, and even with the brute creation, and make it 
 significant. 
 
 Some men have ‘said that if Jesus Christ had 
 lived the life He lived and taught the truths He 
 taught, and died a natural death, it would have 
 meant as much to the world. 
 
 They talk nonsense. 
 
 If Jesus had lived as He lived, his life would 
 have been unspeakably precious; if He had taught 
 as He taught, the truths He uttered would have 
 been among the greatest heritages of mankind; but 
 his life and his teachings take on a dignity and 
 spiritual significance with his death which the 
 great teachers from the apostles down have rightly 
 evaluated. 
 
 Death may be a very insignificant event. 
 
 It is easy to die; men have died for a wish or a 
 whim; 
 For bravado, passion or pride. 
 
 Yes, that is true. Some deaths have been incon- 
 
 sequential; some might as well have occurred years 
 89 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 before they did, and the world would have been, if 
 anything, better; some deaths have been wasteful, 
 and some have been shameful; but some have been 
 noble, and have inspired the lives of later genera- 
 tions as living alone could never have inspired 
 them. 
 
 We hardly need to be reminded of the brevity of 
 life. | 
 
 It is the universal testimony of old men that to 
 them life has seemed short. Fiven a life of three 
 score years and ten is a restricted life, and if by 
 reason of strength the years be four score, yet the 
 life is soon cut off. 
 
 All of our plans are made with the knowledge 
 that we may not live to carry them out. We press 
 through the world with a feverish haste as if we 
 were not to be here long. 
 
 The Apostle James, the brother of Jesus, asked, 
 “For what is your life?” and answered: “It is even 
 a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then 
 vanisheth away.”—James 4:14. 
 
 Ife was speaking well within bounds when he 
 compared life to vapor. Measured in the propor- 
 tion of its length to the boundless extent of time, 
 
 90 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 the life of any one man is too brief to be repre- 
 sented by a vapor; measured by the proportion of 
 his bulk to the mass of the universe he is altogether 
 too insubstantial and insignificant to be thought of 
 even as the tiniest speck in a vapor. 
 
 If the man of science be asked concerning human 
 life in its relation either to the stretch of time or the 
 bulk of the universe, he would say what James said 
 and say it more emphatically. 
 
 If we take a handful of marbles, one of them 
 large and glistening, the others small and varied in 
 size, and roll them around in a silk hat, we might 
 get a scale for the measurement of our solar system 
 in its relation to the rest of the universe. 
 
 Placing that solar system in Chicago, with our 
 world perhaps as a pea among the marbles, one 
 might start and walk to Cleveland one way and to 
 Omaha the other before he began to find many of 
 our nearer neighbors among the fixed stars, and 
 the world is not wide enough for us working upon 
 that scale of proportion to reach anywhere near the 
 edge of the visible universe in which our sun is a 
 mere speck of golden dust—one of the smaller 
 stars in the Milky Way. 
 
 91 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 In such a universe, what is a solar system like 
 
 ours ¢ 
 What is our world, and what is man? 
 Of man, in his relation to the universe, Harry 
 
 Kemp has written: 
 
 God made a million atoms, each by mortals called 
 a “world”; 
 
 Like dust-motes in a beam of light, they dartled, 
 circled, whirled; 
 
 Yet all these million worlds, compared to ail his 
 might did rule, 
 
 Were in the Universal Whole one tiny molecule. 
 
 The mortals on these shining specks spake of God’s 
 space as “far,” 
 
 And every bright companion-mote they hailed as 
 “world” or “star.” 
 
 (They should have known the Eternal Mind no 
 need for measures hath; 
 
 God looketh down the Milky Way as down a gar- 
 den path; 
 
 The distance from our outmost sun unto his 
 throne, no doubt, 
 
 Is a hand’s breadth in his seeing, or too small to 
 measure out. ) 
 
 These manikins then fought and died on many a 
 shining mote— 
 For what they dubbed as “empires” sworded one 
 
 another’s throat; 
 92 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 Kach nation on its anthill swarmed and sang a pa- 
 triot song, 
 
 And stormed another anthill to avenge an emmet- 
 wrong: 
 
 And thus they hated, loved and lived until the end 
 of time, 
 
 While up the weary rounds of life a million worlds 
 did climb. 
 
 Then flash! Two molecules collide and worlds ex- 
 hale in mist, 
 
 And back into a fiery ring do melted empires twist, 
 
 And cities in solution hang and drop in fiery rain, 
 
 And the sinew of the tiger fuses with the poet’s 
 brain; | 
 
 All back into one element trees, mountains, oceans, 
 glide, 
 
 And not one life is left to strut and swell in pom- 
 pous pride— 
 
 Then some far-worlded telescope which chance did 
 thither turn 
 
 Beholds this starry funeral pyre minutely flame 
 and burn. 
 
 “Lo!” thinks the awed astronomer, his star-map at 
 his side, 
 
 “Upon yon utmost verge of night a star was born 
 and died.” 
 
 And so they numbered eons there, and cherished 
 histories gray! 
 
 Oh, but they battled, loved and dreamed for a 
 clock-tick in God’s day! 
 
 93 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Life is a vapor. But what is a vapor? It is all 
 that it ever has been. It was a pearly raindrop 
 that fell down from the skies; and as it fell, it 
 brightened and made beautiful the flower in whose 
 golden heart it lay, and then, dropping to the earth, 
 watered the root that there might be other flow- 
 ers; and then, by subterranean channels breaking 
 forth into a spring,-it flowed singing to the sea, 
 turning the wheels of industry as it went, and 
 laughing in the sunlight as it bore great ships upon 
 its blue bosom. | 
 
 The sun caught it up and it vanished into heaven, 
 smiling as it rose. All this the vapor was and is; 
 all this it did and does. It appeareth for a little 
 while and then vanisheth away. 
 
 But when it vanishes it rises fragrant with the 
 odor of the flowers it has refreshed, dignified by 
 the burdens it has borne, radiant with the honor of 
 thirst it has quenched, and jubilant in the memories 
 of service it has rendered. 
 
 It vanishes away, but as it vanishes, the sun 
 catches it up mto heaven, pours through it the sev- 
 enfold glory of its prismatic splendor and imparts 
 to it a radiance fit for the diadem of God. 
 
 94 
 
THE POWER OF LIFE 
 
 It vanishes away, but as it vanishes it smiles in 
 the glow of promise of joyful service still to be, and 
 its rainbow gladdens the eyes of men and reminds 
 them of the covenant of God. 
 
 There are lives like that. They appear for a lit- 
 tle time and then vanish away. But they come to 
 earth trailing clouds of glory, and they vanish fra- 
 grant with the memories of a beautiful and varied 
 ministry to their fellow men. 
 
 They flow through the channel of their years, 
 leave behind them holy and sacred memorials, and 
 when they vanish they overarch the two worlds; at 
 this end are glorious memories, and the gold at the 
 other end of their rainbow is the pavement of the 
 city of God. 
 
 And the vapor is not lost. It is one of the cer- 
 tainties of modern science that every particle of the 
 vapor abides. It disappears, but it is indestruct- 
 ible. We see it: 
 
 Like the snowdrop in the river, 
 A moment white, then fades forever. 
 
 Forever? No! It has fallen, faded, risen and 
 blessed the world a million times; and unborn gen- 
 erations will see it, taste it and be refreshed by it. 
 
 95 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 There are lives like that. They come to earth, 
 live, love and pass away. But they are not lost. 
 The sweet influences by which they made life bet- 
 ter are added to the invisible cords that bind the 
 world to the throne of God. They are not lost. 
 They live, and live forever. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 Tr 1s often affirmed that science knows nothing 
 of life after death. This is true. It is also true 
 that it knows next to nothing about this present 
 life. Science observes life as a phenomenon and is 
 able to classify some inferences and deductions 
 concerning it, but that does not imply that science 
 understands the present life of man. 
 
 I have seen in a medical college a series of jars 
 containing the constituent ingredients of a human 
 body. ‘There was a large glass vessel containing a 
 few gallons of water; there was a smaller jar con- 
 taining a few pounds of lime; and there were salts 
 and solids of various sorts, a spoonful of iron and a 
 pinch of phosphorus, It was an interesting exhibit 
 and doubtless had its educational uses, but no stu- 
 dent, J am confident, was ever encouraged to sup- 
 pose that he would be taught in that school how to 
 
 97 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 mix together that water and lime and the rest and 
 make a man. 
 
 Furthermore, if scientists were not themselves 
 men, and had never seen a man, and had only those 
 jars of material at hand, they would have been as 
 helpless to conjecture anything about this present 
 life as they now are and must be about the life to 
 come. Concerning this life, they are able to talk 
 and write with a modest approach to wisdom, but 
 they could not have imagined it if they had never 
 seen it. But here it is, strange beyond all compre- 
 hension yet undeniably real. If their scientific in- 
 vestigation does not prove a future life, neither 
 does it prove a present life, apart from the actual 
 experience of it. No scientist claims more than 
 this, and, if he can not prove a life after death, nei- 
 ther can he prove that such life does not exist. 
 
 Inertia is a property of matter; but growth is a 
 law of life. Each lifeless thing in all this vast uni- 
 verse will stay where it is placed until something 
 moves it, and remain as it is until something 
 changes it; but every living thing though molded 
 by forces without, is also shaped by powers within. 
 The inorganic world is static; the organic world is 
 
 38 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 progressive. Moved upon by the forces of vitality, 
 dead matter feels within it the throb and thrill of 
 life and responds to laws beyond its own domain. 
 This is the perpetual miracle of nature. In the tree 
 that lifts its tons of earth and water high in air, and 
 transforms them into sap and leaf and fruit; in the 
 flower that roots itself in unfeeling soil and turns 
 it into petals of beauty and of grace; in the bird 
 that eats matter and sings music; in the man who 
 consumes carbon and oxygen and thinks thoughts 
 that soar among the stars and explore the long 
 reaches of eternity, the law is the same. In each 
 and every one of them, life transforms matter by 
 the laws not of matter but of life. Inertia gives 
 way to growth; the laws that govern from without 
 share their domain with forces resident within. In 
 every one of them is wrought the change spoken of 
 by the Apostle Paul: the corruptible clothes itself 
 with the glory of the incorruptible; mortality is 
 swallowed up of life. Matter ceases to be dead. 
 Earth becomes “crammed with heaven, and every 
 common bush afire with God.” Inertia still is a 
 law of matter; but life rules matter. Upon the 
 inert forms of matter are stamped the impress of 
 99 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 animation; and within it are the potency and the 
 passion and the progress that belong to life. 
 
 Gradually, and through a number of centuries, 
 the thinking of the world has modified with respect 
 to the relation of life to the universe. Changes 
 that are recent go back in their beginnings and are 
 seen to have been involved in discoveries much more 
 remote. 
 
 In 1542 Copernicus published a book which he 
 had completed twelve years before, but had with- 
 held for fear of persecution, showing the sun 
 and not the earth to be the center of the solar sys- 
 tem. It was nearly a hundred years before that 
 theory as enunciated by Galileo came to the atten- 
 tion of Pope Urban VIII, who demanded the 
 recantation of Galileo. Galileo recanted, but the 
 earth moved, and continued to move. 
 
 Meantime, other minds were moving with the 
 earth. In 1687 Isaac Newton set forth his theory 
 of gravitation, showing the invisible power that 
 holds the planets in their orbits round a central sun. 
 
 Still another hundred years, and in 1796 La 
 Place published his Exposition du Systeme du 
 Monde, in which he set forth his Nebular Hypoth- 
 
 100 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 esis. And even a little before his time James Hut- 
 ton had uttered the first word of the new Geology, 
 declaring the rocks to have been laid through 
 successive ages which reveal “no trace of a begin- 
 ning; no prospect of an end.” 
 
 In 1858 Charles Darwin published his Origin of 
 Species, and in 1871 his Descent of Man. It now 
 appears that there was uninterrupted progress 
 from the beginning of this series of movements. 
 They begin with astronomy and end with man, even 
 as the psalmist considered the heavens as the works 
 of God’s fingers and then bowed in wonder before 
 the greater power that made man but little lower 
 than God, and crowned him with glory and honor. 
 
 It would be safe to say that no one of these the- 
 ories stands to-day precisely as enunciated by its 
 author. Copernicus, Newton, Hutton, La Place 
 and Darwin have all given place to later interpre- 
 ters of the universe. Yet each of them wrought an 
 epoch-making change in the thought of the world. 
 We may discard the Copernican theory, but we 
 never shall go back to the Ptolemaic. We may 
 give up the theory of star-dust as held by La Place, 
 but we shall never go back to a theory of instanta- 
 
 101 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 neous creation. We may think of Darwin as an 
 obsolete authority, but we shall never re-establish 
 the theories of life that existed before his day. The 
 changes which wait our thought in future lie not 
 behind us in the line of progress. Straight ahead 
 they may not lie, but backward they do not and can 
 not retreat. New theories may not have come to 
 stay, but the old ones have gone forever. 
 
 There is a very real sense in which religion is 
 independent of all these changes. God, sin, duty, 
 salvation, are all the same to men whether they live 
 on a flat earth or a round one; whether the earth 
 was created in a week or a million years, whether 
 man was originally perfect or has ascended from 
 lower life. No man ever had a right to nail the 
 truth of the Bible to the questionable truth of his 
 theory about the order of events in the first chapter 
 of Genesis. And those do still err, and greatly, 
 who assume that men have great spiritual need to 
 settle as spiritual concerns the doubtful and chang- 
 ing hypotheses of current science. The apostle 
 who said that neither circumcision availeth any- 
 thing nor uncircumcision, would have said that, for 
 the real problems of the soul, neither evolution 
 
 102 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 availeth anything nor special creation, but faith 
 that worketh by love; and that though we have all 
 knowledge and understand all mysteries we shall 
 have missed the real spirit of religion unless we 
 have the spirit of Christ. 
 
 Yet because the religious thought of every age 
 expresses itself in the language of that age; and 
 because religion relates itself to the whole man, it 
 has become inevitable that theology should have 
 come to express itself in terms of more or less sci- 
 entific analogy. If we are to have any books that 
 perform for this generation such service as Butler's 
 Analogy performed in its own age, those books 
 must do what Butler did, must employ the latest 
 words of science as it now is. If there is any Nat- 
 ural Law in the Spiritual World, that natural law 
 must be interpreted in terms of modern science, and 
 according to the analogies of the men whose busi- 
 ness it is to know science. Hence, naturally, inevit- 
 ably, and very properly, our religious writing has 
 been cast in a scientific mold; and the evolutionary 
 philosophy is in our religious treatises, and in 
 our high school text-books, and in our college 
 lecture rooms, and in our theological seminaries, 
 
 yp \108 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 It is not incumbent on the modern minister that 
 he preach evolution. It matters little to the con- 
 tent of his message how men came to be what and 
 where they are. His message is to men as he finds 
 them, and has respect to what they may become. 
 But this is incumbent on any minister in any age, 
 that he speak the language of his generation, and 
 clothe his thought in the terms of his contempora- 
 ries. He may speak with the tongues of men and 
 angels, but he will be to his own generation a bar- 
 barian unless he utters his message in the nomencla- 
 ture of his own day. If he preach in a region where 
 men believe the world flat, he need not assume it to 
 be his duty constantly to proclaim the theory of a 
 round earth, but he will be careful not to seem to 
 make the flat earth a cardinal doctrine of religion. 
 The shape of the earth does not greatly concern his 
 message; but it is important that his message shall 
 express itself in terms of the best knowledge of 
 those to whom it is delivered. 
 
 Hence it has come about that all our present-day 
 preaching and writing more or less assumes the 
 phraseology of scientific speech; and even those 
 who oppose the conclusions adopt the terms of the 
 scientific world. 
 
 104 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 We have no need to decry this condition. We 
 could not help it if we wanted to, and we do not 
 want to do so. To try to keep it back would be 
 Mrs. Partington’s attempt to mop out the Atlan- 
 tic. Upon the sea our boat is launched and we are 
 in the boat. 
 
 But it is all the more important that we know 
 how far and in what direction these theories bear 
 us, and within what limits we have chart and rud- 
 der. For there are some who adopt the theories of 
 progress in ascending life, who have not fully reck- 
 oned with their import. And there are others who 
 assume that because the universe shows progress 
 and plan, there is little need of anxiety or concern: 
 for “God’s in his heaven: all’s right with the 
 world.” 
 
 But the doctrine of evolution, while a doctrine 
 that strengthens our argument for an all-embrac- 
 ing purpose of an invincible God, is a very solemn 
 doctrine as applied to the responsibility of the indi- 
 vidual man. It offers no escape for unfaithfulness ; 
 it teaches no lesson of comfort to him who neglects 
 his duty. 
 
 For a generation we have talked about the strug- 
 
 105 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 gle for existence and the survival of the fittest. 
 And sometimes we have spoken words of truth, and 
 again we have spoken words of cruel error. Tor 
 that which constitutes fitness for the struggle does 
 not always constitute fitness for the survival. 
 Some years ago Doctor Reuen Thomas uttered a 
 warning lest too shallow a view of evolution make 
 us cruel and unfeeling, and directed the mind of 
 those whom he addressed to its deeper and often 
 neglected lesson of brotherhood and the social 
 spirit as taught in nature: 
 
 For a generation we have been almost slaves to 
 two ideas which are associated with the name of the 
 great naturalist Darwin. One idea goes by the 
 name of “Natural Selection” and the other we 
 know as “the Survival of the Fittest.” Natural Se- 
 lection, of course, means that Nature favors some 
 organisms instead of others in consequence of dif- 
 ferences in the organisms themselves. ‘The “fittest 
 to survive” are those which are most adaptable to 
 the surroundings in which they find themselves. 
 These two ideas have had the field and have 
 wrought most disastrously in politics and in the po- 
 litical use of military power. We have had to 
 listen to the horrible dogma that Nature intended 
 and therefore the Author of Nature intended that 
 the strong should subdue the weak. Small nations 
 were intended to be exploited by large nations. 
 
 106 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 “We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities 
 of the weak, and not to please ourselves’ —such 
 apostolic words were laughed out of court. Mil- 
 itarism got a new sanction. The old George III 
 Toryism lifted up its head in England once more. 
 Nature was Tory. Brotherhood as an ideal and an 
 alm was scouted. 
 
 Recently men have risen who, working aong 
 evolutionary lines, have pushed into mental and 
 moral regions, and have shown that such ideas as 
 those by which we have been enslaved, have a larger 
 content than their originators perceived. The 
 physically strongest may be only representatives of 
 a gilded barbarism. 'The most effective among 
 men (and even among animals) have been those 
 capable of coming into fraternities for mutual 
 helpfulness. There is, if only we will look for it, a 
 Sermon on the Mount embedded in Nature. When 
 once we have the fine tone and temper of that ser- 
 mon in ourselves, we shall find it elsewhere. Peo- 
 ple are ruled by ideas. If our ideas of life and its 
 purpose are wrong, our politics will be wrong, our 
 domestic life will be wrong, all our conduct will be 
 wrong in spirit and in tendency. ‘To say “it does 
 not matter what your opinions are providing your 
 life be right” is arrant nonsense. The last note in 
 evolution is that we are members one of another. 
 
 The theory of evolution does not assure us that 
 all progress shall be upward. It assumes that life 
 presses outward from its various centers in every 
 direction, seeking unoccupied space for itself. It 
 
 107 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 often grows downward. The white ghost-flower 
 called Indian pipe was once a true flower, with red 
 petals, but growing in the shade it lost the glow 
 from the blossom and the green pigment of the 
 stalk; it now grows in the dark glen, hanging its 
 head for shame, the ghost of its former self. It has 
 made progress, and has found a place where it may 
 survive. But its progress has been degeneracy, 
 and the only place it now can live is in the dense 
 shadow of other vegetation that has learned to 
 nourish itself in the sun. 
 
 We do well to remember, and it is pleasant and 
 profitable to remember, that the perishing of an- 
 cient Greece has left us, not the bickerings and 
 petty commonplaces of her ordinary life, but those 
 monuments to her greatness that stand out in bold 
 relief above all that could degrade them by too inti- 
 mate a knowledge of the meaner elements in the 
 lives of the men who produced them. But we need 
 also to remember how much good has escaped, and 
 how much evil has survived as the years have gone 
 by. 
 
 Nature has shown some of her most consummate 
 skill in the fashioning of creatures for our torment. 
 
 108 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 What, for instance, is more perfectly adapted to 
 its end than the proboscis of the mosquito? Some 
 of the types least desirable have longest lease of 
 life. Aristotle theorized about the origin of certain 
 insect pests; Aristotle died, and his theory is obso- 
 lete, but the pests are with us still. The gnat and 
 the flea harassed the armies of antiquity. Leon- 
 idas and his three hundred Spartans died at Ther- 
 mopyle and their descendants in Chicago peddle 
 fruit from push-carts; but the insect scourges of 
 the ancient world are still with us in unabated 
 vigor. 
 
 The theory of evolution does not assure us that 
 there shall be no failures; it does not promise that 
 there shall be no loss of type, no experiment not 
 visibly productive of good; but it gives us hope that 
 creation as a whole shall not fail, and that the 
 highest types will dominate. 
 
 The doctrine of evolution may be interpreted 
 not as antagonistic to immortality, but as almost 
 requiring it. It may cause us to look backward 
 across the ages in which we have battled with a 
 brute ancestry, and say with Paul, “If after the 
 manner of men I have fought with beasts at 
 
 109 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise 
 not?’ It may cause us to declare with ‘Tennyson 
 that the very facts of our humble origin affirm that 
 we were born to higher things than the life of the 
 beasts that perish, and to an inheritance incorrupt- 
 ible, undefiled and that fadeth not away: 
 
 I trust I have not wasted breath; 
 I think we are not wholly brain, 
 Magnetic mockeries; not in vain 
 
 Like Paul with beasts I fought with death. 
 
 Not only cunning casts in clay; 
 Let science prove we are, and then 
 What matters science unto men, 
 At least to me? I would not stay. 
 
 Let him, the wiser man who springs 
 Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
 His action, like the greater ape, 
 
 But I was born to other things. 
 
 Any thinking person must now and then seek in 
 his own mind an explanation of existing things. 
 When we once have learned, as we soon must learn, 
 that an effect implies a cause, we find ourselves | 
 seeking causes for all perceived effects. Not only 
 so, but we seek to unify our knowledge, and to find 
 
 110 
 
RAIL ERNE AIG sy 
 re aaa 
 
 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 a cause sufficiently great and inclusive to account 
 for all existence. Our difficulty is not wholly one 
 of bulk. If that were all we could mentally mul- 
 tiply the power of causation as we perceived the 
 aggregate and diversity of effect. What troubles 
 us is that we have so many kinds of effect and such 
 apparently contradictory effects. If we were mind 
 only and not matter, we might the more easily 
 account for mind; or if we were matter only, and 
 yet able to think at all, we might with the more 
 
 _. consistency become materialists. But we still must 
 
 say with Byron that “If Bishop Berkeley says 
 there is no matter, then it is no matter what Bishop 
 Berkeley says.” And we say to the materialist 
 
 . that even such thinking as he does is a denial of 
 
 materialism. Matter and mind are both here, and 
 the two combined are more than twice as hard to 
 account for as either one alone. Good and evil are 
 both here. ‘That fact would not be strange if . 
 there were two eternal and equally balanced prin- 
 ciples, each represented by a god equal in power to 
 his opposing god; but it is very difficult to account 
 for if there.is but one God. For most people it is 
 convenient to divide the universe very nearly into 
 1il 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 two equal parts and to hold the devil accountable 
 for about half of what occurs. 
 
 If everything appeared to us to be good, it would 
 not be difficult to hold the theory that all that ex- 
 ists is caused by one God and He a good one. But 
 when we discover things that appear to us to be cer- 
 tainly evil, it is easier to think that there is one evil 
 god, even though a minor one, who is responsible 
 for that part of creation. To attribute the world to 
 one infinitely good God is still more than all good 
 people are willing to undertake. 
 
 It is this apparent dualism in the universe as we 
 behold it, this alternation of light and darkness, 
 this co-existence of matter and spirit with an un- 
 defined relation between them, this see-saw of joy 
 and pain, this bringing forth of life to be swallowed 
 up in death, this age-lasting struggle between good 
 and evil, which we find so difficult to ascribe to the 
 consistent operation of any one God, be He either 
 good or evil. 
 
 Yet, while life’s experiences might seem to imply 
 two antagonistic forces, working forever at cross- 
 purposes, science does not admit this dualistic sys- 
 tem. Weare not at liberty to assume that the wind 
 
 112 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 and the sun, or the cloud and the sun, are hostile 
 each to the other, for the sun causes both cloud and 
 wind. Forces that appear antagonistic work to a 
 common result. The earth is held in its orbit by 
 the balance of forces, not hostile but antithetic. 
 
 Thus, as science has thought its way back to a 
 theory of essential unity, and in so doing walks by 
 faith and not by sight, theology is constrained to 
 exercise “like precious faith” and hold to the exist- 
 ence of one God, and He a good God. 
 
 The new sciences of the last generation have not 
 failed to modify our thought of God. There have 
 been at least a dozen of them. Comparative reli- 
 gion is new; comparative philosophy is new; com- 
 parative anatomy is new. Every science that uses 
 the adjective “comparative” is new. Historic 
 criticism is new; history itself is new. It is no 
 longer a mere chronicle of events. It is a philoso- 
 phy and interpretation of life in the perspective of 
 these events. It is a study of cause and effect in 
 the light of human happenings. Social science, 
 sociology, is new. Every other science with the ad- 
 jective “social” is new. All these sciences of life 
 and all the physical sciences that use the micro- 
 
 113 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 scope, that use electricity, that use radium, that use 
 the X-ray, all are new. I well remember when I 
 first looked through my hand with the X-ray. 
 Every science that recognizes the penetrability of 
 matter to light, and every science that attempts to 
 make real the relationships of matter to force is 
 new. Half the theories of yesterday are on their 
 way to the scrap heap, and they have not left un- 
 modified our conception of God. We are bound 
 either to move God very much farther away or 
 bring Him very much closer into the actual thick 
 of the conflict of life. The conception of God just 
 barely outside, the conception of Paley’s Natural 
 Philosophy, of a universe which God wound up like 
 a watch and left for us to find, a universe initiated 
 by a God who went off and forgot it, save for an 
 occasional intrusion by the process of a miracle— 
 that conception of God, good as it was in its day, 
 will not answer for our present thinking. It is not 
 adequate to the strain; God must be moved further 
 away, or brought closer than in the thought of the 
 old theology—and the old theology was good in 
 its day. 
 
 Science is far from being the enemy of faith, 
 
 114 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 Doctor Edward A. Birge, who retired in 1925 
 from the presidency of the University of Wiscon- 
 sin, devoted his last baccalaureate address to a 
 confession of faith, as he had learned it simulta- 
 neously from Science and Religion. 
 
 The text of the address, if we may borrow a term 
 from the sphere of homiletics, was the scripture: 
 
 “Whereunto shall we liken the Kingdom of 
 God? or with what comparison shall we compare 
 it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which grow- 
 eth up.” 
 
 In early Greek philosophy, and now in modern 
 science, Doctor Birge believed he saw the growth 
 of the “eternal truth” to which each century adds 
 a little and which each thinker serves in his own 
 way. He is sure that the processes of the past, 
 whose results are now apparent, are operative in 
 the same way to-day and with the same certainty of 
 continued advance. 
 
 Science had first assembled the facts of the 
 world much at random and in_helter-skelter 
 fashion. ‘Then it had gradually seen that they 
 were integral parts of a structure. Later it was 
 realized that the world was an operating affair, an 
 organized and going concern, with its own methods 
 
 115 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 and laws. Now there was added the full concep- 
 tion of a past and a future, of an historical devel- 
 opment, of an evolution which could be read in the 
 light given by present operations, just as the laws 
 of the Kingdom of God may be found in the 
 growth of the mustard seed. 
 
 With this idea as a clue, a new and limitless 
 field was opened to science, a field which it has only 
 begun to explore, whose extent is even yet un- 
 known. But the short century since 1830 has seen 
 advances into it along certain lines. For just as Ly- 
 ell was completing his Principles of Geology, Dar- 
 win was beginning his studies on the species, and 
 twenty-five years later he was to apply to that side 
 of the problem of life the same fundamental princi- 
 ples that Lyell had applied to the history of the 
 earth. Darwin told us that if we want to begin to 
 know how species have come about, we must look 
 first to the pigeon house, to the barnyard, to the 
 grain field, and see what forces are operating there. 
 Here are processes to be followed out; here is an 
 evolution of forms, and the forces behind it are not 
 those exercised suddenly by the intervention of un- 
 known and incalculable energies; they are those 
 now at work in the world about us. To this world 
 as a present going concern we must look if we are 
 to understand its past, knowing that out of the past 
 the present has come. The kingdoms of life in all 
 their multiform greatness are expressions of the 
 same forces and laws that determine the growth of 
 the mustard seed. 
 
 116 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 After nearly nineteen centuries of reading, the 
 parable of the mustard seed is at last, through the 
 aid of science, coming into its own. 
 
 Look where we may—consider universes or 
 stars, or turn to atoms and to elements; study the 
 earth as a planet or as a structure; look to oceans 
 and continents; trace the development of their liv- 
 ing inhabitants; or, finally, read the history of man 
 in structure and powers—one law appears, and one 
 event. We may phrase it as we will, and its ex- 
 pression will vary according to the precise nature 
 of the revelation that is given and according to the 
 temper of him through whom the revelation comes; 
 but beneath all variation there appears, as funda- 
 mental to the movement of the entire Kingdom of 
 God, the law which our Lord found in the mustard 
 seed—“it groweth up.” 
 
 The universe in every part from least to great- 
 est is moving by an inner life; it has growth; it is 
 growing. It has powers and potencies which come 
 into action according to opportunity. They find 
 constant expression in a development after their 
 own kind, according to their own capacity, to ends 
 ordained in them and decreed in their own con- 
 struction. ‘This is the revelation of the law of the 
 Kingdom of God, operative in all parts of that 
 kingdom, a law whose disclosure has come grad- 
 ually during the past four centuries, as men have 
 discovered nature, and whose full scope and signif- 
 icance are beginning to be revealed to our own 
 day. 
 
 117 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Science, Doctor Birge affirmed, is another form 
 of a divine revelation: 
 
 Science is teaching men to look for a progress- 
 ive revelation, to expect from nature new truth, 
 which will call for change and reorganization of 
 former truth. ‘This attitude is nothing new in 
 theory, but it is very far from old in practise, even 
 for individuals. And as present on a large scale, 
 as held by many thousands of thinking men, it now 
 reveals a new and surprising temper and leads to 
 surprising results. Men’s eyes are turning to the 
 coming day—to a developing world—as never be- 
 fore. Science inevitably locks to the present and 
 future, to a world unfolding before our eyes—the 
 mustard seed growing up out of the ground. It is 
 sure that the world is “fresh every morning,” and 
 that the assurance of the newness requires only 
 eyes to see. It is equally certain that its newness 1s 
 the natural product of its oldness, that it results 
 from growth, from the new expression of internal 
 powers. 
 
 At the close of each creative period God pro- 
 nounced his work “good.” At the end He called 
 it “very good.” He has never called it perfect. 
 We talk of the “total depravity of inanimate 
 things,” and not without some reason. ‘The Bible 
 tells us that creation has been made subject to 
 vanity, not because it has a wicked will of its own, 
 
 118 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 which thwarts God’s will, but by the deliberate will 
 of God, and that the redemption of creation from 
 this subjection to vanity is a part of the hope of the 
 universe. We are living still in the dawn of the 
 creation Sabbath. God seems to be resting from 
 his labors, but really the J’ather worketh hitherto, 
 and our work is a part of his, and the dew is still 
 on the leaves. This is St. Paul’s explanation of 
 much that seems to us awry in the universe. It is 
 awry, he says, but itis not completed. It was made 
 subject to vanity, instability, liability to decay and 
 wrong usage. Nor is it entirely of its own perverse- 
 ness nor yet of the will of man that it is so; it is in 
 process of completion. It has been so made by a 
 conscious act of God, causing it intentional sub- 
 jugation to powers from which it is yet to be re- 
 deemed. God’s plan is to be judged, not alone by 
 the uncompleted work which is now seen, but more 
 by the final redemption of all that He has made. 
 This redemption begins with mankind, and through 
 the revelation of our divine sonship is to be wrought 
 the redemption of creation from the bondage of 
 corruption into the liberty of our own glory as the 
 children of God. 
 119 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 That is, the Bible does not affirm that God 
 started a machine which He has permitted to get 
 beyond his control, and that He is now desperately 
 pursuing it in the almost hopeless effort to regain 
 it. The Bible says that God is on the throne, and 
 ever has been. This is a tremendous assumption, 
 but it is scientific. Paul says the creation, that is, 
 the world, as we know it, is unfinished; it is the 
 germ of the world that is to be. It is coming to the 
 birth. The past is pre-natal. These “vanities” and 
 sins and sorrows are the birth-throes of God’s ulti- 
 mate purpose. ‘There is to be a delivering of the 
 creation, a cosmic redemption. 
 
 If we are sure of this, it is no small gain. The 
 method of God is discernible in part, and very per- 
 plexing in the parts we do not understand, but 
 there is a soul in the universe, working out a logical 
 result. 
 
 Great minds have sometimes endeavored to re- 
 produce the sensation which an intelligent being 
 might have experienced if present at creation. He 
 would have been filled with wonder and reverence 
 at the unfolding of the divine plan—so they as- 
 sume. But it is more probable that such a mind 
 
 120 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 would have been completely bewildered at the ap- 
 parent contradictions, the long delays when 
 nothing seemed to be accomplished, and the un- 
 numbered centuries in which the work of creation 
 seemed to have been abandoned by God to the play 
 of wild and conflicting forces. At infinite cost 
 earth crust was formed to be submerged in the 
 seething caldron of eruption and upheaval. Beds 
 of rock which took centuries to form disappeared 
 from sight in a single subsidence. Spots that 
 seemed preparing for an Kden were engulfed in a 
 deluge when the fountains of the great deep were 
 broken up. Forests grew for ages to be buried be- 
 neath sand which hardened into rock, and the loss 
 seemed irreparable and inexplicable. We could 
 not have understood it had we seen it in progress. 
 Hence, I say, there has been vast gain that the 
 progress of creation, still incomplete, may now be 
 discerned; that an end, a purpose, or a series of 
 purposes, may now be discovered by an intelligent 
 mind. 
 
 Professor N.S. Shaler, in The Interpretation of 
 Nature, declared that there has been a perceptible 
 progress among scientists in the recognition of pur- 
 
 121 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 pose in creation. “In the study of the succession 
 exhibited by plants and animals, it has been per- 
 ceived that the march of events from the primitive 
 simplicity toward greater and greater complica- 
 tion, culminating in man, requires us to assume the 
 existence of something like permanent guiding 
 influences in the world of matter... . In 
 other words, it seems to me that the naturalist is 
 most likely to approach the position of the phil- 
 osophical theologian by paths which at first seemed 
 to lie far apart from his domain” (pp. 46, 47). 
 
 If this be true, and the naturalist and theologian, 
 one working from the standpoint of observed phe- 
 nomena, and the other from axiomatic or revealed 
 truth, and one by induction and the other by deduc- 
 tion, meet at length like the workmen from the two 
 ends of the Hoosac tunnel, each complementing the 
 work of the other, and each affirming the discovery 
 of what Professor Shaler calls “something like per- 
 manent guiding influences” in creation, immense 
 gain has been made that man has been able to 
 discover these purposes; and a new teleological 
 argument of great cogency is added to those for- 
 merly in our possession. 
 
 122 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 A truth is more than doubly valuable when thus 
 doubly discovered. It is valuable for what it is in 
 itself, and for the confidence in both processes 
 which may result in other discoveries. When 
 Leverrier and Adams, in 1846, separately com- 
 puted the position and orbit of a yet undiscovered 
 planet, and Galle, in Berlin, and Challis, in Eng- 
 Jand, following these calculations, found the planet 
 Neptune through the telescope, the discovery was 
 worth more to science than many separate discov- 
 eries, either by mathematical calculation or fortui- 
 tous telescopic observation. So when the student 
 of the Bible and the student of natural history come 
 by independent Imes of research to substantial 
 agreement upon a truth, the value of that discovery 
 is more than doubled. It shows us that the lines of 
 study which seem to us divergent really focus 
 somewhere, and this gives us reason to believe that 
 our study, fruitful in this instance, will be increas- 
 ingly so in other discoveries. 
 
 If there is one cbjection offered more frequently 
 than another to faith in a life after death, it is that 
 such a life must be, in all its essential qualities, so 
 far beyond anything we now know, as to be a mat- 
 
 123 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 ter of the imagination only. ‘This seems to ignore 
 the fact that imagination is most commonly 
 thought of as belonging to the sphere of art. 
 
 In our exercise of the imagination in the sphere 
 of religion, we are not going beyond what becomes 
 necessary in the sphere of science. Great scientists 
 have recognized this, foremost among them Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall, who in the beginning of his second 
 lecture on Light, says what he expresses more fully 
 in his Fragments of Science. He says of the true 
 scientist that from the very outset he is dependent 
 on his imagination: 
 
 _ “He can not consider, much less answer, the 
 question, “What Is Light? without transporting 
 himself to a world which underlies the sensible one, 
 and out of which in accordance with rigid law, all 
 optical phenomena spring. ‘Io realize this sub- 
 sensible world, if I may use the term, the mind 
 must possess a certain pictorial power. It has to 
 visualize the invisible. . . . This conception of 
 physical theory implies, as you perceive, the exer- 
 cise of the imagination. Do not be afraid of this 
 word. . . . I do not mean a riotous power 
 which deals capriciously with facts, but a well- 
 124 
 
 So. 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 disciplined power whose sole function it is to form 
 conceptions which the intellect imperatively de- 
 mands.” “He must visualize the invisible.” So 
 said Professor Tyndall of the scientist. “He 
 endured as seeing Him who is invisible.” So says 
 the Bible of the man of faith. ‘The two sound very 
 much alike; they are alike. 
 
 All we are claiming for the super-sensible world 
 is what Professor Tyndall claims for the sub-sen- 
 sible world. And really these two, and the world 
 of sense, are one world, three in one; and no one of 
 the three is apprehended wholly without the 
 imagination. 
 
 All great scientists, therefore, are men of imag- 
 ination, and hence of faith. I do not wonder that 
 Professor Tyndall thought necessary to warn men 
 of the scientific mind not to be afraid of the word, 
 for some of them do not know how much they owe 
 to their own imagination, and to their faith. I 
 could undertake to add some verses to the eleventh 
 chapter of Hebrews and to place upon the list of 
 the faithful a long roll of names of men of science, 
 whose imagination was that of faith. 
 
 By faith Columbus, when he was called of God 
 
 125 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 to discover a new continent, went out not knowing 
 whither he went. By faith he sailed strange waters, 
 with Cabot, Magellan, Vespucius and Balboa, the 
 heirs with him of the same promise; and they be- 
 held, rising from the waters, new heavens and a 
 new earth, fresh from the hand of God, and be- 
 stowed upon men through faith. 
 
 By faith Copernicus lifted the earth from its 
 solid base and set it to moving in rhythmic order 
 round the sun; by faith he beheld all the suns and 
 suns of suns with planets in bright array, circling 
 round the throne of God; and this he discovered by 
 faith. 
 
 By faith Galileo, when he had been forced to re- 
 cant, still testified that the earth moves ever at the 
 decree of God; by faith he endured persecution till 
 the mind of his fellow men found its orbit in the 
 same true faith. 
 
 By faith La Place understood how the worlds 
 are made from star-dust, and framed by the word 
 of God, so that the things that are seen in the mak- 
 ing take their place in the established order of an 
 infinite God of goodness and might. 
 
 By faith Newton beheld in the fall of the apple 
 
 126 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 the demonstration of an all-pervading force, op- 
 erating by the unchanging will of God, so that the 
 worlds are held in place and that not by the things 
 that do appear. 
 
 By faith Paracelsus, when he was a-dying, be- 
 queathed to those who followed him an imperfect 
 science, much mixed with error, but left the inspira- 
 tion of his name to others through whom the 
 indivisible elements of earth and the laws that 
 combine them were made known. 
 
 These all died in faith, not receiving the 
 promises, but were persuaded of them and em- 
 braced them and moved toward them and _ be- 
 queathed to others the heritage of their faith. 
 
 By faith men suffered persecution, ridicule and 
 poverty, and walked from office to office wearily 
 and in threadbare garb, trying to enlist the sympa- 
 thy and faith of their fellow men in things the 
 world thought visionary, choosing rather to suffer 
 affliction as the children of faith than to sell their 
 vision for bread. 
 
 And as for Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall 
 and Spencer, these, too, were men of faith, and 
 their faith gave substance to the things they hoped 
 
 127 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 for, and led them from experiment to hypothesis, 
 anh from hypothesis to theory, and from theory to 
 discovery, and from faith to sight; these also were 
 the children of faith. 
 
 And what shall I more say? For the time would 
 fail me to tell of Stevenson and Fulton, of Morse 
 also and Edison, and Roentgen and Lister, and 
 Cyrus Field and Bell, of Marconi and Wilbur 
 Wright, who through faith made iron float, yoked_ 
 chariots to the invisible power of steam, caused the 
 human voice to be heard across thousands of miles, 
 brought the mind of man into touch with his fellow 
 man beyond the sea, filled the air with voices inau- 
 dible to the ear alone and intelligible only to faith, 
 and lifted the bodies and minds of men on wings of 
 wonder and set them to sailing amid the clouds. 
 
 Through faith they built railroads, irrigated des- 
 erts, and crossed the trackless ice to the poles, led 
 by faith in the compass and the friendly stars. By 
 faith they subdued climates, overcame hardships, 
 out of weakness were made strong, added to the 
 span of human life, wrought wonders incredible, 
 and filled the world with the news of their achieve- 
 ments that ceased to be wonderful through their 
 incredible certitude. 
 
 128 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 Now they who do such things see visions of them 
 before they come to pass, and thus are men of faith. 
 And these all, and they who labored with them and 
 before them, lived in faith, and those who died, died 
 in faith, that all who follow may add their knowl- 
 edge to that which is gone before, and the world by 
 the gift of all men of faith at last shall be made 
 perfect. 
 
 Is there a life beyond the grave? ‘The man of 
 sense and of sense alone, sees dust return to dust, 
 and answers, “Death ends all.” But life itself 
 makes a tremendous demand on the imagination. 
 Our present life is strange and wonderful past all 
 belief. It requires imagination to account for the 
 present union of matter and spirit in these bodies 
 of ours, for who understands it? And why should 
 it be thought a thing incredible that God should 
 raise the dead? 
 
 And when we come to believe in heaven, we still 
 have every appeal to the imagination in making our 
 belief a motive in righteousness. So the Bible tells 
 us in material figures a few things that furnish ma- 
 terial for the imagination. The gates of pearl, the 
 streets of gold, the ever-blooming flowers and the 
 
 129 
 
 Se 
 AS 
 
 ee 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 trees bearing fruit all the year, the nightless day 
 and the unending song—these are the rare ma- 
 terials for the sanctified imagination, to help us to 
 make real to the soul the things that “eye hath not 
 seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the 
 heart of man.” 
 
 We walk by sight, but not wholly, for we walk 
 by faith. And our appeal for clean streets, for 
 righteous politics, for the uplifting of mankind and 
 for the heaven that God hath prepared for them 
 that love Him, as an appeal to that sanctified 
 imagination which fruits in faith. 
 
 So let us rejoice in the glory of the human mind, 
 its power to know, its ability to love and rejoice and 
 its creative strength of will. And with it all, let us 
 cultivate that power of seeing the invisible, of form- 
 ing and cherishing ideals, and of framing an im- 
 pelling faith, through the enlightening influence of 
 that great gift of God, which gives substance to 
 things hoped for and affords evidence of things 
 not seen. So shall we add our names to those who 
 endure “‘as seeing Him who is invisible,” and share 
 in the triumph of faith. 
 
 And so I am ready to meet the pre 
 
 150 
 
 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 who asks if religion is not largely concerned with 
 the imagination and admit to him that it is. But I 
 also remind him that all his hope for the betterment 
 of human life, and all his inspiration for the life 
 that is to come, necessitate an appeal to the imagi- 
 nation. And I will go further and say that no- 
 where is that appeal more sane or practical than 
 within the sphere of religion. Whether it be to 
 make real my brother’s hunger to the practical end 
 that he may share my loaf, or whether it be that the 
 soul shall be elevated out of the weary round of the 
 commonplace and find fellowship with the hosts 
 immortal, the appeal is to the imagination. The 
 glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fel- 
 lowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, 
 these are the inspiring companions of the man with 
 the sanctified imagination. On his ears fall the 
 sweet melodies of the choir invisible, and his soli- 
 tary race in the lonely arena is cheered by the ap- 
 plause of the cloud of witnesses. And he endures 
 “as seeing Him who is invisible.” 
 
 Scientists are still discussing the conservation of 
 energy. ‘They are not sure whether there is or is 
 not such a thing as waste in the physical universe. 
 
 131 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 We can afford to wait for their investigation with 
 hearty interest in its result. Meantime, we are as- 
 sured that much that seems waste is not really so. 
 If fire consumes the wood, the whole mass of the 
 original log can be accounted for in the weight of 
 ashes and smoke and vapor; there is precisely as 
 much matter in the world as there was before. 
 HKinergy, also, is persistent in many, if not all cases, 
 where it appeared to have been dissipated. If we 
 were to add together that which the lightning flash 
 displays in heat and light and rending power, we 
 should be able to assert that all of it was still con- 
 served in the sum total of creation’s forces. 
 
 God holds matter cheap. Worlds are to Him 
 as small dust in the balance, and He taketh up the 
 isles as a very little thing. Force is not the most 
 precious thing in God’s possession; his is the king- 
 dom and the power; He can utilize the atomic ener- 
 gy we vaguely grope after and speculate about. 
 But character is God’s most precious product, and 
 most like Himself. Will God cherish with miserly 
 care his least valuable possessions and cast away 
 what has cost Him Gethsemanes of struggle, Cal- 
 varies of divine suffering? 
 
 182 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 Human reason cries out against this conception 
 of a God parsimonious of his cheapest and waste- 
 ful of his best. 
 
 “What is most excellent, that, as God is God, is 
 permanent.” 
 
 The body of man reaches its limit in height and 
 weight. This is a wise and necessary limitation; 
 but no such restriction applies to man’s power to 
 learn or to grow in goodness. 
 
 One of the most easily understood reasons for 
 immortality is the undying appetite of the soul for 
 knowledge and for love. As we approach the 
 limit of life, it never occurs to us that it is time to 
 fold our arms, close our eyes, and bid farewell to 
 nature, poetry, art and friendship. As long as our 
 faculties permit, we take exactly the same interest 
 in life that we would if we were to go on indefi- 
 nitely. 
 
 As we approach its physical limit we cease to 
 harass ourselves or others much about mere 
 questions of creed. A very few central truths 
 satisfy us. ‘Trust in God, love to man, are enough. 
 We cease to argue and to doubt, but we do not 
 cease to learn. The mind is still alert and the spirit 
 
 133 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 is eager for truth and righteousness. ne should 
 that process not go on forever? 
 
 Some good people have been concerned 1S the 
 doctrine of evolution should furnish an argument 
 against immortality. At what point in the ascent 
 of man, they ask, did the soul enter into immortal 
 relations with mortal life? That is a question 
 which does not belong to the evolution of the race 
 any more than it belongs to the evolution of each 
 individual in the race. Hach person begins with a 
 single cell and ascends in his pre-natal development 
 through stages analogous to those of lower forms. 
 We do not know at what point either in the life of 
 the individual or the race the foetus becomes hu- 
 man. Ina sense it was always human, both racial- 
 ly and individually; in another sense it passes over 
 from lower to higher stages of existence. The 
 problem is not to find the line but to discover the 
 significance of the fact. 
 
 Reverent believers in evolution, those who see 
 in it God’s way of working, have a new joy in its 
 implications. “It means,” they say, “that God was 
 always thinking of me.” It means that God’s in- 
 terest in the ascent of life goes as far back as the 
 
 134 
 
 ES a 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 spiral nebulew, and then as much further into the 
 unfathomable chaos. Still, God was there, and He 
 was thinking of us. He saw the end from the be- 
 ginning, and held this as the highest stage of evolu- 
 tion, that man, his masterpiece, was to become 
 capable of knowing God, being like God, and liv- 
 ing eternally with God. 
 
 We need not demand of modern science that it 
 prove to us the fact of immortality, nor cry out 
 against it as godless if it declares that it has made 
 no such discovery and thinks that it can never do 
 so. Personally, I question whether science as such 
 holds this prerogative. But if science can not prove 
 immortality neither can it disprove it, and there are 
 many scientists who have no desire to undertake 
 that task. Meantime, they have given us valued in- 
 formation about this life. For this they have our 
 thanks. And we have their good will, also, while 
 we seek, in the fields where it may properly be 
 found, the proof of life after death. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 SCIENCE concerns itself with phenomena, and en- 
 deavors to classify and explain the data of experi- 
 ence in orderly fashion and in accord with fixed 
 methods and reliable principles of cause and effect. 
 Philosophy seeks the unification of all knowledge, 
 and a rational synthesis of all the data of science. 
 Philosophy is, by its etymology, the love of wisdom, 
 but it is more than that. It is the attempt to make 
 wisdom out of what, without her aid, might be mere 
 knowledge. It might be expected or at least hoped 
 that the philosophers would be better able than the 
 scientists to give us a confident approach to a hope 
 of life after death. The philosophers have not all 
 agreed, but in the main they have treated the sub- 
 ject with reverence and with profitable results. 
 
 There occur to me seven ways in which people 
 may interpret life. The first is: To say that any 
 
 136 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 attempt to discriminate between good and evil is 
 subjective; that we have no valid reason to believe 
 that any such distinction exists in the world; that 
 all things are equally good and equally pure in the 
 universe at large; that a thing that is not good for 
 one purpose is good for another, and that probably 
 nothing is really good or evil at all; that the terms 
 good and evil are only our attempt to superimpose 
 our own subjective and variable judgments on a 
 universe that is inherently non-ethical. That is the 
 first way; to my mind an utterly inadequate at- 
 tempt to account for life and the universe. 
 
 The second theory holds that there may be good, 
 and probably is; that there may be evil, and prob- 
 ably is; at least there exist in the universe such cur- 
 rents and counter-currents as seem to us to be good 
 and evil; forces which we can not account for ex- 
 cept by calling them so; but that to distinguish any 
 moral purpose in the flux of things is utterly im- 
 possible for us; that the forces do not simply coun- 
 teract each other, but they are a confused mass of 
 counter-currents, which may or may not come to 
 an ethical result; and that they have no ultimate 
 destination as far as we can see; so that while there 
 
 137 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 is a possibility or even a probability of good and 
 evil, those qualities exist, if they do exist, without 
 discoverable ultimate purpose. 
 
 The third is a dualistic philosophy. It affirms 
 that there is good and there is evil, equally divided 
 as day and night are equally divided, two perma- 
 nent and opposing forces. One of the Chinese 
 philosophies represents this doctrine graphically 
 by a reverse curve carefully drawn through a circle, 
 half of it light and half of it dark. You may draw 
 through such a circle a diameter in any direction 
 through the center, always half will be light and 
 half will be dark. Some of the philosophies and 
 some of the religions of the world, even some that 
 call themselves Christian, are based essentially 
 upon that fundamental hostility. ‘There are Chris- 
 tians who so exalt the devil into a kind of negative 
 God as logically to classify themselves in the cat- 
 egory of dualists. 
 
 The fourth is the philosophy of pure pessimism, 
 which is to say that the evil in the world is so un- 
 deniable, so present in even the best of what men 
 call good, that the Creator (if there be one) is to 
 be judged only by the world which He has made, 
 
 138 
 
 
 
 } 
 ‘ 
 : 
 
 — ee eee ee ee eee i ene Sa ee 
 
 ee ee eee eee 
 
 en ee ————— eee 
 
 es a e, 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 and we can not know Him to be good or imagine 
 Him to be other than malignant. Presumably the 
 Creator is Just as good and just as bad as the world 
 which He has made; and being so, He could not 
 have made the world as bad as it is if He had not 
 been fundamentally bad at heart. Whatever good 
 there is, according to this theory, is Just enough to 
 save us from suicide, and the Creator desires us to 
 live that we may suffer a little longer. This is the 
 philosophy of Schopenhauer, and of Nietzsche. 
 This philosophy is growing in some sections of po- 
 lite society. There is something to be said for it. 
 To my mind there is just enough truth in it to 
 emphasize its utter and infernal folly. 
 
 The next is a complete antithesis of the one we 
 have been considering. It holds that God is good 
 and only good and eternally good and there can 
 not enter into his life and into his purpose any 
 conception of evil; and therefore the world is good 
 and only good, and nothing in it can be anything 
 else than good, and we are to deny that anything is 
 evil or that evil could be. 
 
 The sixth teaches that God is good and God 
 always has been good, and God always will be good, 
 
 139 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 but the world is bad, as bad at present as it can be; 
 and probably getting worse. But if you ask how 
 a good God could make a bad world, the answer is 
 that it was made good and something happened to 
 it; a snake got in, or the devil—into the garden, or 
 into the heart of a man or a woman, one or both. In 
 the beginning God made all good and something 
 occurred to it to change it, and whether it now can 
 be repaired is the problem of Theology. Some 
 think it is getting better and some think it is get- 
 ting worse, but the idea is of a perfect world in the 
 beginning, the mirror of the mind of a perfect God, 
 but a world which has met with some moral mishap. 
 
 I shall not stop to speak of these six. Each has 
 its stout defenders. All of them to my mind are 
 inadequate. 
 
 We come now to the last. It calls for the most 
 faith of any, in that it calls for the most perfect 
 vision of them all. It says that God is good, funda- 
 mentally and eternally good, and that He has made 
 a world, the bed rock of which is his own everlast- 
 ing goodness; that the undeniable evil that is in it is 
 somehow the expression of his goodness; that the 
 world has never got away from Him; that God is 
 
 140 
 
 ee ae ES ee i, rte te So cnt 
 
 Retr ae 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 still in the saddle; that God is still on the throne: 
 God is still King of the world; that even the forces 
 of evil and unrestraint are under his control, 
 working out a more glorious form of his eternal 
 goodness than the world has yet seen. That calls 
 for no cheap and easy optimism. Over against the 
 easier, cheaper forms which sing and trip along— 
 
 God’s in his heaven 
 All’s right in the world; 
 
 this says, “God is working in his world, and all’s 
 right with his heaven.” God made a good world, 
 but a world that lacked the perfection of moral 
 character, because character is the one good thing 
 which God can not furnish ready made. ‘The world 
 never has been perfect, but is working toward per- 
 fection. 
 
 There is only one religion that is brave enough 
 to face all the facts of life, the bitter and the un- 
 pleasant facts as well as the facts that are agreeable 
 and readily intelligible. It is no cheap and easy 
 optimism which we find in the Bible. It is an 
 optimism which arrives at its basis of assurance 
 through conflict; that discovers its certainty of 
 
 141 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 divine love while looking squarely in the face of the 
 contentions and sorrows of the world. 
 
 Swift and violent are the reactions of the human 
 mind in times such as these in which we now live, 
 and great is the temptation to react toward some 
 form of social or spiritual hysteria. Jiven desir-' 
 able changes are liable to occur in undesirable 
 ways, and truths neglected to spring up, bound 
 hand and foot with the grave clothes of error. We 
 are in a new era, not only in politics but in religion. 
 It emerged from the chaos of war, and it 1s still 
 without form and void, and darkness is upon the 
 face of the deep. May the Spirit of God brood 
 upon the waters, and bring to the world order, light 
 and life. 
 
 It is not strange that before the War, faith in im- 
 mortality burned low in the socket. Our studies 
 in science and religion had been almost wholly in 
 other directions, and our philosophy had sought to 
 discover whether it could not somehow modify the 
 declaration of Novalis, that “Philosophy can bake 
 us no bread; but she can procure for us God, free- 
 dom and immortality.” The baking of bread had 
 become a highly important vocation, and the quest 
 
 142 
 
 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 for immortality a neglected pursuit. Philosophy 
 had largely given place to psychology, and psychol- 
 ogy was a cheap word in the mouth of the faker. 
 Science had become nothing if not “comparative” 
 and the religious disciplines nothing if not “‘social.”’ 
 It is said that Agassiz introduced the new order of 
 thinking into modern science in a single sentence 
 in criticism of a new book which his associates at a 
 scientific dinner were commending—‘The fatal 
 error of the book is that while it is descriptive it is 
 not comparative.” Descriptive works in natural 
 science were thenceforth counted of value only as 
 material for investigation. Comparative anatomy, 
 comparative zoology, comparative psychology be- 
 came the new order, and the word “comparative” 
 ruled in all sciences dealing with life in any of its - 
 forms. ‘The human hand, the human eye, the hu- 
 man brain ceased to be studied as they had been 
 studied in the days of Paley, as proofs of intelligent 
 design on the part of an all-wise and all-good Cre- 
 ator, and assumed their places in the catalogue of 
 comparative forms of evolution, having common 
 origins and diversified adaptations to environment. 
 The hand, for instance, was no longer an argument 
 143 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 we 
 
 in natural theology, showing the perfection of 
 God’s work in man who was made in the image of 
 God, but was an adaptation of a highly developed 
 form of mammalian life, analogous in its essential 
 anatomical parts to other developments of the 
 quadruped type, and comparable, bone for bone, 
 artery for artery, nerve for nerve, muscle for mus- 
 cle, with the paw of the lion, the wing of the bird 
 and the flipper of the whale, all of them variant 
 forms of the same generic type. Even religion 
 was no longer to be studied as if there were one 
 true and many false religions, but all religions 
 were to be recognized as the gropingss of the human 
 mind after God, if haply they might find Him, 
 _who was not far from every one of them. Com- 
 parative religion became as essential as compara- 
 tive anatomy. 
 
 Moving in the other direction, religion had rushed 
 with ardor into all manner of social experiment. 
 The Gospel was discovered, not primarily as a 
 preparation for death, but as a rule of life, and that 
 life essentially social. A whole group of new 
 sciences and philosophies sprang into being. We 
 had for the first time social psychology, social 
 : 144 
 
 -= 
 
 Tee 
 
 a 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 ethics, and in a sense, a new social gospel. Wash- 
 ington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbush did 
 not live in vain. Rauschenbush was able before he 
 died to see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied 
 with the widespread preaching of the social Gospel 
 for which earlier he had pleaded, to publish a book 
 lamenting that that social Gospel had as yet no 
 adequate theory, and to attempt himself to furnish 
 the outlines of A Theology for the Social Gospel. 
 
 Inevitably these studies, theological and scien- 
 tific as well as philosophical, tended to a pragmatic 
 adaptation of religion to the needs of the present 
 life. “One world at a time” was almost enough for 
 it. A man not much beyond middle age could say, 
 as one did say: 
 
 “In my childhood, the preaching was seventy- 
 five per cent about hell, twenty per cent about 
 heaven, and five per cent about this present life. 
 Then came a time when it was seventy-five per 
 cent about heaven, twenty per cent about hell, and 
 the same old five per cent about this life. And now 
 it is ninety per cent about this life, ten per cent 
 about heaven, and hell is a back number.” 
 
 His percentages may be open to dispute, but the 
 
 145 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 shifting of emphasis had occurred within his per- 
 sonal recollection. In 1916 Professor James H. 
 Leuba of Bryn Mawr, published a book,* in which 
 he set forth results of inquiries, among college stu- 
 dents, scientists and men of standing in the literary 
 world, but especially among the students of one 
 college for women. It was found that only a mui- 
 nority of those whom he had interrogated believed 
 in personal immortality. He believed that faith 
 had little practical value in the life of modern ed- 
 ucated people. Holding, as he did, that the real 
 ground for the continuance of this belief in a per- 
 sonal God, was not the validity of the positive 
 proofs, but the practical utility of the beliefs them- 
 selves, he challenged the practical utility of the be- 
 lief, and declared that the answer commonly given 
 to the question of such utility was wholly uncon- 
 vincing. 
 
 Such were the straws that showed some currents 
 of the wind when America entered the World War. 
 
 Of the dimming of faith in immortality before 
 the War, and of the way in which the War com- 
 pelled the world to think of the fact of life and the 
 
 
 
 *The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthro- 
 pological and Statistical study. By James H. Leuba. Boston, 
 Sherman, French & Company, 1916. 
 
 146 
 
 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 mystery of death, Dean Inge, of Saint Paul’s in 
 London, says: 
 
 References to the future life had, before the 
 War, become rare even in the pulpit. The topic was 
 mainly reserved for letters of condolence and was 
 then handled gingerly, as if it would not bear much 
 pressure. Working-class audiences and congrega- 
 tions listened eagerly to the wildest promises of an 
 earthly Utopia the day after to-morrow, but cooled 
 down at once when they were reminded that “‘if in 
 this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all 
 men most miserable.” Accordingly, the clerical 
 demagogue showed more interest in the unem- 
 ployed than in the unconverted. Christianity, 
 which began as a revolutionary idealism, had sunk 
 into heralding an apocalyptic revolution. Such 
 teachers have no message of hope and comfort for 
 those who have lost their dearest. And they have, 
 in fact, been deserted. Their secularized Christian- 
 ty was received with half-contemptuous approval 
 by trade unions, but far deeper hopes, fears, and 
 longings have been stirred, which concern all men 
 and women alike, and on the answers to which the 
 whole value of existence is now seen to depend. 
 Christianity can answer them, but not the Churches 
 through the mouths of their accredited representa- 
 tives. And so, instead of “the blessed hope of ever- 
 lasting life,” the bereaved have been driven to this 
 pathetic and miserable substitute, the barbaric be- 
 lief in ghosts and demons, which was old before 
 
 147 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Christianity was young. And what a starveling 
 hope it is that necromancy offers us! An existence 
 as poor and unsubstantial as that of Homer’s 
 Hades, which the shade of Achilles would have 
 been glad to exchange for serfdom to the poorest 
 farmer, and with no guarantee of permanence, even 
 if the power of comforting or terrifying surviving 
 relations is supposed to persist for a few years. 
 Such a prospect would add a new terror to death; 
 and none would desire it for himself. It is plainly 
 the dream of an aching heart, which can not bear 
 to be left alone.—Swurvival and Immortality in 
 Hibbert Journal. 
 
 The philosophers have not been able to set forth 
 the facts of human life without taking account of 
 man’s hope of immortality. They have sought to 
 discover in the realm of pure thought and in the 
 conditions of life, the basis which may exist for such 
 a hope, and to a surprising extent they have given 
 utterance to a firm faith in a life beyond the grave. 
 We have no present purpose to attempt the merest 
 outline of their approach to the subject. Volumes 
 which deal with this aspect of their thinking are 
 reasonably abundant. We may, however, refresh 
 our memory with a glance at the method of reason- 
 ing of some of the leading thinkers of ancient and 
 of modern times. 
 
 148 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 We begin with Plato, remembering that in his 
 writings we have also the teaching of Socrates. 
 
 Plato believed that the soul had existence before 
 it entered the life of this world. His belief in a 
 future life was Joined to a belief that life had 
 passed through a previous existence. Plato held 
 that immortality 1s not a doctrine for philosophy so 
 much as it is for theology. He does however at- 
 tempt an explanation. God, he says, is good, and 
 free from all jealousy. He wants the largest pos- 
 sible number of beings to share his perfection. 
 Upon the beings thus created, God confers the 
 eternity which of right belongs to Him alone. This 
 is a very close approach to the Christian doctrine 
 of God, “Who only hath immortality, dwelling in 
 the light which no man can approach unto;” (I 
 Timothy 6:16), but who has freely granted this 
 quality of his own perfection to those whom He has 
 made in his own image. 
 
 To be sure, Plato does not always deal with the 
 subject on this high level of assurance. In his 
 Apology, his Phedo, his Republic and his Phe- 
 drus he approached the question from different 
 angles, and at times seemed to be less convinced by 
 
 149 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 his own reasoning; but this only shows how many 
 angles of approach this philosopher found and his 
 effort to explore each avenue honestly to its own 
 proper ending. 
 
 The philosophy of Socrates has been considered 
 in some respects agnostic. That term should not be 
 accepted either in his case or in that of the men who 
 in the beginning applied it to their own position as 
 implying any degree of disinclination to believe. 
 It was to him and to many of them the attitude of 
 the open mind. When Socrates was condemned to 
 death, he faced his judges and calmly accepted his 
 sentence. In a brief and most memorable speech 
 he said to them that, while they had not so intended 
 it, they were doing him a kindness. If death was a 
 dreamless sleep, as some supposed, that would 
 bring him relief from many trials and cares, and 
 crown a life which he was content to look back upon 
 without regret. But he thought it possible that 
 death was not a sleep, but a new life in Hades, in 
 which event he would have opportunity to converse 
 with Rhadamanthus and with the heroes and sages 
 of all past ages. If death were but a sleep, his 
 judges had done him a kindness; if it should prove 
 indeed a new life, then great would be his gain. 
 
 150 
 
 —— a 
 
 ie) 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 Calm in this assurance, he lived the thirty days 
 that, under the unusual conditions of his sentence, 
 he had to live, received his friends, conversed on 
 high themes, refused all proposals made by his 
 friends that would have enabled him to escape, and 
 met death on the high plane of a serene confidence 
 that all was well with him. 
 
 Of modern philosophy, the fountain head is Im- 
 manuel Kant. He did not regard immortality as 
 proved by pure reason, but he reached assurance 
 by what he called practical reason. He sought, as 
 did Plato and Socrates, the summum bonum, or 
 highest good for man. Flow is man to know that 
 good and attain it? Man has in him conscience, 
 which does not say, “This is desirable,” but ‘This is 
 what you must do, or fail of your duty.” The char- 
 acteristic of conscience is its assumption of au- 
 thority, its categorical imperative. This conscience 
 possessed by man is nothing more nor less than the 
 indwelling life of God. It is of the nature of Rea- 
 son, but it is in itself unreasonable, unless there 
 is a God from whom it proceeds, and who will 
 give opportunity for it to realize its fruition. But 
 that opportunity can not be realized in a limited 
 life such as we lead here. The God who has put 
 
 15] 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 within us the expression of his own life in the cat- 
 egorical imperative will provide adequate life for 
 its realization. This is Kant’s argument in his own 
 words: 
 
 The realization of the swmmum bonum in the 
 world is the necessary object of a will determinable 
 by the moral law. But in this will the perfect ac- 
 cordance of the mind with the moral law is the su- 
 preme condition of the summum bonum. 'This 
 then must be possible, as well as its object, since it 
 is contained in the command to promote the latter. 
 Now, the perfect accordance of the will with the 
 ~moral law is holiness, a perfection of which no ra- 
 tional being of the sensible world is capable at any 
 moment of his existence. Since, nevertheless, it is 
 required as practically necessary, it can only be 
 found in a progress in infinitum toward that per- 
 fect accordance, and on the principles of pure 
 practical reason it 1s necessary to assume such a 
 practical progress as the real object of our will. 
 
 Now, this endless progress is only possible on the — 
 supposition of an endless duration of the existence 
 and personality of the same rational being (which 
 is called the immortality of the soul). ‘The sum- 
 mum bonum, then, practically is only possible on 
 the supposition of the immortality of the soul; con- 
 sequently this immortality, being inseparably con- 
 nected with the moral law, is a postulate of pure 
 practical reason (by which J mean a theoretical 
 proposition, not demonstrable as such, but which is 
 
 152 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 an inseparable result of an unconditioned a priori 
 practical law) .* 
 
 And again: 
 
 In the foregoing analysis the moral law led to a 
 practical problem which is prescribed by pure rea- 
 son alone, without the aid of any sensible motives, 
 namely, that of the necessary completeness of the 
 first and principal element of the swmmwm bonum, 
 viz. Morality; and as this can be perfectly solved 
 only in eternity, to the postulate of immortality. 
 The same law must also lead us to affirm the pos- 
 sibility of the second element of the swmmwim. bo- 
 num, viz. Happiness proportioned to that morality, 
 and this on grounds as disinterested as before, and 
 solely from impartial reason; that is, it must lead 
 to the supposition of the existence of a cause ad- 
 equate to this effect; in other words, it must pos- 
 tulate the Haistence of God, as the necessary 
 condition of the possibility of the swmmum bonum 
 (an object of the will which is necessarily connected 
 with the moral legislation of pure reason). 
 
 The postulate of the possibility of the highest 
 derived good (the best world) is likewise the pos- 
 tulate of the reality of a highest original good, that 
 is to say, of the existence of God. Now it was seen 
 to be a duty for us to promote the summum bonum; 
 consequently it is not merely allowable, but it is a 
 necessity connected with duty as a requisite, that 
 we should presuppose the possibility of this swm- 
 mum bonum; and as this is possible only on con- 
 
 
 
 *Crit. of Pract. Reason, bk. ii. ch. ii, § iv., trans. Abbott. 
 158 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 dition of the existence of God, it inseparably 
 connects the supposition of this with duty; that 1s, 
 it is morally necessary to assume the existence of 
 
 God.* 
 
 True philosophy is not content with an immor- 
 tality which is survival and nothing more. It de- 
 mands an immortality that gives full opportunity 
 for the expression of the exuberance of human life. 
 Of that life as here manifest, William James 
 
 wrote: 
 
 Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the 
 exuberant excess of his subjective propensities— 
 his preeminence over them simply and solely in the 
 number and in the fantastic and unnecessary char- 
 acter of his wants, physical, moral, esthetic, and 
 intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest 
 for the superfluous he would never have established 
 himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the nec- 
 essary. And from the consciousness of this he 
 should draw the lesson that his wants are to be 
 trusted; that even when their gratification seems 
 farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the 
 best guide of his life and will lead him to issues 
 entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. 
 Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you 
 undo him. ‘The appetite for immediate consistency 
 at any cost, or what the logicians call the “law of 
 parsimony’’—which is nothing but the passion for 
 conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving 
 
 *Ibid., 8 v. 
 154 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 way—will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, 
 end by blighting the development of the intellect 
 itself quite as much as that of the feeling or the will. 
 The scientific conception of the world as an army 
 of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion 
 most exquisitely. But if the religion of exclusive 
 scientificism should ever succeed in suffocating all 
 other appetites out of a nation’s mind, and imbuing 
 a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and 
 consistency demand a tabula rasa to be made of 
 every notion that does not form part of the soi- 
 disant scientific synthesis, that nation, that race, 
 will just as surely go to ruin and fall a prey to their 
 more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of 
 the field, as a whole, have fallen a prey to man. 
 
 In the face of life’s stupendous mysteries, we can 
 afford to be very modest in our affirmations, and 
 charitable toward those who do not share our con- 
 fidence. ‘loo often men have been condemned as 
 atheists who were at the worst agnostics. They have 
 suffered the opprobrium of harsh names when they 
 should at least have been credited with honesty in 
 refusing to affirm doctrines which, sometimes re- 
 luctantly, they found themselves impelled to doubt. 
 Faith in immortality is a precious possession to him 
 who is able to afford it; but even more precious 
 than faith is charity. No man having faith in im- 
 
 155 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 mortality gains by that faith the right to be cen- 
 sorious toward those who doubt. 
 
 Even the doubters have their faith. None of us 
 is consistent, least of all can those be consistent who 
 deal in negations. Sooner or later hope rises above 
 denial, and hope is akin to faith. 
 
 I am not sure that we have any right to divide 
 men into groups of believers and infidels. Some of 
 those who believe have never had faith enough to 
 nourish a doubt; and some of those who doubt 
 might prompt the Lord to say, “I have not found 
 so great faith, no not in Israel.” 
 
 Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll was an orator, not a 
 scholar; a poet rather than a philosopher. Yet he 
 had what may be called his philosophy of the future 
 life. Called to speak at the grave of his brother, 
 and again at the grave of a friend, and still again 
 at the grave of a little child, he uttered what was his 
 personal creed, the right to hope for the best: 
 
 _ “We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help 
 for the living—Hope for the dead.” 
 
 He did not pretend to know: 
 “Every cradle asks us ‘Whence? and every cof- 
 
 fin, “Whither? ‘The poor barbarian, weeping 
 156 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 above his dead, can answer these questions just as 
 well as the robed priest of the most authentic 
 creed.” 
 
 “In the presence of death, how beliefs and dog- 
 mas wither and decay! How loving words and 
 deeds burst into blossom! All wish for happiness 
 beyond this life. All hope to meet again the loved 
 and lost. In every heart there grows this sacred 
 flower. Immortality is a word that Hope through 
 all the ages has been whispering to Love. Let us 
 believe that over the cradle Nature bends and 
 smiles, and lovingly above the dead in benediction 
 holds her outstretched hands.” 
 
 “Life is a narrow vale between the cold and bar- 
 ren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to 
 look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the 
 only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From 
 the voiceless lips of our unreplying dead there 
 comes no word; but in the night of death Hope 
 sees a star, and listening Love can hear the rustle 
 of a wing.” 
 
 These are sentences quoted from his addresses at 
 the grave. Shall we say that under stress of emo- 
 tion he contradicted the negations of his own 
 creed? It would not be fair thus to accuse him. 
 Rather it would be more true to say that he him- 
 self did not regard these hopes based on love as a 
 
 157 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 denial of his every day creed. He did not know, 
 but he hoped. 
 
 Of a friend who died, sharing his doubt and 
 faith, he said: 
 
 “Fe lived for this world: if there be another, he 
 will live for that.” 
 
 He maintained that we do not know whether 
 death is a wall or a door; the beginning or the end 
 of a day; the folding forever of wings, or the 
 spreading of pinions to soar; the rise or set of a 
 sun; the quiet end of life or the beginning of an 
 endless life that brings the rapture of love. Of 
 this he was sure, that immortality must be more 
 than a continuity of life: it must bring recognition 
 and love: 
 
 “TY had rather live and love where death is king 
 than have eternal life where love is not. Another 
 life is naught unless we know and love again the 
 ones who love us here.” 
 
 But he would not live on negations: 
 
 “Whatever flower of hope springs in my heart I 
 will cherish; I will give it breath of sighs and rain 
 of tears.” 
 
 158 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 When he was told that he had been accused of 
 attempting to destroy men’s faith in immortality, 
 he denied it. Immortality, he said, was a hope that 
 no man could destroy, and he had no desire to de- 
 stroy it: it was a hope that sprang from Love and 
 would persist so long as Love reached out its hand 
 and held to the cold hand of Death. But are we to 
 meet and know our loved ones? 
 
 “Reason says, ‘Perhaps,’ and Hope whispers, 
 “Yes; 
 
 There is a sense in which we are all philosophers | 
 by compulsion. We can not restrain ourselves 
 from asking the reasons for things and seeking to 
 unify our little broken knowledge. 
 
 If a man were to spend his life beside the Ni- 
 agara River and had little knowledge of geography 
 or natural science, but was possessed of reasonable 
 intelligence, he would find himself continually 
 meditating about the river whose waters were flow- 
 ing past him, by day and by night, and would ask 
 himself, “Where does this water come from, and 
 where does it go to?’ He would observe that the 
 stream flowed ever in one direction; that it never 
 reversed its current; that it flowed gently at the 
 upper_end of the short stream, but gathered mo- 
 
 159 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 mentum, and moved more and more swiftly, until 
 at last with terrific speed it plunged over the edge 
 of the chasm, to be lost below in the whirlpool and 
 swallowed up in a vast mystery. 
 
 He would sometimes ask himself, “Is there any 
 power on earth that can lift those waters up again 
 to their former level above the Falls?’ He would 
 be very likely to answer that there can be no such 
 power. He could hardly be expected to think oth- 
 erwise. He could see nothing, understand nothing, 
 to justify any other opinion. The water flowed 
 down from an unknown source, running faster and 
 faster, until at last it disappeared over the Falls, 
 and that was virtually the end of it. It flowed on 
 to unseen mysteries, but it came back never. He 
 might even come to see a certain fascination in it, 
 think it a desirable arrangement, and lose all wish 
 to have it otherwise. 
 
 But even as he looked, the water would be ris- 
 ing. He could not see it or understand it, but the 
 very mist into which the falling water was dashed, 
 would be the beginning of its elevation. And if he 
 could but know it, the silent power of the sun play- 
 ing upon it was able to lift it up, not simply to its 
 
 160 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 former level at the brink of the chasm, but higher 
 than the river, higher than the lake above the river, 
 up and up, into the very sky, where rainbows would 
 play through it, and the sunlight find joy in its 
 companionship. And in time, it would be sent on 
 fresh ministries, unending opportunities of service. 
 
 We live on the banks of such a stream. Its wa- 
 ters flow ever in one direction. ‘They go faster and 
 faster as the years multiply, and they take a plunge 
 which carries them from our sight. ‘That river is 
 the stream of human life. We may not sit upon its 
 banks, for we flow with it and are a part of it; but 
 we are able to see the direction of its current and to 
 witness the plunge before we ourselves take it. We 
 are compelled to ask ourselves again and again, 
 What is the source of life, and what is its destiny? 
 
 It is not strange that our first answer should be 
 that death ends all. It is not to be wondered that 
 we see no great distance down the gorge or beyond 
 the whirlpool. The wonder is that we see as much 
 as we do, or that we possess as much faith as we 
 know ourselves to have. 
 
 But the power of God that lifts the water out of 
 the cataract, out of the whirlpool, out of the very 
 
 161 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 ocean, and sends it, purified and illumined, on other 
 ministries, is capable of lifting human life out of 
 the grave, and giving to it new opportunity, new 
 service, new light and life. 
 
 A rational hope of immortality involves the sur- 
 vival of personality and the continued existence of 
 personal identity. There will be recognition of 
 loved ones, and a permanence of social relation- 
 ships. We shall not be impersonal units in a celes- 
 tial mob, and our friends will not be lost to us in 
 the unnumbered and unidentified multitude. 
 
 Let us carry this thought further in the relation 
 of this present life to the life to come. I shall not 
 lead you into any of those fantastic, and to my 
 mind, unworthy imaginings which of late have be- 
 come common; neither shall we go wholly into the 
 realm of speculative theology. I am proposing to 
 outline my own approach to a study of this subject. 
 I do not claim that this line of thought is original 
 with me; it is in essential accord with that set forth 
 by the eminent physician of three hundred years 
 ago, Sir Thomas Browne. It is also that which 
 was developed by Gustav Theodor Fechner who 
 was not a theologian but whose province was 
 
 162 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 physics and psychology. His work in cosmogony 
 and in the study of electrical energy and the va- 
 lidity of the atomic theory has made him an au- 
 thority in those departments of research. He was 
 also a very direct and practical philosopher. 
 
 Following a line of thought parallel with Fech- 
 ner, and in places essentially the same as his, I give 
 my own confession of faith in terms of a phil- 
 osophic interpretation of life and hope. 
 
 We live, in this life of which our conscious earth- 
 experience is a part, not once, but certainly twice, 
 and I rather think three times. We are living now, 
 and we know it. We have lived previously, and we 
 just as certainly know that, and we have what I be- 
 lieve are valid hopes for a life to come. 
 
 Compare for a few moments the life we now have 
 with that which we know we formerly possessed. 
 We need not go into those fine and suggestive un- 
 certainties so beautifully set forth by Wordsworth: 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
 _ 'The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 
 Hath elsewhere had its setting, 
 And cometh from afar. 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 
 163 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
 From God, who is our home! 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy. 
 
 Such thoughts move us profoundly by their 
 beauty and suggestiveness. We seek to fathom our 
 own souls, and look deep into the eyes of children 
 to discover if they may be true. 
 
 But we are to keep close to the simple facts as we 
 know them, and we say, The life that we are now 
 living is part and parcel of a life which had a pre- 
 vious existence, and we know it. We are to think 
 for a few minutes about that previous life of 
 ours, that it may provide us whatever suggestions 
 it affords of another life. 
 
 Every one who now is here lived on earth before. 
 We lived lives that are plainly continued in this 
 life, lives for which that form of life was a prepara- 
 tion. For the space of some ten lunar months each 
 one of us lived in that previous state. Now, for 
 varying periods—in some instances as many as 
 three score years and ten—we have lived some- 
 what as we now are living. 
 
 In the first stage, man lives alone in the dark- 
 ness; in the second, he lives in association with com- 
 
 164 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 panions and friends; in the third stage he is to live 
 in a higher social sphere, in which we shall know 
 perfectly, even as we are known, and discern ulti- 
 mate verities. 
 
 Our previous life was a continuous sleep; our 
 present life alternates between sleeping and wak- 
 ing; the coming stage of our life will be of ever- 
 lasting consciousness. 
 
 The function of the first stage was to prepare a 
 body and brain suited to the second stage; and the 
 function of the second is to develop a character 
 fitted for the third. 
 
 Now, in the first stage, we had eyes that never 
 opened, and which, if they had opened, could have 
 seen nothing; but those eyes that were formed in 
 darkness were formed for the light. In the first 
 stage we had ears that never heard a sound, but 
 though formed in the silence, they were made for 
 hearing. All the light of the seven colors of the 
 spectrum, all the sounds and chords of the octave, 
 were created for eyes and ears that were made in 
 darkness and silence. 
 
 It seems to me quite impossible that the little un- 
 born child should have any premonition of the pur- 
 
 165 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 pose for which it is living and is to live; but if we 
 could imagine it to be possible that through the 
 telepathy of love the little life might ask of its 
 mother, “Are these parts of me which have no pres- 
 ent use made for any use hereafter?” the mother 
 would whisper, “Yes, my dear little one, your eyes 
 are forming to behold beautiful things, and your 
 ears are so created as to enjoy rich harmonies, and 
 your tiny hands and feet are for a world where you 
 can use and enjoy them and do useful things with 
 them; and if I can not tell you everything that you 
 would like to know, believe the best that you pos- 
 sibly can believe; it is all true, and more.” 
 
 There are two transitions from one to another of 
 these three stages of our life. Both are through 
 darkness and pain. The first of them we call birth; 
 the other we call death. As we could not ad- 
 equately interpret the first before our birth, so 
 neither can we fully understand that the darkness 
 and pain of death are the way to light and joy, but 
 it is true. 
 
 To what extent is it true that life is continuous 
 through all these stages? The body which we now 
 have is the same body that we had before we were 
 born, taller and larger and modified by growth and 
 
 166 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 contact with the world, but the same. Are we to! 
 believe in the resurrection of the body? 
 
 The ancient creeds say, “I believe in the resur- 
 rection of the body.” Personally, I prefer nct to 
 be asked to express my own faith in those precise 
 words. I should prefer that whatever creeds I am 
 asked to recite should be formulated as nearly as 
 may be in terms of the thought of my own gen- 
 eration. But this may not always be. If we are to 
 recite our faith in unison with other Christians we 
 must be allowed all reasonable elasticity in the use 
 of words. The makers of the old creeds knew no 
 possibility of personal survival apart from the 
 body. When they said, “I believe in the resurrec- 
 tion of the body,” they meant, “I believe in the sur- 
 vival of personal identity.” If I find myself in a 
 congregation which is using such a creed I do not 
 forbear to recite the words with them, but I believe, 
 and I think they also believe, in general, what the 
 makers of the creed meant, the survival of per- 
 sonality. 
 
 As to the survival of the physical body, let us 
 employ an illustration which seems to me sug- 
 gestive. 
 
 It is not quite true that the body which we now 
 
 167 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 have is identical in its parts with what constituted 
 the body of the unborn child. In the embryonic 
 period it was only a part of his body, and in the 
 early stages of life, a minor part. The other part 
 enveloped it, and gave it life. The two developed 
 together, and the two were born together. But 
 they were soon separated, and the part that had 
 been so useful was discarded immediately as being 
 no longer of use. No one cared very much what 
 became of that discarded envelope that had _ be- 
 longed to the body. It was buried soon and with- 
 out grief. No one ever desired that it should 
 return to cumber a body which it had once sup- 
 ported but which had become capable of indepen- 
 dent existence. 
 
 Now, I suppose that if the unborn child could be 
 told that as soon as it was born its body would be 
 cut in two and one part discarded and buried, never 
 to rise again, the little infant mind would be 
 stricken with terror. How could it possibly live 
 without that part of its being which it had always 
 possessed, and which had furnished it its very life 
 blood and sustenance? The little mind might even 
 try to formulate a foolish creed affirming its belief 
 
 168 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH 
 
 in the permanent survival of all that it regarded as 
 its body, all that it had found essential to its life and 
 well-being. I suppose we are not much more capa- 
 ble of making wise creeds that dogmatize about the 
 relations of this physical body to the spiritual life. 
 It is enough for us to know that personality will 
 survive, and will evolve for its spiritual uses an or- 
 ganism suited to its continued life. 
 
 I think of this present wonderful body of ‘ours as 
 a kind of placenta for the spiritual organism that 
 shall relate itself to our spiritual life and express 
 our spiritual nature in the world to come. I do not 
 despise these beautiful bodies of ours, but I like to 
 think that our spiritual life is capable of develop- 
 ing for its expression an organism as well adapted 
 to its future existence as this one is to our present 
 existence. This present body is but the placenta of 
 the spiritual organism that is to be. 
 
 The immortality which the best of our philoso- 
 phers teach is an immortality which recognizes the 
 unlimited capacity of the human soul for growth; 
 its capacity for joy, for love, for goodness. It 
 gives us not life, merely, but life more abundant. 
 
 We can not claim that philosophy has given to us 
 
 169 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 a demonstration of immortality; that would be too 
 much to ask; but it does give to us the assurance 
 that faith in immortality is reasonable, as judged 
 by the tests of sound and sane thinking. It enables 
 us to go back over the history of human thought 
 and say with Addison: 
 
 It must be so—P lato, thou reasonest well— 
 Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 
 This longing after immortality ? 
 
 Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, 
 Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul 
 Back on herself and startles at destruction? 
 
 Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 
 "Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter 
 And intimates Eternity to man. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 IMMORTALITY IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 CONSIDERING that some of the fathers of the Jew- 
 ish nation lived in Egypt, and that Egypt was 
 never far away from their place of sojourn, it is 
 nothing less than remarkable that the Old Testa- 
 ment contains so little about immortality. The Tel 
 el-Amarna letters show us that in the centuries al- 
 most immediately preceding the occupancy of 
 Palestine by the people of Israel, that land was 
 ruled by Egypt: it is strange that Egyptian re- 
 ligion left there no notable mark of its own faith in 
 the survival of the soul. 
 
 Let us see if we can find immortality in the Old 
 Testament. 
 
 The doctrine of personal immortality is not 
 taught in the Law of Moses. 
 
 The doctrine of life after death is not taught in 
 the prophets. When Isaiah, greatest of all the 
 
 171 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 prophets, went to see Hezekiah, who was sick, he 
 
 had no message of everlasting life with which to 
 
 comfort him. And when Hezekiah later recorded 
 
 the prayer he made to God, and which God heard 
 
 for his recovery, it was a prayer which contained a 
 
 distinct denial of immortality. 
 
 For the grave can not praise thee, death can not 
 celebrate thee: 
 
 They that go down into the pit can not hope for thy 
 truth. 
 
 The living, the living; he shall praise thee, as I do 
 this day: 
 
 The father to the children shall make known thy 
 truth.—lIsaiah 38 :18-20. 
 
 For a long time the doctrine held was that a man 
 was to survive in his posterity, or in his nation. It 
 was believed that the righteous were to prosper in 
 health and wealth, and the wicked to be punished 
 with adversity during their life. 
 
 But there are two great skeptical books which 
 deny this doctrine and through their doubt come to 
 a vague affirmation of immortality. One of these 
 is Keclesiastes, which first denies that there is any 
 difference between the fate of the good and the 
 bad, between man and the brute; but at length 
 
 172 
 
IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 comes out of this pessimism into a conviction that 
 a man should remember his Creator in youth, be- 
 fore such pessimism comes to him, and that when 
 the dust returns to the earth as it was, the spirit 
 shall return to God who gave it. 
 
 There is dim light in the other great book of 
 doubt and faith, the book of Job. Job’s friends 
 defend the traditional theology, which asserts that 
 God rewards the just and punishes the evil in this 
 life, and Job knows that is not true in his case. So 
 he affirms that if this is God’s method, God is mak- 
 ing a mistake in this particular instance, and he ap- 
 peals to the God back of his god, from god to God, 
 from the god of phenomena to the God of justice 
 and truth; from the god “who hath taken away my 
 right” to the God who is next of kin to an honest 
 man. At first he has no faith in immortality, nor 
 in the divine justice. 
 
 He declares that his friends are wrong when they 
 assert that God prospers good men and brings bad 
 men to naught, for the tents of robbers prosper, 
 and the good man is made a laughing-stock. And 
 neither he nor his friends have any faith in a here- 
 after save one in which souls shall live in a low 
 
 173 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 subconscious state, the good and the evil and the 
 untimely born together, in unconsciousness of each 
 other, even of those nearest to them, while they suf- 
 fer little and scarcely realize pain. 
 
 Daniel, which is a very late book, and one which 
 the Hebrews never reckoned among the prophets, 
 has this affirmation: 
 
 And many of them that sleep in the dust of the 
 earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and 
 some to shame and everlasting contempt.—Daniel 
 12:2. 
 
 This is perhaps the clearest passage in the Old 
 Testament, and the only one with a distinct mes- 
 sage of retribution for evil. But this is very late. 
 
 The Psalms seem to deny and then to affirm im- 
 mortality. They are the work of many authors, 
 covering several centuries in their composition. 
 Psalm vi is the song of a sick man, a pathetic cry 
 of pain, pleading with God for recovery. It says: 
 
 For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in 
 the grave who shall give thee thanks?—Psalm 6:5. 
 Psalm xxx is a song of praise for recovery, 
 probably by the same writer, and expresses the 
 same measure of faith: 
 174 
 
 
 
IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 I cried to thee, O Lord; and unto the Lord I 
 made supplication. What profit is there in my 
 blood, when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust 
 praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth?—Psalm 
 30 :8-9. 
 
 Even as late as the Exile some singers of Israel 
 have no hope of life after death. One of them cries 
 out to God to save his people from the captivity be- 
 fore they all die in Babylon, and go to where God 
 forgets people: 
 
 Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the 
 dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy loving kind- 
 ness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in 
 destruction’—Psalm 88:10-11. 
 
 But two earlier Psalms have a clearer faith. One 
 
 of the authors has his lines cast in pleasant places 
 and is sure that God’s goodness will continue: 
 
 Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory re- 
 joiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. 
 
 For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither 
 wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. 
 
 Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy pres- 
 ence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are 
 pleasures for evermore.—Psalm 16:9-11. 
 
 The other singer is in sorrow and oppression, his 
 lot in striking contrast with that of the wicked, who 
 175 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 have plenty for themselves and much to leave to 
 their abundant posterity. But this Psalmist says: 
 
 From men which are thy hand, O Lord, from 
 men of the world, which have their portion in this 
 life, and whose belly thou fillest with thy hid treas- 
 ure: they are full of children, and leave the rest of 
 their substance to their babes. 
 
 As for me, I will behold thy face in righteous- 
 ness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy 
 likeness.—Psalm 17 :14-15. 
 
 Hegel, in his notable posthumus work on the 
 Philosophy of Religion, said: 
 
 They (the Jews) did not believe in immortality, 
 for even though it is perhaps possible to point to 
 certain traces of belief in it, still those passages in 
 which they occur are always of a very general char- 
 acter, and had not the slightest influence on the re- 
 ligious and moral points of view from which things 
 were regarded. ‘The Ramla of the soul is not 
 yet an admitted truth. 
 
 Professor A. B. Davidson a noted English Old 
 Testament scholar, said: 
 
 If . . . we find explicit teaching on this ques- 
 tion of immortality postponed, we may infer that 
 it was not unnatural that it should be so, that there 
 was something in the ways of thinking of the peo- 
 
 *Vol. Il, p. 213. 
 
 
 
 176 
 
IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 ple which, for a time at least, supplied the place 
 of it, or at all events made it not a necessity to a 
 true life with God.* 
 
 Reverend C. J. Wright, in a thoughtful article 
 in the Homiletic Review, said: 
 
 No one should be surprised to find that the Old 
 Testament contains no speculation as to the pre- 
 existence of souls or of metempsychosis. But very 
 many are surprised, when they come to study care- 
 fully the teaching of the Old Testament on the 
 subject of the future, to find how vague and in- 
 definite that teaching is, how very slightly em- 
 phasized. Here may we say that we are speaking 
 of the eschatology of the individual, and not of the 
 eschatology of the people. ‘The former question 
 is tantamount to that of the doctrine of immortali- 
 ty, the latter to that of the kingdom of God upon 
 earth. The obscurity of our subject as exhibited 
 in the Old Testament is at once acknowledged by 
 all who make it their business to study the question, 
 and the acknowledgment gives rise to many ques- 
 tions. It has been concluded, for example, that the 
 revelation of the truth was kept back by God from 
 his people for certain definite reasons—there may 
 have been danger, for instance, in such a doctrine 
 to the Jews. On this point it has to be remembered 
 that there can be an immoral eschatology; the his- 
 tory of ancient Kgyptian religion on this matter is 
 
 
 
 *Biblical and Literary Essays, p. 278, 
 177 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 at once significant. But attempts at explanation 
 such as this, while no doubt containing ideas that. 
 have kernels of truth within them, seem to conceive 
 of revelation in a more artificial manner than the 
 history of religions warrants. 
 
 To the Jew, the idea of personality which we 
 possess was more or less intangible. He had not 
 much regard for individual life; he lived in his fam- 
 ily, his tribe, his nation. “Thou shalt love thy clans- 
 man as thyself’? was the second article in the law 
 for him. ‘The Jew did not think so much of his per- 
 sonal future as of the future of his family. 
 
 But he had his own idea of personality. It was 
 not of the soul as distinct from the body: all his ex- 
 pressions of intellectual and emotional activity 
 were assigned by him to some physical organ, the 
 heart, the reins, the bowels. The body was as es- 
 sential to life, present and prospective, as was any 
 conception which he may have had of the soul. 
 There was no duality between the two in the men 
 who wrote the Old Testament. 
 
 We are disposed to relegate rewards and pun- 
 ishments to a future life. Not so the Jew. The 
 book of Proverbs correctly sets forth the Jewish 
 
 178 
 
IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 idea that righteousness produces prosperity, and 
 sin brings present and temporal disaster. 
 
 The book of Job is written to confute this prev- 
 alent idea. It grew out of the conflict between 
 traditional theology and the stern facts of experi- 
 ence. 
 
 But if the Jew was not a believer in personal im- 
 mortality neither did he believe in annihilation. He 
 believed that at death all human lives continued in 
 a place called “Sheol.” This word occurs some 
 sixty-five times in the Old Testament. The picture 
 presented by it is so gloomy that the authorized ver- 
 sion commonly translated it “hell.” But it was not 
 a place of punishment of the evil as contrasted with 
 the reward of the good. A few times where this 
 translation was impossible they gave it the render- 
 ing “grave” or “pit.” The essential thing to re- 
 member about it is that all souls went there without 
 moral distinction. It was a shadowy place, where 
 individual lives continued a kind of existence. 
 It was a place prepared as a “house of meeting 
 for all living.” (Job 80:23). It is “a land of 
 darkness and of the shadow of death, without any 
 order, and where the light is as darkness.” (Job 
 
 179 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 10:21-22.) It is a place of low consciousness, with 
 little perception of what is happening elsewhere, a 
 place of dull pain and of twilight of the senses. Of 
 the man who is in that place Job said: 
 
 His sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not; 
 
 And they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not 
 of them. 
 
 Only for himself his flesh hath pain, 
 
 And for himself his soul mourneth.—Job 14:21-22. 
 
 Sheol is a place without any moral quality. It 
 was conceived by the Jews as a place where there 
 was bare consciousness and perpetual gloom, but 
 not a place of punishment for sin. 
 
 The Preacher says: ‘The living know that they 
 shall die, but the dead know not anything, neither 
 have they any more a reward. Neither have they 
 any more a portion forever in anything that is done 
 under the sun.” — (Eccl. 9:5-6.) Job in one of the 
 most despairing passages in the Old Testament 
 says: “There is hope of a tree if it be cut down, 
 that it will sprout again, and that the tender 
 branch thereof will not cease . . . But man 
 dieth and wasteth away. Yea, man giveth up the 
 
 180 
 
IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 ghost and where is he? As the waters fail from the 
 sea, and the river decayeth and drieth up, so man 
 lieth down and riseth not. ‘Till the heavens be no 
 more, they shall not awake, nor be roused out of 
 their sleep.” (Job 14:7-12.) What gave Sheol 
 its acutest sting was that there the relations with 
 God were cut off. So the Psalmist cries (6:5), “In 
 death there is no remembrance of thee, In Sheol 
 who shall give thee thanks?’ (Psalm 6:5.) 
 
 Faith in immortality did not come into the Old 
 Testament till some of its inspired writers passed 
 through experiences, personal and national, which 
 showed them the inadequacy of the doctrine they 
 had been holding. The righteous did not always 
 prosper. Misfortune was not always caused by the 
 sin of the man who suffered it. If God was to deal 
 justly with men, there must be another world in 
 which He could right the wrongsof this. And so, 
 some of them came to believe in a life beyond death. 
 
 Jewish thought rose to a conception of the maj- 
 esty and eternity of God which sometimes swept 
 into its deep current a faith in the eternity of man. 
 Habakkuk cried out: 
 
 “Art thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, 
 
 181 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 mine Holy One? we shall not die.” ‘This would al- 
 most seem to identify the believer with God, in his 
 possession of immortality. 
 
 There are a few more passages, a very few, and 
 they are of less importance and less clear meaning. 
 Do they afford us faith in immortality? Yes, a dim 
 hope. In them we think we have eternal life. We 
 have a mighty and increasing hope for the Christ. 
 We can find that prophetic hope there without 
 question. In the New Testament we find the 
 Christ himself. And in Him we have, we do not 
 think we have, we have eternal life. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 IMMORTALITY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 THE faith which dimly glows in the Old Testa- 
 ment breaks forth in the New ‘Testament into 
 luminous truth. Jesus himself is the light that il- 
 lumines the sacred Scriptures of the New Cove- 
 nant. 
 
 Jesus recognized that the Old Testament hope 
 of immortality was not very bright. He said to the 
 Jews who were ardent students of the Old Testa- 
 ment, but rejected Him, that it was in Him and 
 not in the letter of the older scriptures that their 
 hope of immortality was to find its assurance. He 
 said, “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think 
 ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify 
 of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might 
 have life.” 
 
 We utterly miss the force of these words when 
 we endeavor to strain them into an injunction to 
 
 183 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 read the Bible. The Bible had no readers so dili- 
 gent as those whom Jesus was addressing. Nomen 
 on earth had so little need to be told “search the 
 scriptures.” They did nothing else. And we do 
 not need this verse as such admonition, for we have 
 it elsewhere. But we do need the passage in its 
 true meaning. 
 
 Jesus stated as a matter of fact that the men 
 whom he addressed searched the scriptures. He 
 neither commanded it nor commended it. He cer- 
 tainly did not reprove it, but He said that in this 
 particular instance the searching of the scriptures 
 was not yielding profitable results. 
 
 Prophecy, the living voice of aspiration and 
 faith, was dead. ‘The scribes, who had done so 
 much to preserve the scriptures, were halting their 
 inquiry ito truth where the prophets left off 
 speaking. Jesus told the Jews why they searched 
 the scriptures. It was because in them they thought 
 they found eternal life. One sect of the Jewish 
 teachers, the Pharisees, thought they found eternal 
 life in the Old Testament; another, the Sadducees, 
 denied it. But Jesus declared that He himself was 
 the life they sought. 
 
 184 
 
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 The New Testament doctrine of immortality 
 rests securely on the conviction that this world was 
 created and is governed by a wise and good God. 
 The spirit and character of that God, we discern 
 in Jesus Christ. In Him some men discover a rey- 
 elation of what God is like, and others find in Him 
 a suggestion of what man may become. I waste 
 no time in discussing the divinity and humanity of 
 Christ. Of this I am sure: I need both aspects of 
 his character. I want to be sure that God is the 
 kind of God whose human coefficient we have in 
 Jesus. Also I want to be sure that the character of 
 Jesus is revealed to me, not for my eternal discom- 
 fiture, not to condemn me because I can never 
 hope to be like Him, but for my comfort and en- 
 couragement. I believe that we can be like Him. 
 I believe that this is the essential truth of what St. 
 Paul called the Gospel—that the life of God, 
 which was lived humanly by Jesus of Nazareth, 
 can be lived divinely by those who find God in 
 Him. 
 
 If that is true, then any good thing may be 
 true. If God is our heavenly Father, and Jesus 
 Christ is the human expression of the character of 
 
 185 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 God and of his attitude toward man, then the only 
 limit of what we may attain is to be found in the 
 limitations which we impose upon ourselves. God 
 has made us in his own image. He has sent our 
 Lord Christ to reveal to us the moral and spiritual 
 implications of that relationship. If God is really 
 our Father, then there is nothing too good to be 
 TEUey 
 
 I do not wonder that the hope of immortality is 
 a hope and not a demonstration. I wonder that 
 so vast and all but incredible a hope should ever 
 have suggested itself or been suggested to us. 
 
 But we have such hope, an ineradicable, an 
 indefeasible hope. And if God is good, it is not 
 an unreasonable hope. It is a hope to be examined 
 in the light of our conviction that we live under the 
 rulership of a God whose moral attributes and 
 whose attitude toward humanity we are discov- 
 ering in Jesus Christ. On the basis of our convic- 
 tion that we have such a God, our faith in immor- 
 tality is as reasonable as it is persistent. 
 
 There are some utterances of Jesus on this sub- 
 ject which seem to me to be in themselves vast reve- 
 lations of what it is reasonable for us to hope and 
 
 186 
 
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 believe. ‘Take, for instance, those words which he 
 addressed to his disciples in the Upper Room, 
 when, speaking of life after death, He said: “If 
 it were not so, I would have told you.”— 
 John 14:2, 
 
 I am inclined to think that we ought to consider 
 these words as among the most precious of all the 
 utterances of Jesus. ‘They are our assurance of the 
 validity of all our most cherished hopes for the life 
 to come; they are the guarantee of our right to be- 
 lieve all that is best and most beautiful concerning 
 our loved ones on the other side. 
 
 Jesus had never previously conversed with his 
 disciples on this high theme, yet He assumed that 
 most wonderful things concerning it were or rea- 
 sonably might be already believed by them, and He 
 declared that these were true. It was as if He said, 
 “Of course such fine things must be true; it could 
 not be otherwise. You should know that without 
 my telling you.” It gives us added reason to be- 
 lieve that every beautiful thing we think about 
 Heaven is either true or the suggestion of a truth 
 more beautiful. It confirms us in the faith that all 
 our best endeavors to know about the life to come 
 
 187 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 are founded upon a valid impulse of the human 
 heart. God has not given us these hopes in order 
 to deceive us. The best that we can think is either 
 true or a suggestion of a truth which is better than 
 our thought. We question, we wonder, we doubt, 
 and we express a hesitating faith. “Lord, 1s this 
 true?” “Certainly it is true,” says the spirit of this 
 declaration. “If it were not so, I would have told 
 you.” Jesus would not have permitted us to be 
 deceived about anything so important as this. ‘The 
 broken heart of humanity cries out for immor- 
 tality, and wants to know whether this is a thing 
 too great for us to ask of God. Jesus says that we 
 are permitted to believe in immortality, and that 
 that belief is a true belief. “If it were not so, I 
 would have told you.” 
 
 The principle underlying this affirmation goes 
 much further than we shall attempt to discover in 
 this chapter. It reminds us that the words of Jesus 
 are to be interpreted more liberally than some peo- 
 ple suppose. There are many things desirable for 
 us to know which the Bible does not in so many 
 words tell us. ‘There were many problems con- 
 fronting the early Church on which Jesus left no 
 
 188 
 
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 specific direction. He did not, so far as we know, 
 leave with his disciples any explicit directions as to 
 the form of organization of the Church, nor any 
 command as to the change of the Sabbath from the 
 seventh to the first day of the week, nor did He 
 indicate in definite terms what reforms Christian 
 men ought in any particular age to champion. 
 Jesus was not a law-giver but a life-giver. He came 
 that men might have hfe, and live it out in terms 
 of all the best possible in the successive ages in 
 which they were to live. We may search the Bible 
 in vain for a verse that tells us that this is the day 
 or year in which Christian men ought to engage in 
 a particular enterprise or support a particular re- 
 form, but the Spirit of Jesus is with us to say, “Of 
 course you should do this good thing; if it were not 
 so, I would have told you.” I do not like to say 
 that Jesus has left us to work these problems out 
 for ourselves, because that is not what I believe. 
 He has not left us. His spirit is still with us to 
 guide us in all matters which are vital to the prog- 
 ress of the work of Christ in the world. 
 
 I mention these matters only as a passing sug- 
 gestion, and I shall not return to them. They il- 
 
 189 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 lustrate in what and how many interesting direc- 
 tions a verse like this might carry us. But I think 
 it profoundly significant in its assurance of the 
 fact and the character of immortality. 
 
 When [I think of immortality, 1 remember the 
 old Greek story of Prometheus, who snatched the 
 thunderbolt from the hand of Jove that he might 
 bestow upon humanity the priceless boon of fire. 
 Verily, faith in immortality is nothing less than 
 Promethean. It is as if mortal man, conceiving of 
 immortality as part of the inherent life of God, had 
 risen to the very steps of the Throne and demanded 
 that so good a thing should not remain a divine 
 monopoly, but that God should share it with his 
 children. | 
 
 If God is infinite, immortality is certainly not 
 impossible; and if God is good and human immor- 
 tality is really good for the moral universe, it cer- 
 tainly is not improbable. 
 
 The supreme contribution which the New Testa- 
 ment makes to the question of immortality is the 
 person of Jesus Christ. “In Him was life; and the 
 life.-was the light of men.” He came that men 
 might have life and have it more abundantly. -He 
 
 190 
 
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 died. What became of the material body of Jesus 
 is not our chief concern, though no satisfactory ex- 
 planation has been given of its disappearance. The 
 tomb was empty of his body, and earth was thrilled 
 with new life in his living presence. St. Paul said 
 that he rose from the dead because it was not possi- 
 ble for death to hold Him. It would indeed appear 
 a most astounding conclusion of such a life as that 
 of Jesus if He had perished as a criminal and that 
 had been the end, Life from the dead was for Him 
 inevitable. 
 
 But “because He lives, we shall live also.” Jesus 
 tasted death for every man, that all who come to 
 the possession of life through Him may not be ob- 
 literated by the incident of death. Our life is in 
 Christ. 
 
 There is continuity of life in Him. Life is con- 
 tinuous in God, and in those who share God’s life. 
 It is a present and abiding possession. “On either 
 side of the river was there the tree of life.” It 
 blooms and fruits both now and hereafter. 
 
 I had occasion to make a journey to California. 
 I was returning homeward, and ascending the 
 Rocky Mountains near the roof of the Continent. 
 
 191 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Two engines were pulling our train, and a third 
 was pushing behind, as we climbed toward the 
 divide. It was a bright morning, and as we rose 
 above the clouds we could see them huddling on the 
 opposite side of the deep valleys. Now and then 
 we slipped through the upper edge of one of them. 
 For a time we rode just over the top of a cloud, and 
 for some distance it was just below us. 
 
 There came into my section a little girl and boy 
 who lived in Oklahoma. The boy was full of won- 
 der and outspoken admiration. But his sister was 
 older and worldly wise. The little boy cried: 
 
 “Oh, look! look! We're riding right on top of 
 a cloud!” 
 
 But his sister said, “A cloud ain’t nothing 
 but fog. Nobody can’t ride on a cloud; we’ve got 
 rails under us, just the same as always.” 
 
 The little boy said, “Jesus can ride onacloud, I 
 saw a picture of Him.” 
 
 The little girl answered, “Yes, but that ain’t us.” 
 
 There are plenty of people who have that answer 
 ready. But Jesus is “us.” He is our humanity, 
 bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And a 
 
 192 
 
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 cloud is more than a fog. A cloud has silver linings 
 which, for our purposes, fogs have not. A cloud 
 can be risen above, and its upper side can be seen 
 all lighted up by the sun. 
 
 And Jesus came into the world to show us that 
 very nearly every good thing that is true of God 
 may be true of us, 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 CAN WE COMMUNICATE WITH THE DEAD? 
 
 A BELIEF that our loved ones are still living leads 
 very naturally to the inquiry whether it is possible 
 in any way to communicate with them. Attempts 
 to establish communication with the dead are found 
 in many forms of superstition and are not confined 
 to the ignorant or uncivilized. The Bible affords 
 us examples of the effort to recall the souls of those 
 who have departed, notably in the case of Saul’s 
 visit to the Witch of Endor. The prophecies of 
 Isaiah contain a protest against the practises of 
 those who consult “wizards that peep and mutter” 
 and instead exhort the seeker after knowledge to 
 go “to the law and the testimony.”’ 
 
 Spiritualism is a new word, but the thing for 
 which it stands is among the oldest of human su- 
 perstitions. 
 
 The belief in intercourse with the spirits of the 
 departed in modern times may be said to begin with 
 
 194 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg. This Swedish scientist and 
 seer had trances in which he professed to speak with 
 the mighty dead of all ages. 
 
 In the United States spiritism may be said to 
 have begun its career of publicity in the year 1848. 
 ‘Two sisters, Maggie and Kate Fox, then living in 
 Hydesville, New York, began a series of rapping, 
 which were alleged to have been caused by super- 
 natural means, but which in later years the sisters 
 confessed to have been fraudulent and to have been 
 produced by their own trickery. 
 
 Interest in spiritualism gradually diminished, 
 until about 1890, when it seemed likely to dis- 
 appear. At that time, however, the phenomena of 
 spiritualism began to be investigated by scientific 
 men who maintained that even the crudest and 
 least promising phenomena of this character ought 
 not to be ruled out as evidence until it had been 
 carefully investigated. 
 
 Certain noted mediums became the subjects of 
 much painstaking study by genuinely scientific 
 men and there was organized in Great Britain and 
 in America the Society for Psychical Research. 
 Two of the most noted of these mediums, by reason 
 
 195 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 of the attention bestowed upon them by scientifi¢ 
 men, are Mrs. Piper of Boston, who for the past 
 thirty years has been under almost constant super- 
 vision, and Eusapia Palladino of Naples. Husapia 
 was carefully studied by Cesare Lombroso of the 
 University of Turin, who has given in detail the re- 
 sults of his experiment in a large book entitled, 
 After Death, What? — Skeptic though he was, she 
 succeeded in convincing him. She subsequently 
 came to America where she was detected in mani- 
 fest fraud. Mrs. Piper is not known to have been 
 engaged in consciously fraudulent performances. 
 She has been studied by Professor William James,, 
 Professor James H. Hyslop, and other men of 
 note. The attention given to the subject by these 
 distinguished men gave to psychic phenomena of! 
 this general character a new dignity.* | 
 William T. Stead, that stormy petrel of the lit- 
 erary world, did much to popularize this so-called 
 science. He believed that he had learned definitely 
 from the spirit world that he was to be kicked to 
 
 
 
 *Mrs. Piper’s trances and alleged communications were care= 
 fully investigated by Professor G. Stanley Hall who told me that: 
 he believed her honest, but unconsciously influenced by her depend- 
 ence on her seances for financial support and that he utterly dis- 
 eredited their supernatural character. 
 
 196 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 death by a mob, with his jaw broken by one partic- 
 ularly savage kick. This gave him great comfort, 
 for he felt assured that he could die in no other 
 way. But he went down on the Titanic with his 
 jaw still in good condition. 
 
 The great World War gave to spiritualism in its 
 various forms a new and mighty impulse. Conan 
 Doyle having won the ear of the world with his 
 entertaining stories of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a 
 book, which is very dogmatic and very unconvinc- 
 ing, in which perhaps the best paragraphs are 
 these, in which the spirits are alleged to elevate our 
 thought of heaven a little above that which is given 
 to us by the ordinary medium: 
 
 But there is a great deal of a higher intellectual 
 life stript of grossness and materialism—the curse 
 of the present day. ‘Therein the inhabitants fol- 
 low out their destiny much as we do here. 'Those 
 who are intellectual pursue their speculations and 
 their artistic pursuits, and every gift finds its full 
 fruition there. Those who were less spiritual on 
 earth remain in some intermediate state until they 
 are ready to progress. 
 
 Heaven, as we understand it, is the final goal of 
 all. ‘The passing period of development varies ac- 
 cording to the advancement or merit of the soul. 
 
 197 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 But it is strange to find persons of apparently in- 
 ferior position on earth occupying there an exalted 
 place. For the man who has worked up from hum- 
 ble beginnings is likely to be more highly consid- 
 ered than he who has had every advantage, but has 
 been comparatively inactive throughout his life. 
 Nor is one’s individuality merged in the new 
 world. One is broadened, but is still tinged by the 
 old views. The teaching of the other world is that 
 all religions are good as long as they lead to spirit- 
 uality, and are bad as far as they retard it. The 
 man of low spiritual stature is longer traveling 
 through to the higher plane than the other. He is 
 isolated from contact with the best spirits, save 
 when they descend to him upon missionary work. 
 
 There is not very much to criticize in the above, 
 except the notion that a statement of this sort 
 needed any intelligence for its dictation above that 
 of Conan Doyle himself. This is simply Conan 
 Doyle’s idea of heaven and there is no reason why 
 either he or any one else should seek to claim for it 
 any higher authority than his own opinion. 'To- 
 gether with the rest of his book it lacks all convine- 
 ing proof of containing anything higher or nobler 
 than he could have produced, while that which 
 comes to him through the mediums is manifestly in- 
 ferior to his own mental production. 
 
 198 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE! 
 
 Most notable of the products of the war as it 
 relates to the growth of spiritualism is the book 
 Raymond, by Sir Oliver Lodge. It is a memoir of 
 his son and an account of alleged communications 
 with him since his death. 
 
 Raymond Lodge was the youngest son of Sir 
 Oliver and Lady Lodge. He volunteered for serv- 
 ice in the British Army in September, 1914, re- 
 ceived a commission as second lieutenant and was 
 killed in action, September 14, 1915, aged twenty- 
 SIX. 
 
 About six weeks before the death of Raymond, 
 Sir Oliver received from Mrs. Piper, the noted 
 American medium, a message purporting to have 
 come to her from the spirit world, from his old 
 friend, F. W. H. Myers, author in his lifetime of 
 two massive volumes on spiritualism. The mes- 
 sage read as follows: 
 
 “Now, Lodge . . . Myers says, you take the 
 part of the poet, and he will act as Faunus .. . 
 Ask Verrall; she will understand.” 
 
 Sir Oliver had no difficulty in recognizing the 
 reference to Verrall. Mrs. Verrall was a well- 
 known spiritualist and also a classical scholar. Sir 
 
 199 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Oliver was already a spiritualist, an active member 
 of the Society of Psychical Research, and for a 
 quarter of a century had been keenly interested in 
 the subject of survival after death. He made 
 haste to inquire of Mrs. Verrall whether she under- 
 stood the allusion to Faunus. She turned to her 
 Horace and found a place where that poet referred 
 to his narrow escape from death from a falling tree. 
 It is a well-known passage and one sometimes 
 quoted in books on Latin grammar because of an 
 unusual grammatical construction. Horace says 
 that the falling of the tree might have killed him 
 had not Faunus, guardian of poets, preserved him. 
 Connington’s translation of these lines reads: 
 
 “Me, the curst trunk, that smote my skull, 
 Had slain; but Faunus, strong to shield 
 ‘The friends of Mercury, check’d the blow 
 In mid descent.” 
 
 Mrs. Piper received this communication August 
 8, 1915, and mailed it to Sir Oliver. He wrote to 
 Mrs. Verrall and she answered him on September 
 8, citing the above text and translation. It would be 
 interesting to know just what impression Sir Oliver 
 got from it when he first received this interpreta- 
 
 200 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 tion. Apparently Mrs. Verrall guessed correctly 
 the meaning of Mrs. Piper’s allusion. It is not 
 necessary to suppose that Mrs. Piper received any 
 supernatural information concerning F'aunus, nor 
 was it necessary for her to become a classical 
 scholar. In her rather wide and superficial reading 
 she could quite easily have fallen upon the passage. 
 No great risk was run in sending it to Sir Oliver. 
 Assuming that his studies in other lines had caused 
 him to ignore the passage, it was a safe guess that 
 Mrs. Verrall would be able to identify the refer- 
 ence. If after that nothing happened to Sir Oliver 
 it was because his friend Myers was doing for him 
 what Faunus did for Horace. If anything terrible 
 happened it would be safe to assume that it would 
 have been worse but for the protection of Myers 
 still acting the part of F'aunus, defender of the 
 friends of Mercury. Sir Oliver Lodge is no poet 
 and the allusion was rather far-fetched. But it 
 answered all the requirements. 
 
 It is interesting to note, however, that Myers, 
 who was a noted spiritualist in his day and master 
 of all the arts of that system, being now in heaven, 
 was compelled to send his messages to his old 
 
 201 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 friend, equally skilled in matters of spiritualism, by 
 way of Mrs. Piper and by further way of Mrs. 
 Verrall. Far-fetched and ambiguous and round- 
 about as the message was, it is the only thing in the 
 book possessing any approach to inherent dignity. 
 The Delphic oracle was not more ambiguous. The 
 Faunus message if never interpreted did no harm, 
 and if interpreted it was certain to be a satisfaction 
 to a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, whether anything 
 happened or not. 
 
 Six days after Sir Oliver received Mrs. Verrall’s 
 interpretation of Mrs. Piper’s transmitted message 
 from Mr. Myers, Second Lieutenant Raymond 
 Lodge was killed in action. His death occurred on 
 September fourteenth and the family soon learned 
 of it. Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge lost little time 
 in going to a professional medium. A Mrs. Ken- 
 nedy, who had lost a son in June of the same year 
 and had introduced herself to Sir Oliver Lodge by 
 letter on August sixteenth, proffered her good of- 
 fices as soon as she knew of the death of Raymond 
 and arranged for very nearly all the sittings that 
 followed in which Sir Oliver and his wife consulted 
 professional mediums and obtained what they 
 
 202 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 thought were revelations. Lady Lodge went on 
 the twenty-fifth of September, and Sir Oliver hur- 
 ried to London two days later to see the same 
 medium, a Mrs. Leonard. This Mrs. Leonard had 
 as her control a little Indian maiden named Feda, 
 and talked a sort of foolish baby-talk, pronouncing 
 Raymond, “Yaymond” and she wiggled her own 
 body to show how Raymond’s dog wagged its tail 
 in heaven. 
 
 We shall not follow Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge 
 on their weary and credulous tramp from one me- 
 dium to another. ‘The story from this time on is 
 the drivel of a medium under the alleged control of 
 Feda, the Indian child, Moonstone a dead Yogi, 
 Biddy an Irish washer-woman, and other puerile or 
 senile personalities of the spirit world. The de- 
 tails may be read in full in Sir Oliver’s book and 
 they are pathetic in their vapidity. 
 
 The first message came to Mrs. Kennedy from 
 her own son through a professional medium. It 
 read: 
 
 “TI have seen that boy, Sir Oliver’s son; he’s bet- 
 ter, and has a splendid rest. ‘Tell his people.” 
 
 Perhaps in the spirit land a lad of seventeen 
 
 203 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 speaks of a man of twenty-six and a commissioned 
 officer as “that boy.” But that is not the custom in 
 tthe British army; indeed, the activity of Mrs. Ken- 
 nedy in these subsequent sittings with professional 
 mediums opens every necessary opportunity for 
 such information as a medium requires. Sir Oliver 
 states he believes that Mrs Kennedy did not give 
 the medium any information as to who were the 
 distinguished visitors coming to them; and he says 
 it is not probable that mediums have time to hunt 
 up family information. Both suppositions are dis- 
 tinectly contrary to probability. Indeed, when it 
 was known that a son of Sir Oliver Lodge had 
 been killed, every medium in London must have 
 been on tiptoe with expectation that he and his 
 family would be seeking communication with Ray- 
 mond. ‘The newspapers must have furnished them 
 a considerable part of the information they wanted 
 and Mrs. Kennedy may at least have dropped a 
 few unintentional intimations that the people for 
 whom she was arranging sittings were very impor- 
 tant people, 
 
 Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge obtained what they 
 wanted, ‘They secured communications from Ray- 
 
 204 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 mond and a detailed description of the dog he had 
 with him in heaven, the dog who according to Feda 
 had nice hair and seemed to be of dark color and 
 had ears that did not stand up and that wagged his 
 tail in a manner which Feda illustrated by body 
 movements of her own. Beside this description of 
 Raymond’s dog, the most interesting things com- 
 municated by Raymond Lodge and Paul Ken- 
 nedy, were, first, that heaven is filled with the 
 lonely souls of dead soldiers, eager to communicate 
 with their friends but unable to do so unless those 
 friends will consult professional mediums; and sec- 
 ondly, (Sir Oliver Lodge appeared to count this a 
 sort of scientific basis for the continuity of sub- 
 stance and life in heaven) that things rotting here 
 on earth send up a stench which affords the phys- 
 ical basis for their restoration as actual entities in 
 heaven. This is a heaven made up out of the bad 
 smells of earth, a place of celestial stenches, glori- 
 fied and made immortal! 
 
 There is one other bit of alleged evidence which 
 he introduces, namely, a reference to a photograph 
 of Raymond, which the family did not know to be 
 in existence, a group photograph which later came 
 
 205 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 to them. Considering, however, how busy the cam- 
 era was in making group photographs of soldiers, 
 it would have been almost miraculous if some such 
 group had not contained a picture of Raymond. 
 The photograph is published in the book and very 
 nearly every detail of it appears to have been in- 
 correctly reported by the medium. 
 
 What most impresses a reader is the utter lack of 
 anything that can truthfully be called the scien- 
 tific spirit in the book. Sir Oliver Lodge is, or has 
 been, a great scientist, but this is neither a great 
 book nor a scientific book. The author’s fame as a 
 scientist can not protect him from the just criticism 
 of having given to the world as spiritual comfort 
 the drivel of the ignorant and designing medium. 
 
 The grief of a heart-broken father entitles Sir 
 Oliver Lodge to the reader’s sincere sympathy; 
 but neither this nor any awe of his great name can 
 protect him from the righteous indignation of 
 those who resent this foisting upon the world of 
 so-called comfort in the form of a heaven with 
 cigars and whisky and soda and of utterly vapid 
 occupations and concerns. Perhaps the most com- 
 forting thing that Sir Oliver and Mrs. Lodge 
 
 206 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 might have got would have been the description of 
 Raymond’s dog, which, unfortunately they were 
 not able to identify. 
 
 He has brought that doggie again, nice doggie. 
 A doggie that goes like this, and twists about 
 (Feda indicating a wriggle). He has got a nice 
 tail, not a little stumpy tail, nice tail with nice hair 
 on it. He sits up like that sometimes, and comes 
 down again, and puts his tongue out of his mouth. 
 He’s got a cat, too, plenty of animals, he says. He 
 hasn’t seen any lions and tigers, but he has seen 
 horses, cats, dogs, and birds. He says you know 
 this doggie, he has nice hair, a little wavy, which 
 sticks up all over him, and has twists at the end. 
 Now he’s jumping round. He hasn’t got a very 
 pointed face, but it isn’t like a little pug-dog either ; 
 it’s rather a long shape. And he has nice ears with 
 flaps not standing up; nice long hairs on them too, 
 darkish color he looks, darkish, as near as I can see 
 him. | 
 
 To such low estate has science fallen in Sir Oli- 
 ver Lodge’s investigation that the evidence which 
 he submits contains all the crudities and vulgarities 
 of the trance-medium, the table-rapper and the au- 
 tomatic writer. By these several methods, each 
 with its invitation to fraud and its necessity of 
 
 employing professional interpreters of alleged 
 207 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 spirit messages, he and his family are supposed to 
 have communicated with his dead son. All Sir 
 Oliver Lodge’s twenty-five years of work in the 
 Society of Psychical Research had not availed to 
 make it possible for Raymond to come to his father 
 directly. All his dead associates in the Society of 
 Psychical Research, including Mr. Myers, were 
 helpless to come to him, except through these 
 crude and suspicious agencies. It is interesting to 
 read that at one of these seances a table which had 
 been rapping out Raymond’s messages became so 
 charged with Raymond’s living personality that it 
 tried to climb up into Lady Lodge’s lap. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge himself in an interview a few 
 months after the publication of his book, admitted 
 that no progress had been made in subsequent rev- 
 elation. He said: 
 
 “The stress and anxiety to communicate have 
 subsided in our case. The wish to give evidence re- 
 mains, but now that the fact of survival and happy 
 employment is established, the communications are 
 placid.” 
 
 The happy employment referred to would ap- 
 pear to be chiefly the use of cigars and whisky 
 
 208 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 and soda and playing with the dog which Feda de- 
 scribed with characteristic ambiguity. If Sir Oliver 
 and his family are comforted, no one else need 
 complain. 
 
 Professor James H. Hyslop in his book, Life 
 after Death, approaches the phenomena of the 
 professional mediums in a much more scientific 
 spirit than Sir Oliver Lodge. He admits the 
 crudity and vulgarities of the mediums, and he 
 urges that the intellectual limitations of the me- 
 dium, the inadequacy of language to convey mean- 
 ings except in terms of the sensory life and the 
 pragmatic nature of the ordinary mind, carry with 
 them an almost irresistible tendency to conceive of 
 any spiritual environment after the analogy of the 
 physical world. 
 
 This is the best explanation that can probably be 
 ‘ given and it is entitled to some weight. Hyslop 
 Says: 
 
 The spiritual life after death is mentally created, 
 so to speak, and hence the analogies with the 
 earthly life are not sensory in respect to stimulus, 
 but mental and creative. That is to say, it is 
 not the physical life that survives, but the inner 
 life and death leaves us with the internal mental 
 
 209 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 faculties intact. The spirit enters into the new 
 life with memory, imagination and self-conscious- 
 ness; and it builds up an idealistic world in the 
 new state of existence formed according to our de- 
 gree of progress in spiritual things, and more or 
 less a reflection of our earthly experience. 
 
 He, therefore, maintains that there is a three- 
 fold limitation. The spirit itself is limited in its 
 new environment. The medium is limited in pow- 
 ers of interpretation. We also are limited in re- 
 spect to that which we are able to receive from the 
 spirit world. 
 
 Accepting this statement by Professor Hyslop 
 as reasonable, two questions arise. First, why is it 
 that with heaven filled with spirits in all grades of 
 spiritual development, virtually the only ones 
 which have succeeded in establishing communica- 
 tion with earth are those who talk baby talk, or 
 who jabber in foolish, broken sentences? Why 
 must Raymond, in looking about heaven for some 
 one to convey a message to his father, communicate 
 through the little Indian maiden Feda, whose In- 
 dian chatter appears as such only to those who 
 never knew any Indians? Why must he go to the 
 spirit of Moonstone, the dead Yogi, or to the soul 
 
 210 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 of Biddy, the Irish washer-woman? Why do none 
 of Oliver Lodge’s associates in the Society of Psy- 
 chical Research talk to him in language at least as 
 good as they were accustomed to use when on 
 earth? 
 
 A few years ago a St. Louis woman undertook 
 to interest her friends in some alleged communica- 
 tions which she professed to have had from a lady 
 of about the Elizabethan period who discoursed in 
 alleged old English and claimed the name of Pa- 
 tience Worth. Her literary achievements inter- 
 ested some people who should have known better, 
 and resulted in the publication of a volume of the 
 writings alleged to have been of this person. ‘The 
 volume presumably may still be found by any who 
 care to see what mediocre performances the spir- 
 its indulge in and how highly these banalities are 
 rated by those who bring to them the proper qual- 
 ity of adoration. As a matter of fact, no single 
 great thought has come into human life through 
 any modern commerce with alleged spirits. ‘The 
 souls of the mighty dead have shriveled pitifully 
 if they are now capable of such trash as the me- 
 diums have uttered in their name. 
 
 Agnes Repplier in a magazine article, entitled 
 
 211 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Dead Authors, makes a rather long list of people 
 who were able to write good literature when they 
 were on earth, from whom alleged revelations have 
 recently been received, and neither Mark 'Twain 
 nor O. Henry nor Charles Dickens is now able to 
 write anything nearly as good as when he was on 
 earth. 
 
 The other question relates to the intellectual and 
 spiritual caliber of the medium. Even Mrs, Piper, 
 most famous of American mediums, had as her 
 habitual “control” a queerly named spirit less intel- 
 ligent than herself. Professor William James, 
 who studied her for twenty years, had to admit that 
 he awaited “new facts, clearer and more precise” 
 before he could say with certainty whether her 
 alleged revelations contained anything of the su- 
 pernatural. He died waiting. Meantime her pow- 
 ers of this character instead of growing more bril- 
 liant have diminished. 
 
 It might be supposed, because alleged spiritistic 
 phenomena come to us now vouched for by noted 
 men of science, that there has been some change in 
 their character since the table-rapping of the Fox 
 sisters and the crude and illiterate babblings of the 
 
 212 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 mediums. On the contrary, we are still face to 
 face with the familiar old methods, which lent 
 themselves so easily to fraud that they were ex- 
 posed as such in case after case. The only notable 
 difference is that now these are the alleged phe- 
 nomena of the spirit world under scientific obser- 
 vation. Now we have the phenomena catalogued 
 and the alleged communications recorded, and the 
 means of fraud lessened if not eliminated. But the 
 means of fraud were not eliminated in the case of 
 Kusapia Palladino, who interested the scientific 
 investigators of two continents, and who com- 
 pletely deceived even so seasoned a skeptic as 
 Lombroso. 
 
 The most recent notable case in America of al- 
 leged spirit communication under conditions which 
 entitle it to any attention is that of “Margery” the 
 wife of a prominent Boston surgeon. Her case 
 has been the subject of investigation at Harvard, 
 under a commission appointed by the Scientific 
 American, which has offered a prize for a well au- 
 thenticated super-normal revelation under test 
 conditions. Full accounts of this case have been 
 published. The interesting fact is, not that the 
 case is manifestly one where deliberate imposture 
 
 213 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 has been practised, but that such imposture, of the 
 crudest possible sort, so nearly succeeded in impos- 
 ing upon the learned men who observed the case.* 
 
 When those who profess to come to us with rev- 
 elations from the dead begin by surrounding 
 themselves with apparatus such as might easily 
 lend itself to fraud, and such as repeatedly has 
 been used in the interests of fraud, it begins to be 
 time for sensible people to lose interest. 
 
 People who read the names of the distinguished 
 men who have surrendered to this delusion, do not 
 all consider that the revelations which they suppose 
 themselves to have received are not direct revela- 
 tions to themselves, but such revelations as they 
 have been able to delude themselves into supposing 
 they have received through mediums, not all of 
 them of very high intellectual or moral grade, and 
 through such experiences as the attempt of a table 
 to climb up into the lap of Lady Lodge and cuddle 
 there as a substitute for the grown man who had 
 once been her baby, and who had died an officer on 
 the battle-field. 
 
 
 
 *See concerning this investigation an article on “Science and 
 the Medium” by Hudson Hoagland, in the Atlantic Monthly, for 
 November, 1925. 
 
 214 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 This at least deserves to be remembered concern- 
 ing all this recent interest in spiritualism, that it 
 does not appear to have in it a shred of religion. 
 When Conan Doyle affirms that in this form re- 
 ligion is to survive, he seems to fail to inquire 
 whether the form of belief which he is commending 
 is In any true sense religious. Life after death is 
 not of necessity religious, any more than life before 
 death is religious. A heaven of woolly dogs and 
 whisky and soda is not of necessity religious. What 
 has been disclosed in all this alleged revelation con- 
 cerning God, or love or hope or duty? 
 
 Is it any comfort to believe that our beloved dead 
 are occupied in nothing better worth while than in 
 trying to “get across” with such communications 
 as have come from the tipped tables and the dark 
 cabinet and the alleged trance utterance of the 
 mediums / 
 
 Meantime, those men and women who earn their 
 money by making people think they have news 
 from heaven have awaiting them a standing reward 
 when they can exhibit any proof that the phe- 
 nomena they produce require belief in a supernat- 
 ural agency, or can not be duplicated by clever 
 
 215 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 magicians. Until we have some better evidence 
 than yet has come to us it is better and more dig- 
 nified and more religious to leave our beloved who 
 have departed beyond our sight in the hands of the 
 Father of their spirits and ours. 
 
 My own mother died more than thirty-five years 
 ago. She was an earnest, spiritually minded 
 woman, who had implicit faith in immortality, and 
 if there is such a thing as communication between 
 the two worlds, her spirit could have no greater joy 
 than in communication with the children whom she 
 dearly loved. Let us suppose then that my mother 
 desires to send a message to me. What will be 
 the process by which she establishes communica- 
 tion with her eldest son? ) 
 
 In the first place she will be compelled to look 
 about heaven until she finds some little Indian 
 maiden, or some Irish washer-woman who is on 
 speaking terms with some particular medium; then 
 Feda or Biddy will communicate with me through 
 some woman, whom my mother, if living, would be 
 very desirous that I should not know. Then with 
 my mother’s beautiful thoughts vulgarized into 
 alleged Indian baby talk by Feda and still further 
 
 216 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 vulgarized by the medium, I may obtain some 
 precious piece of information which it is supposed 
 the medium could not have known and which 
 therefore the spirit of my mother must have com- 
 municated. 
 
 What will that message be? This perhaps, or 
 something as important, that there is a small hole 
 in the toe of my left stocking caused by a nail in my 
 shoe of which up to the present time I have had no 
 knowledge. If having paid two dollars to the me- 
 dium I return home and find the hole and the nail 
 I am supposed to admit that this must have been a 
 message from my mother in heaven. It is my own 
 opinion that if my mother in heaven ever sends a 
 message to me she will send it through some chan- 
 nel that she would have recognized while living and 
 that the message itself will possess inherent value. 
 
 We have need of a revival of faith in immortality 
 without superstition. We need a heaven high 
 above the maudlin and almost imbecile heaven of 
 the mediums. We need a life beyond the grave 
 which is worthy of God, the author of life, and of 
 Jesus Christ, who brought life and immortality to 
 light. 
 
 217 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 It is not enough to believe that our dead friends 
 exist in a state of celestial feeble-mindedness, and 
 that we may communicate with them through per- 
 sons admittedly their intellectual and spiritual in- 
 feriors upon this side. We need faith in an immor- 
 tality that possesses ethical and spiritual value. 
 
 Jesus said, “Lay hold on eternal life.’ The 
 word “eternal” as He used it had more than the 
 suggestion of time: it had in it the connotation of a 
 moral value. His words meant “Lay hold on the 
 life that is life indeed.” The doctrine of life after 
 death as Jesus taught it is more than the doctrine 
 of the continuity of existence. It is the doctrine of 
 the permanence of spiritual values. Such a doc- 
 trine, the doctrine of a life beyond the grave based 
 upon the integrity of God, the value of moral life, 
 and the deepest and most ennobling affirmations 
 of the human intellect, and the richest and most 
 abiding longings of the human soul, is the doctrine 
 that in the present hour of spiritual chaos needs to 
 be uttered with assurance and power. 
 
 Nor need we question the practical value of such 
 a faith. It will impart value to this present life, 
 and give added worth to every article of Christian 
 
 218 | 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 faith. “Godliness is profitable unto all things, 
 having promise of the life that now is, and that 
 which is to come.” Every effort to make this a bet- 
 ter world will be mightily strengthened by a re- 
 newed faith that this life is a part of God’s great 
 whole. The social gospel needs for its higher 
 reaches of endeavor and the crown of its aspiration 
 and the motive of its activity this dynamic which is 
 attested in the Word of God—‘the power of an 
 endless life.” 
 
 Are our dead friends near us, and do they know 
 what we are doing, and can they share our life and 
 thought? 
 
 I hope they do not know all that causes us anx- 
 iety and concern. If they do, I hope they are 
 enough wiser than we not to fret and worry as we 
 do. I hope that the veil between us is sufficiently 
 merciful to shut from their sight some of our fol- 
 lies and sins and pains. But I should not like to 
 think that they had no part in our life and no 
 knowledge of how it fares with us. 
 
 I have sometimes thought of it in this way. Let 
 us suppose that the spirits of our loved ones, more 
 on the other side than here, still have a community 
 
 219 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 of interest, still cherish a common concern for our 
 well-being, yet are unable to communicate with us. 
 Would that be so very lonely and unnatural an ex- 
 perience? We have an analogy in our present life. 
 It is the family concern for the baby not yet born. 
 
 Consider for a moment a home in which there is 
 to be a baby. The father and mother know about 
 it, have known for a long time. Even the children 
 are told that before very long God will send to this 
 home a little life, a new little brother or sister. The 
 whole family shares the knowledge of the little one 
 that is to be born. 
 
 Now, this little unborn life is not up in heaven, 
 nor on another planet, nor far away. It is here, 
 among us, under the same roof with us. Mother is 
 carrying this precious little life under her heart un- 
 til the glad and solemn day when through the 
 blessed and awful ministry of pain it shall be born. 
 It is no stranger to be sent to us from a foreign 
 land; it is already a member of the family, here 
 just as certainly as we are here. 
 
 We can influence this little life already. In 
 countless ways we can make provision for it. We 
 can love it, and we do; we can pray for it, and we 
 
 220 
 
CAN WE COMMUNICATE? 
 
 do. When it comes, it is not an intrusion; it is the 
 manifestation of a life that all the while had been 
 among: us. 
 
 I do not know any reason why it may not be so 
 in the case of our loved ones who have been born 
 into the heavenly life. There is no reason for us to 
 think of them as distant; they may not be remote 
 at all. They may be as conscious of us as we were 
 conscious of the unborn child. They may love us, 
 care for us, and promote our welfare in ways we 
 do not know. 
 
 Life would be poor but for our dead. They are 
 still ours. They are not hopelessly lost to us. And 
 they may be nearer to us than we think. 
 
CHAPTER XIIT 
 UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 I am ready now to meet tle objection of some 
 reader who may have followed the argument thus 
 far, but has held all the while in the back of his 
 mind a serious objection. He says, if I hear him 
 aright, “It would be very pleasant to agree with 
 you, but your faith in immortality has joined to it. 
 a terrible corollary. You believe in an eternal hell, 
 into which those who leave this world in what you 
 call sin are plunged in hopeless and unspeakable 
 torment. I have had friends, well-loved and dear 
 to me, who left this world in the state you thus de- 
 scribe. I can not pretend that they were Chris- 
 tians; [ can not even say that they were good. But 
 they were not hopeless, even as judged by our short 
 measure of hope. No human father, no matter how 
 sorely tried and perplexed with their folly and per- 
 verseness, would have sent them even to prison, 
 
 222 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 much less to hell. You have made the doctrine of 
 immortality, which ought to have been beautiful, a 
 very terrible thing on account of your teaching of 
 eternal retribution. I would far rather believe that 
 God wiped the slate clean, got rid of all of us, 
 charged up our virtues to profit and our sins to 
 loss, than to believe in an eternal hell.” 
 
 I am ready, as I have said, to face this objection, 
 which I think has right to a frank consideration. 
 
 The doctrine of an endless hell, flaming with 
 physical torture, may be said to have been a very 
 precious one in the past, and in some form a very 
 necessary one. But we shudder as we look back no 
 very long time to what good people thought they 
 believed about it. No gentler soul lived than Isaac 
 Watts, yet what terrible things he put into some of 
 his hymns, of people doomed to endless death, yet 
 never dying, and this for the primary. reason that 
 they had inherited the sin of Adam: 
 
 Backward with humble Shame we look 
 On our Original; 
 
 How is our Nature dashed and broke 
 In our first F'ather’s Fall! 
 
 Ffow strong in our degenerate Blood 
 The old Corruption reigns, 
 
 223 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 And mingling with the crooked Flood | 
 Wanders through all our Veins! 
 
 Here is another hymn which our ancestors loved 
 to sing: 
 
 Far in the Deep where Darkness dwells 
 The Land of Horror and Despair, 
 _ Justice has built a dismal hell, 
 And laid her stores of Vengeance there. 
 
 Eternal Plagues and heavy chains, 
 Tormenting Racks, and fiery Coals, 
 
 And darts to inflict immortal Pains, 
 Dyed in the Blood of damnéd Souls. 
 
 There Satan, the first Sinner, lies, 
 And roars, and bites his Iron Bands; 
 In vain the Rebel strives to rise, 
 Crushed with the weight of both Thy hands. 
 
 There guilty Ghosts of Adam’s Race 
 Shriek out, and howl beneath Thy rod; 
 
 Once they could scorn a Saviour’s grace, 
 But they incensed a dreadful God. 
 
 Tremble, my soul, and kiss the Son, 
 Sinner, obey the Saviour’s Call, 
 Kilse your Damnation hastens on, 
 And Hell gapes wide to wait your Fall. 
 224 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 This is the terrible picture of the God of their 
 hymns: 
 
 His Nostrils breathe out fiery Streams, 
 And from his awful Tongue 
 
 A sovereign Voice divides the I‘lames 
 And Thunder roars along. 
 
 Tempests of angry Fire shall roll 
 To blast the Rebel Worm, 
 And beat upon his naked soul 
 In one eternal Storm. 
 
 This is the picture of the living death to which a 
 loving God was supposed to have consigned his 
 children: 
 
 What, to be banished from my Life, 
 And yet forbid to die: 
 
 To linger in eternal Pain, 
 Yet death forever fly? 
 
 It is possible that there are still some Christians, 
 and very gentle ones, who hold these views; but 
 these dogmas no longer appear in our hymn-books. 
 He who believes in this kind of a hell must believe 
 it alone; he can not find others to sing it with him, 
 nor a hymn-book in which it is set to be sung. 
 
 225 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 I believe in hell. If there is no hell, it is time one 
 was established. If there is no hell, some one has 
 been negligent. 
 
 But there is a hell. I have seen men in it. Fur- 
 thermore, I have known men living who have made 
 no visible preparation here for any other kind of 
 future. I have known men who, if they lived after- 
 ward as they lived here, were of such sort that, if 
 they died and did not find a hell, they would have 
 established one within fifteen minutes after their 
 arrival in heaven. Character being what it is, some 
 sort of hell is inevitable. The Bible teaches that 
 there is a hell. And the Bible does not describe it 
 as a desirable place. The figures of speech which 
 are used to describe it are most unpleasant. 
 
 But what is the character of hell? Is it a place 
 for the display of the divine vindictiveness? Is ita 
 place where sin is licensed to go on forever un- 
 restrained? Is it a place where God has abdicated, 
 and where love can never enter? So far as that 
 part of the universe is concerned, has God given it 
 up in despair? 
 
 I could not believe any of those things if I be- 
 lieved as I do ina good God. If there is a hell, and 
 
 226 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 1 think there is, men make it themselves by their 
 own wickedness; it is the inevitable expression of 
 their own character. 
 
 If there is a hell, it is a good hell. A good God 
 could permit no other kind. If there is a hell, a 
 good God has established it because it is the logical 
 and necessary result of character expressing itself 
 in destiny. If there is a hell it is because the moral 
 universe needs it. I will go even further and say 
 that if there is a hell, it is because those who go 
 there need it. If there is a hell it is because it is the 
 best place to which a loving God can send, or per- 
 mit to be sent, the people whose own wilfulness 
 drives them in violation of God’s desire that they 
 would accept something better. I think there is 
 such a hell. | 
 
 Let us frankly admit that the Hebrew word 
 which is translated “hell” conveyed no such mean- 
 ing to the Jewish mind as our English word “hell” 
 conveys to present-day readers. “Sheol” was not 
 primarily a place of torture, but the abode of the 
 dead. Sometimes it was thought of as divided, but 
 the division had no such sharp and clear definition 
 
 as has come to it in Christian theology. 
 227 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Our modern word hell conveys to the imagina- 
 tion a very different thought than that which it 
 brought to the people of the Old Testament. When 
 the Psalmist said, “If I make my bed in Sheol,” he 
 did not think of a place of torment as a punishment 
 for sin. He was thinking of some dark, gloomy 
 and forbidding abode of the dead, a place shrouded 
 with gloom and impenetrable to human investiga- 
 tion. He was thinking of the place to which all 
 human life goes and from which no human life 
 returns. 
 
 The Psalmist asked himself whether the abode 
 of the dead was a place of utter hopelessness. He 
 thought it could not be so. No barrier could shut 
 God out of there. Life and death were not to him 
 so absolutely inseparable that God could be shut 
 out from any part of his universe. 
 
 This was what the Psalmist was thinking and in 
 strict justice to his thought we ought to use the 
 word “Sheol” here instead of the word “hell.” Yet; 
 I am using the word “hell” with intent, for if the 
 Psalmist’s thought is true at all, it must be true 
 not only of the Hebrew Sheol but of the Christian’s 
 hell. There can not be any part of God’s moral 
 
 228 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 universe from which God himself is excluded. ‘The 
 Love that dwells in the highest heaven must some- 
 how reach to the lowest hell. 
 
 I am willing to ask whether even with our blunt- 
 est and cruelest modern conception attaching to 
 the word “hell,” the verse is not true? Is God in 
 the bottomless pit? There are verses in the Bible 
 which read as if that might be true. The wicked 
 are spoken of as banished from the presence of 
 God. Yet I must believe for myself that banish- 
 ment from God’s presence can only be a fact of ex- 
 perience and not of actual reality. To say of a 
 sinner that he departs from the presence of God is 
 the same as to say the sun goes down. But the sun 
 does nothing of the sort: the earth merely turns its 
 back upon the sun and hides in the darkness of its 
 own shadow. The sun is shining all the time: the 
 earth can not possibly get out of the sunshine. All 
 it can do is to make a little tapering shadow and 
 creep into it, but that shadow is less than a fly- 
 speck on the face of the heavens. 'The sun is flood- 
 ing the universe with light. Even the light which 
 the earth stops by casting a shadow is not de- 
 stroyed. It is gathered up on the face which the 
 
 229 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 earth exposes to the sun and not a ray of all that 
 glorious light is permanently wasted. 
 
 God himself must be in hell. It is a shocking 
 thing to say, but it certainly must be true. If it 
 were not so God would be less than infinite. ‘There 
 can be no corner of God’s universe from which He 
 is absent. The sufferings of the damned are not 
 apart from Him, they are not unfelt by Him. In 
 the last analysis I think they are not inflicted by 
 Him. They inhere in the very nature of sin, which 
 makes it inevitable that transgression should carry 
 with it shame and pain. 
 
 Shall we say that the sufferings of hell are re- 
 demptive? I should not dare to say that because 
 i do not know. ‘There is nothing in the Bible that 
 forbids that hope. I will not argue with any one 
 about the mere meaning of the Greek and Hebrew 
 words. It is not on the basis of the definition of 
 single words that great doctrines like this are to be 
 established. We can not be sure enough that we 
 know the precise meaning of any ancient word in 
 any dead language to determine on that basis alone 
 our theory of hope for eternity. Somehow, some- 
 time, God will manifest his kindness even in the 
 
 230 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 blackness of the bottomless pit. There is no black- 
 ness anywhere that is not somehow spanned by the 
 rainbow of his goodness and his hope. 
 
 Jesus spent most of his life in villages. When 
 He visited Jerusalem He was interested in many 
 of the details in which city life differed from rural 
 and village life. One of these was the disposal of 
 sewage and garbage. ‘That is a problem in every 
 city and always has been. Jerusalem met the prob- 
 lem in the crude but reasonably effective method 
 of the age. It carted its refuse to the valley of Ge- 
 henna and there burned what could be burned and 
 left the rest to decompose on a level considerably 
 lower than that of the city’s water supply. Jesus 
 used Jerusalem’s city dump as a figure of speech 
 for God’s method of dealing with refractory ma- 
 terial. He said it would have to be thrown out into 
 the valley of Gehenna “where the worm dieth not 
 and the fire is not quenched.” | 
 
 This figurative use of Jerusalem’s dump has 
 done much to define the popular idea of hell, and 
 its very name, “Gehenna,” is preserved in the trans- 
 lation: for “Sheol” in the Old Testament and 
 “hades” in the New, ought never to be translated 
 
 231 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 “hell.” Let us recall for a moment the Jerusalem 
 garbage pile, and the method of sewage disposal. 
 
 The undying worm and the unquenchable fire 
 are not symbols of torture, but of conservation. 
 They are the symbols of the utilization of waste. 
 The worm does not die, not because any one mag- 
 got is miraculously endowed with immortality, but 
 because the dump wagons are continually carting 
 in more material for worms to feed upon and to 
 lay eggs in. It is not because any one worm con- 
 tinues to gnaw, or because any one carcass survives 
 to be gnawed. 
 
 The fire is not quenched because more fuel is 
 continuously added. It is not because any one 
 scrap of waste paper continues forever to burn. So 
 far as the Jerusalem dump is concerned, when fuel 
 ceases to be carted there will be no more devouring 
 worm, and no more unquenchable fire. 
 
 Meantime, the unquenched fire takes filth and 
 makes of it clean ashes, good fertilizer, or even if 
 leeched, good antiseptic. And the worm, ugly as 
 he is to look at, converts garbage into something 
 less repulsive. Then a bird flies over the valley and 
 eats the worm; and the carrion becomes a carol; 
 
 282 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 the stench is transformed into a song. Even the 
 worm and the fire are God’s beneficent agents for 
 turning the elements of destruction into products 
 of constructive value to the world. They are not 
 the symbols of despair but of God’s apparently 
 thwarted but ultimately triumphant hope. 
 
 Something should be said about the day of Judg- 
 ment. There is such a day, and every day is a Judg- 
 ment day. But “God hath appointed a day in 
 which He will judge the world in righteousness, by 
 that Man whom He hath ordained,” the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. It is no less comforting than alarm- 
 ing to know that there is to be a future reckoning; 
 and it is most significant that both here and else- 
 where Jesus the Christ is declared to furnish the 
 basis of Judgment. 
 
 The Fourth Gospel has this interesting word 
 about the day of Judgment and the Judge: 
 
 “For neither doth the Father judge any man, 
 but He hath given all judgment unto the son; ... 
 And he gave him authority to execute judgment, 
 because he is a son of man.”—John 5:22-27, 
 
 If you read these verses in the American Re- 
 vision you will see that the word “son” in the title 
 
 233 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 ‘Son of man” is not capitalized as it usually is in 
 the New Testament. That of course represents the 
 judgment of the translators and might be a mis- 
 take, but if you will read the passage carefully in 
 the trend and meaning of Jesus’ argument, you 
 will be likely to conclude that the translators are 
 correct. The King James Version was unques- 
 tionably wrong in using the definite article. When 
 Jesus called himself ‘the Son of Man” He used 
 the title in a sense that involved a particular dis- 
 tinction, but when He says that God, the Iather, 
 judges no. man but has committed all judgment 
 unto the son, “because he is a son of man,” the term 
 has a very different connotation. The Twentieth 
 Century Version thus translates it. “Indeed the 
 Father does not judge any one, but has entrusted 
 the work of judging entirely to his Son; .. . 
 and because He is man He has also given Him au- 
 thority to act as judge.” 
 
 We must not lose any part of the force of this 
 affirmation. It affirms distinctly that were Jesus 
 divine and only divine He would have some meas- 
 ure of disqualification for acting as the world’s 
 final judge. The Father judgeth no man, but His 
 Son being man will be their judge. 
 
 234 
 
- UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 This does not imply that the judgment will bea 
 light thing for the wilfully wicked; but it promises 
 that its tests will be reasonable and sympathetic, 
 and its standards adjusted to human values and 
 motives. 
 
 His sympathy will not be the only quality in 
 which the humanity of Jesus will fit Him to be our 
 judge. Just because He was human, but in his 
 humanity realized and lived the life of divinity, He 
 must judge us for any failure we have made to at- 
 tain that measure of divineness which was possible 
 to us. “Of his fulness have all we received” and 
 there was grace to supersede all grace which we 
 thus far have realized and more than we have ap- 
 propriated. For this failure we must be judged, 
 not by the standards of an impossible Omnipotence 
 but by the measure of those qualities realized in the 
 human life of Jesus. He met temptation and suc- 
 cessfully resisted it and called for no miracle to be 
 wrought to enable Him thus to overcome. He 
 lived and loved and died with the life of God tri- 
 umphant in his mortal flesh. Have we done the 
 same? 
 
 Hope is the Cinderella of the three Christian 
 
 235 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 graces. Faith and love are appraised at their real 
 value, but hope is hopelessly at a disadvantage be- 
 tween them. Iaith is a condition of salvation, and 
 love is salvation. What room have we for hope? 
 ‘The answer is, that hope is the dynamic of salva- 
 tion. The epistle to the Hebrews tells us that hope 
 is an anchor to the soul (Hebrews 6:19). So it ts, 
 and the anchor is its emblem, but hope is more than 
 an anchor; it is an engine. 
 
 Glorious things are said of hope by artists and 
 poets, but after all most of them pity hope and say 
 of her, “Poor thing; it’s fortunate she doesn’t know 
 what really is coming.” ‘Thousands of people look 
 at Watt’s familiar painting and say, “Is that 
 Hope? I should think that was Despair.” The 
 poets indeed have made Hope and Despair twin 
 sisters. Milton says in Paradise Lost: 
 
 What reinforcement we may gain from hope: 
 If not what resolution from despair. 
 
 Shelley went further and said, 
 
 Worse than despair, 
 Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope. 
 
 Others who do not go so far are never able to 
 
 236 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 think of hope without remembering how little there 
 is to hope for. 
 Shakespeare tells us that 
 
 The miserable have no other medicine, 
 But only hope. 
 
 Pope in his Essay on Man, tells us that 
 
 Hope springs eternal in the human breast: 
 Man never is, but always to be blest. 
 
 Through all these and a multitude of other quo- 
 tations runs this idea that it is rather desirable that 
 men should hope, but that there is not very much 
 to hope for. It is thus we discount one of the three 
 abiding Christian virtues. 
 
 Greek mythology had its story of the creation 
 of man. ‘I’o Prometheus and his brother Epime- 
 theus was committed this task. :pimetheus had 
 distributed the gifts of life so lavishly to others that: 
 he had very little left to give to man; and for his 
 sake Prometheus ascending to heaven brought 
 down the gift of fire. To punish him for his au- 
 dacity, Prometheus was chained to the rock with 
 vultures forever tearing at his vitals, while to K:pi- 
 
 237 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 metheus was sent the curse of the first woman. Her 
 name was Pandora, for every one of the gods had 
 given something to make her, and she had a box 
 containing all the curses and just one blessing. Be- 
 ing charged by her husband never to open the box, 
 she lifted the cover with no worse intent than to 
 take a momentary peep within, but all the ills of 
 humanity, both those that afflict men’s bodies and 
 those that torment the mind, rushed out. She shut 
 the cover down barely in time to retain the one 
 blessing, and that was hope. It was a poor com- 
 pensation for the ill she had done, but it was richly 
 worth the saving. 
 
 Tope is among the most precious of human as- 
 sets. We belittle it. We discount it. We count it 
 a mark of inexperience. We say, “Blessed are they 
 who expect nothing,” that is who have ceased to 
 hope, “for they shall never be disappointed.” On 
 the contrary, we ought to say, Blessed are they 
 who, no matter how often they are disappointed, 
 steadfastly continue to hope for all that is good. 
 
 Alexander the Great wept because there were no 
 more worlds to conquer. ‘That is not surprising. 
 He was still a young man, and conquest was the 
 
 238 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 business of kings. Any of us might do the same if 
 we saw the end of life completely attained and the 
 long years stretching ahead with nothing left to 
 kindle the imagination or nerve the arm to valiant 
 endeavor. 
 
 I remember reading of a young American busi- 
 ness man who had attained early in life everything 
 he had thought desirable, and it had all come to him 
 easily. Education, business success, wealth and 
 social standing were all his; and one night a com- 
 pany gathered in his honor to congratulate him on 
 the completeness of his success. He received all 
 the congratulations of his friends, and that night 
 went home and put a bullet through his brain. 
 
 Not without reason have the poets and philoso- 
 phers linked together those two contrasting ele- 
 ments, despair and hope. Even despair could not 
 produce quite the paralysis of hope rendered hope- 
 less by complete achievement. 
 
 The World War raised anew the question 
 whether we have a right to hope for salvation after 
 death for those whom we do not know to have ac- 
 cepted Christ in this ife. Our country suffered so 
 little in comparison with Great Britain and the 
 
 239 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 nations of the continent, we can hardly realize how 
 tremendous has been the pressure of this appeal to 
 those who hold the Christian faith and who have 
 lost loved ones that had given no indication in 
 their lifetime of their personal acceptance of Christ 
 as a Saviour. In less degree, but still insistently, 
 the question comes up to Christian thinkers here, 
 “Are we forbidden to hope that our loved ones are 
 saved 2” 
 
 I have an unqualified answer to this question. 
 We are not forbidden to hope for any good thing, 
 for ourselves or for those dear to us. 
 
 A while ago I had occasion to attend a portion 
 of a murder trial. The defendant was a woman, 
 and the circumstances were such that it was im- 
 portant that she should establish a reputation for 
 previous good character. One of the witnesses who 
 appeared on her behalf was a neighbor and friend, 
 and the attorney for the prosecution asked her on 
 cross-examination a series of questions intending 
 to show that she was not an unprejudiced witness. 
 He asked her in succession, “Are you near neigh- 
 bors? Are you intimate friends?” To these and 
 other like questions she answered affirmatively. 
 
 240 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 Then he asked her, “Do you not hope that she is 
 going to be acquitted?” “I object,” interrupted the 
 attorney for the defense, and then, very quietly, he 
 added, “We all hope she is going to be acquitted.” 
 
 The judge sustained the objection. It was the 
 duty of every member of the jury to hope that she 
 would be acquitted and to find her not guilty if he 
 could. 
 
 Our criminal jurisprudence compels judge and 
 jury to hope for the acquittal of the accused and to 
 give him the benefit of every reasonable doubt. 
 
 Orthodox preaching has constantly reminded it- 
 self that it must not take the edge off its appeal to 
 men by holding out a hope of pardon after death. 
 That feeling has been justified. We have no right 
 to be dogmatic at a point where the word of God is 
 so reticent, nor have we any right to superimpose 
 our hard and fast meanings upon Scripture terms 
 which were never intended thus to be employed. 
 
 As Joseph Cook used to say with such tremen- 
 dous emphasis, we have no right to teach men that 
 it is safe for them to die in their sins. It certainly 
 is not safe for men so to die. Neither is it safe for 
 them to live in their sins. 
 
 241 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 There is an old story of a devout old lady who 
 rose in prayer meeting and said, “Lord, thou 
 knowest that some people teach that all men are 
 going to heaven; but we hope for something better 
 than that.”” We should all be able to say, Amen, 
 to such a prayer. I, personally, hope that God will 
 find some way of making men fit for heaven; and 
 that is something better than simply that they 
 should get there. 
 
 Of this I am sure. Punishment for sin will not 
 continue after it ceases to do good. God’s love and 
 mercy are not limited to time but belong also to 
 eternity. If God does not save men in the next 
 world it will be for the same reason that God does 
 not save some men here, namely, that after God 
 has done his utmost those men refuse to be saved. 
 
 I have said that I dare to hope that God’s infinite 
 love and compassion reach far beyond the limits of 
 this short life. I believe that if God does not save 
 men in the future life, it will be for the same rea- 
 son that He does not save all men here, namely that 
 they wilfully resist his salvation, so that He can not 
 save them with a salvation which is of their free 
 choice. I do not dogmatize on a theme so obscure, 
 
 242 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 but I shall not be less than completely honest when 
 I say that I hope that there is no eternity of suffer- 
 ing and sin. I hope that God has some better way 
 of dealing with even the worst of human sinners 
 than to keep them alive that they may sin eternal- 
 ly and thus compel Him to punish them eternally. 
 When sin stops, then, I think, punishment will 
 stop; and I hope that sin will not go on forever. 
 An English poet, J. EK. Flecker, has written a 
 short poem called Tenebris Interlucentem, in 
 which he suggests how even in hell some gracious 
 influence from without might stir a generous im- 
 pulse within. If so, God will not refuse to send it. 
 
 A linnet who had lost her way 
 Sang on a blackened bough in Hell, 
 Till all the ghosts remembered well 
 The trees, the wind, the golden day. 
 
 At last they knew that they had died, 
 When they heard music in that land; 
 And some one there stole forth a hand 
 
 To draw a brother to his side. 
 
 Some good people, accepting as Bible truth the 
 doctrines which they had heard preached concern- 
 245 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 ing hell, have suffered exquisite and unmerited 
 tortures by reason of the death of loved ones whom 
 they could not honestly declare were Christians, 
 but whom they loved too much, and found too 
 lovable, to believe that they deserved to be damned. 
 Yet for these who were dearer to them than life 
 they knew no possible fate but the eternal fires of 
 satanic retribution. If this book shall fall into the 
 hands of any such person, a father, perhaps or 
 mother, to whom the grief had been hard enough 
 without this excruciating element of cruel torture, 
 let me say a word of comfort. 
 
 I did not know this boy or girl or friend of yours, 
 and have no authority to say what judgment awaits 
 upon the other shore. But this I know, your love 
 for this dear one is less than God’s, and his compas- 
 sion is greater than yours. If there is anything that 
 your love could do for that loved one, be sure God’s 
 love will not do less. “If ye, then, being evil,” can 
 not reconcile your thought to this dear one’s eter- 
 nal loss, “how much more shall your Father who is 
 in heaven” find methods of expressing a love that 
 is not willing any should perish. 
 
 Does any one say, “I thought you were an pert 
 
 244 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 dox minister, and I discover that you are a Univer- 
 salist?’ I am an orthodox minister, and I do not 
 belong to the denomination which bears the fine 
 name of Universalist. I am not sure that I am in 
 all points in agreement with them, and I am abun- 
 dantly happy in my own church. I once heard a 
 Universalist minister say he believed “that God’s 
 patch would be as large as sin’s rent.” I should not 
 be willing to believe less. I believe more. I do not 
 believe that where sin abounds grace shall almost 
 as much abound, but that where sin abounds grace 
 shall much more abound. I have some hope that I 
 shall be found to cherish a belief almost as large as 
 the promises of God and the love of Jesus Christ. 
 That love can save to the uttermost. 
 
 I hope. I hope for every sweet and beautiful 
 thing I can think of. I hope there will not be an 
 eternity of sin and suffering. I hope that sin will 
 some time have run its mad course, and God will be 
 all in all. I hope God will not maintain forever a 
 protected and segregated red-light district. I 
 should be ashamed of myself if I did not hope for 
 something better than that sin and shame and suf- 
 fering would go on forever. I hope the devil will 
 
 245 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 either die or be converted. I dare not hope for 
 anything less. 
 
 I do not pretend to know; I only hope. And yet 
 some things I think I know. I know that so long 
 as hell endures, God suffers. I know that so long 
 as there is one lost soul, Christ is on the cross. I 
 hope for entirety, unity, and all-pervading good- 
 ness. I hope this because I know that God is good. 
 Hell will not endure forever unless such eternity is 
 necessary to the expression of divine love. 
 
 There are two arguments used by good men 
 which do not in the least appeal to me. One of 
 them is this. Jesus said that the wicked shall go 
 into eternal punishment, and the word aionios in — 
 the Greek means eternal and nothing else. That 
 argument does not convince me; it does not even 
 touch me. No modern lexicon can tell us precisely 
 the meaning of any word in a dead language. We 
 can not be sure that we occidentals who live with 
 our watches in our hands can determine precisely 
 the values of time words in ancient times or oriental 
 lands. Moreover, Jesus did not speak Greek, but 
 Aramaic; and we do not know of what Aramaic 
 
 246 
 
 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 word the Greek aionios is a translation, nor what 
 its time value was in the elastic and picturesque 
 speech of Palestine. We do know from ancient lit- 
 erature that the longest time-words were used with 
 great flexibility. Jonah speaks of his three days’ 
 imprisonment as “forever” because it seemed to 
 him a long time. 
 
 The other argument is this. “The Bible uses the 
 same adjectives for the timelessness of both heaven 
 and hell. If you show that hell is not inevitably 
 eternal, you show that heaven also is not: eternal.” 
 That is not true. There might be an official report 
 of social conditions in Chicago or New York which 
 would say that we must reckon with both the 
 brothel and the church as permanent elements in 
 our city’s life. The same word “permanent” might 
 be used, and properly, in such a report. Yet there 
 might be a million reasons why the brothel ought to 
 go and the church not, and that very report might 
 concern itself with plans for the ultimate elimina- 
 tion of the brothel. 
 
 If you were a minister, you would have to bury 
 all sorts and conditions of people, good people and 
 murderers, little children and wayward youth. 
 
 24:7 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Sometimes a mother would come to you and ask 
 about her boy who had died. She would say, “He 
 was wayward, but he was not wholly bad. He was 
 kind; in many ways he was good; but he was not a 
 Christian. Is it wicked for me to hope?’ What 
 would you tell her? I should tell her it would be 
 wicked for her not to hope. I should tell her God 
 loves her boy more than she does, and her own love 
 is the reflection of God’s love for him. I should not 
 dare tell her more, nor would I dare tell her less. I 
 do not know much about it. I only know that God 
 is good, and I hope for every great and beautiful 
 thing. 
 
 Does any man say, if what I have been saying is 
 true, he will live sinfully here, and repent here- 
 after? I can not think any man who hears me is so 
 contemptibly mean. But if you are thinking any 
 such thing, do you suppose you can live a reckless, 
 wilful life here, and come to the gate of heaven and 
 find an angel there with a crown and harp for you, 
 and you take it and go in and be happy? You 
 could not look a respectable angel in the face. You 
 would want to go like Judas and hang yourself. 
 And when you stood in the presence of Him who 
 
 248 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 was crucified that He might save men, you would 
 beat your breast and ask the privilege of slinking 
 off to hell for a nmullennium or two, and then of 
 scrubbing the golden streets for about a million 
 years in the hope of some time becoming worthy of 
 some very humble place in heaven. No, the logic 
 of this chapter is this: You must reckon with the 
 same God in whatever world you go to. If you go 
 to hell, the most blistering fact that burns your 
 consciousness will be the love of God. Since you 
 must find Him wherever you go, and reckon with 
 Him, do it now. 
 
 The Sybil offered Tarquin nine books at a price. 
 He refused, and she destroyed three, and doubled 
 the price. Still he refused, and she destroyed three 
 more and again doubled the price, then he bought 
 the three that remained. No man has ever called 
 him wise, or supposed that he drove a shrewd bar- 
 gain. Noman acts wisely who postpones inevitable 
 choices to an uncertain future, letting priceless op- 
 portunities go to waste. 
 
 There is a fine element of risk in the enterprises 
 of God. There is a sublime appearance of uncer- 
 tainty in the Divine undertakings. ‘There is that 
 
 249 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 which fills the doubtful with a sense of the con- 
 sciousness of success and throws into the sphere of 
 the problematical a thrilling but trembling certain- 
 ty. How can God be in hell? How can there be 
 any hell? If there is a God what can be the mean- 
 ing and function of hell? Of one thing we are cer- 
 tain. The love of God like a rainbow spans the 
 blackest abyss made possible by human sin. It is 
 inconceivable that God should cease to love; it is 
 utterly impossible that the heart of God should be- 
 come a stranger to pity. 
 
 Does it follow that there is hope in hell? Where 
 there is life there is always hope. We dare not set 
 limits to the compassion of God’s_ everlasting 
 mercy. But the thought of God’s spirit as present 
 in hell need not bring to us too swift an element of 
 comfort. ‘The presence of the spirit of God in the 
 heart of the transgressor must ever be the keenest 
 element in the Divine retribution. The men of the 
 Apocalypse who called upon the rocks to fall and 
 cover them are seeking to escape from the presence 
 not of Satan but of God. It is his presence that 
 causes the sharpest shame and the bitterest re- 
 morse. It is this which makes conscience so terrible 
 to face. 
 
 250 
 
UNTO THE NETHERMOST 
 
 What is conscience after all but the presence of 
 God in human memory? What is it that drives 
 men to confession or to suicide when they have no 
 accuser but themselves? 'To the wilful transgres- 
 sor, to the shameful impenitent the presence of God 
 in hell can bring only keener sorrow, only more 
 swift and sure and poignant self-condemnation. 
 
 And yet we need not shrink and must not shrink 
 from the confident declaration that the presence of 
 God is a ground of eternal hope. We have no au- 
 thority whatever to say to any man that he can con- 
 tinue in sin and dying impenitent can make up in 
 some future life for opportunities neglected here. 
 On the other hand, we have no right to limit the 
 mercy of God. Punishment is not arbitrary. God’s 
 grace is not vindictive. The love of God is a love 
 not only unto the uttermost, but unto the nether- 
 most. Punishment is for the sake of the good that 
 God can do through punishment and can do in no 
 other way. 
 
 Deep below, as high above 
 Swings the circle of God’s love. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 MAY WE PRAY FOR OUR DEAD! 
 
 Tue Protestant Reformation had its origin 
 in a righteous protest against abuses then existing 
 in the Roman Catholic Church. Among them, and 
 chief among those that evoked the Theses of 
 Luther, was that of the doctrine of Indulgences. 
 The Pope was endeavoring to raise money for the 
 completion of St. Peter’s at Rome; and one of the 
 ways of securing it was by the sale of Indulgences. 
 Whatever the Roman Church itself intended to 
 teach, those who had the sale of these Indulgences 
 taught that by the purchase of them with money 
 designated for so holy a cause, men might buy par- 
 don from sin for themselves or their dead friends. 
 The souls of the dead were and are held to go, not 
 direct to heaven, but to an intermediate state called 
 Purgatory, where they are purged from the sins of 
 earth preparatory to their entrance into heaven, 
 
 aon 
 
MAY WE PRAY FOR OUR DEAD? 
 
 They were held to have no power of earning 
 money, but their living friends could contribute 
 money, which, applied to the purchase of Papal In- 
 dulgences, had the effect of shortening the period 
 of their sojourn in Purgatory and lessening its 
 rigors. 
 
 Against this doctrine the Reformers protested 
 with all their might; and in the reformed churches 
 there was strong protest against any habit of 
 prayer for the dead. This protest was intended as 
 a safeguard against any recrudescence of the false 
 doctrine of the value of purchased masses for the 
 dead, and also as an expression of faith that the 
 soul chooses in this life its eternal destiny. 
 
 But when these superstitions are laid aside, there 
 is still something to be said for an intermediate 
 state between earth and heaven. ‘There are certain 
 more or less obscure passages of Scripture which 
 may be held to teach it. And beside this is a fact, 
 that character as it exists in the life of men and 
 women departing from this world, is not, in every 
 instance, fit for immediate entrance into a per- 
 fected heaven. 
 
 For myself, I find no particular comfort in the 
 
 253 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 doctrine of an intermediate state, yet, we admit 
 that many people who leave this world too good to 
 deserve a place in hell are not fitted, so far as we 
 can judge, for an immediate entrance into such a 
 place as we believe heaven to be. Sam Jones, in his 
 evangelistic sermons, was accustomed to say that 
 if all people who expected to go to heaven really 
 got there, he would need to adopt precautions for 
 the protection of his valuables. ‘There is no moral 
 quality in the fact of death; no magic about it 
 which can be expected suddenly to transform a 
 crabbed or miserly or petulant Christian into an 
 irreproachable angel. There are Christians who, 
 for their own well-being and the comfort of their 
 associates, will need a few millions of years of in- 
 struction if they are to live comfortably with other 
 people in heaven. 
 
 I do not know who invented the notion that 
 there can be no possible sin in heaven; that, as I 
 once heard a man say, if St. Paul should commit in 
 heaven one tiniest offense against the perfect will 
 of God, he would be cast out and hurled into the 
 bottomless pit. No one is wise enough to be justi- 
 fied in any such nonsense. ‘There will be no sin in 
 
 254 
 
 le a a 
 
 ee ae Eh mei 
 
MAY WE PRAY FOR OUR DEAD? 
 
 heaven, in the sense of lawless hostility to God; but 
 souls in heaven will have to learn, and there will 
 always be the possibility of learning by the making 
 of mistakes and trying again. 
 
 Without committing ourselves to the clumsy and 
 needless doctrine of an intermediate state, or the 
 wholly useless machinery of a future probation, let 
 us cherish the belief that heaven is capable of ad- 
 justing itself to people of many degrees of sanc- 
 tity and experience; that it is a place of perpetual 
 growth in knowledge and in grace and in the fine 
 art of living together. 
 
 May we pray for our dead? 
 
 In Great Britain and other countries where loss 
 of life was heavy in the World War, this question 
 is asked with new insistence. There has been 
 strong opposition in Puritan theology to the prac- 
 tise of prayer for the dead. It has seemed to sug- 
 gest the idea of Purgatory, and has been opposed 
 on the ground that those who are dead are either 
 saved or lost, and our prayers can not avail for 
 them. ‘There is a growing conviction that this does 
 not answer the agonized question of sorrowing 
 hearts, and I think it does not. 
 
 255 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 Speaking for myself, I hold no theory of Purga- 
 tory, yet I see no good reason why we should not 
 pray for our dead. We do not need to pray to God 
 to be merciful toward them, for He is more merci- 
 ful than we are, and loves our dear ones more than 
 we do. The fact that our loved ones are in heaven 
 is not the last word of our hope for them: we hope 
 that there they still will grow in love and strength 
 and goodness, and I do not know any reason to 
 think that our prayers may not be a help to them. 
 I am sure that we are under no obligation to cease 
 loving them, and why should we cease to pray for 
 them? If it is any comfort so to do, I am certain 
 no one has a right to forbid it. 
 
 Death as we stand close to it seems a great and 
 wide gulf between us and another world; it may 
 not be nearly as wide as we think. You stand be- 
 side a river and look across; it is very wide, deep 
 and dark. But if you climb a mountain and look 
 down, it is just a narrow silver ribbon, and the two 
 sides of it are not very unlike. So, I think, may be 
 the two shores of the river of death as we shall look 
 down from another world. But I believe the other 
 shore is more fertile, more beautiful; and the same 
 
 256 
 
MAY WE PRAY FOR OUR DEAD? 
 
 God reigns on both sides. I think your prayers can 
 bridge that stream; at least, if it comforts you to 
 think so, you have the right to think so, and to 
 pray. 
 
 Let me add this word of caution. If your heart 
 impels you to pray for your dead, do not Iet your 
 prayers degenerate into superstition in any form. 
 It were better to leave our loved ones alone in the 
 dignity of death than to let our childish fancy lead 
 us into foolish and degraded forms of prayer for 
 them. And do not pray any prayer which assumes 
 either that your dead need your prayers to induce 
 God to be kindly and generous and merciful to 
 them, or that you need their prayers to God to in- 
 duce Him to be merciful and gracious and just to 
 you. If you will bear these cautions in mind, and 
 you. find comfort in prayer for those whom you 
 have “loved long since and lost a while,” no man 
 has a right to forbid you. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 HEAVEN 
 
 THe word Heaven is used in the Bible in three 
 distinct yet closely related senses: 'The first is the 
 atmospheric heaven, the place of clouds, the home 
 of the birds, the region in plain sight and a little 
 
 beyond our reach. “The fowls of the heaven” live 
 
 there. ‘The second is the astronomical heaven, the 
 region in which the sun and moon and planets 
 move. The third is the theological heaven, the 
 abode of God and of holy angels and of redeemed 
 souls, 
 
 It is not to be supposed, however, that this divi- 
 sion is arbitrary or constant. When Paul spoke of 
 being caught up into the third heaven, it is not nec- 
 essary to imagine that he carefully defined the two 
 lower ones; much less is precise numeration essen- 
 tial when “the seventh heaven” is spoken of. The 
 throne of God is exalted high above all visible 
 objects. 
 
 ~08 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 We need not be disturbed by questions of direc- 
 tion or location. That heaven is conceived of as 
 above need not interfere with our knowledge of the 
 revolution of the earth. The elevation is spiritual, 
 and not necessarily geographical. } 
 
 Yet we are hardly justified in saying, “Heaven 
 is a state and not a place.” It is, to be sure, a state; 
 and it can hardly be called a place in the sense that 
 we are to demand its location at some particular 
 point in the stellar map; but it is somewhere. “I 
 go to prepare a place for you.” Heaven is a pre- 
 pared place for a prepared people. Where it is, 
 and at what point in the earth’s revolution we 
 should think of it as nearest when we say that it is 
 above, we need not trouble to ask. We are con- 
 strained in our thinking to locate it, and we think of 
 it as above. That is all we need to say or to know 
 of its location. 
 
 The doctrine of a future life has been abused, as 
 most good things have been abused, in its use as a 
 divine bribe upon the one hand and menace upon 
 the other. We may well pray: 
 
 What conscience tells me should be done, 
 Or warns me not to do, 
 
 259 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 That teach me more than hell to shun, 
 This more than heaven pursue. 
 
 But we do not need to regard it as a selfish re- 
 ward of virtue that the coldly calculating Christian 
 shall barter joy in this world for greater joy here- 
 after, or avoid the sin which in his heart he loved for 
 fear of the hell he deserves. On this subject James 
 Freeman Clark spoke sane and wise words: 
 
 I know that it is the custom to say that belief in 
 immortality is not necessary to human virtue or 
 human happiness. ‘The highest and noblest virtue, 
 it is declared, does not need the stimulus of future 
 reward and punishment. If there is no hereafter, 
 good men will continue to be good for the sake of 
 goodness. And, if there is no hereafter, men will 
 continue to enjoy this life because of its own in- 
 terest. The earthly paradise is enough for us, it is 
 said: we need no future paradise. 
 
 This is partially true. Goodness may not need 
 future reward and punishment as a motive. But 
 the influence on life which immortality furnishes 
 does not act mainly as the expectation of reward. 
 We are made better, stronger, nobler, by our faith 
 in immortality, because we have around us the 
 mighty influence of the great cloud of witnesses 
 who have gone up. We belong to their world as 
 well as to our own. Is it nothing to know that the 
 spiritual universe above us is not empty, but full of 
 
 260 
 
 % 
 
 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 immortal souls, advancing on forever, in sympathy 
 with all that is good here? Is it nothing to believe 
 that the saints and martyrs of all time, the prophets 
 and heroes of every age, are still full of the same 
 powers, still devoted to the same generous activ- 
 ities? Will our lives be the same whether we be- 
 heve that all the regions of being above man are 
 full of intelligence, energy, and love, or that they 
 are a vast emptiness, an infinite and inane void? 
 
 It is sometimes said that it is sheer egotism for 
 any man to assume that he is so important to the 
 universe that God must raise him from the dead 
 and grant him life everlasting. It is said that we 
 need not demand for our own selves or our loved 
 ones identity of being in the life to come. It is 
 affirmed that, having served his purpose with us 
 here, God can better dispose of us when we die and 
 begin again new life with new beings. But this 
 does not satisfy the demands of affection, nor yet 
 those of the higher reason. We are by no means 
 sure that newly created beings without our experi- 
 ence and personality could serve God as well as 
 men can serve. 
 
 There is no Scripture basis for the belief that 
 angels were once human beings. ‘They may have 
 been, but if so the fact is not stated. If they be- 
 
 261 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 long to a different order, to a class that has never 
 known struggle such as we have had, heaven must 
 possess for them a pathetic lack of background. 
 William Hervey Woods with keen penetration has 
 set forth this truth—in a poem entitled Angels 
 and Men: 
 
 He said, “We have no kin— 
 
 No angel of us sees with fond surprise 
 
 Himself smile at him from his daughter’s eyes, 
 And though new worlds we win, 
 
 Lonely and chill is our white angel-hood 
 
 Beside the warm, quick, quivering woof of blood 
 All men are knitted in; 
 
 Envy us not our palace-pomp enskied, 
 
 We have but heaven, and ye have home beside.” 
 
 He said, ““We have no tears— 
 But when mid our antiphonies, we mark 
 Jehovah stoop, because down in your dark 
 
 Some sobbing prayer he hears, 
 And with His own hand lift the weeper’s head, 
 ‘To us who watch, so to be comforted 
 
 Outbids all griefs and fears, 
 And Michael even would snatch at man’s distress 
 Might he but know man-wise God’s gentleness.” 
 
 He said, “We have no scars, 
 No knotted wounds Immanuel’s touch may kiss 
 To sudden-thrilling, keen, deep-seated bliss, 
 But wistful mid the stars 
 
 262 
 
 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 We stand, and hear Him speak rapt, shaken words 
 With His old comrades of the time of swords. 
 O men, it is your wars 
 With Him and for Him, make the Christ your 
 own— 
 You and your Jesus here have sears alone!” 
 
 The Bible descriptions of heaven have been vul- 
 garized by too much literalism. Any description of 
 happy existence and relationship of spiritual beings 
 would of necessity employ figures of speech de- 
 rived from pleasant objects in this life. It is not 
 of heaven but of a regenerate society here on earth 
 that the Book of Revelation speaks when it tells of 
 golden streets and gates of pearls and harps and 
 crowns. It is quite legitimate to use these figures 
 also of heaven, provided we remember that we are 
 not dealing with prose, and are speaking the lan- 
 guage of illustration and not of definition. So 
 soon as we make the Book of Revelation a kind of 
 Baedeker of heaven, we become bound to a crass 
 materialism, none the less pathetic because it is 
 used in the service of religion. 
 
 Healthy boys and girls in this generation are not 
 singing, “I want to be an angel,” and healthy older 
 people do not contemplate with strong and consist- 
 
 263 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 ent desire the picture of a heaven of eternal leth- 
 argy, broken only by choir rehearsals. 
 
 Broadly speaking, we are justified in thinking 
 that heaven will preserve all the essential values of 
 human life, and protect them upon the field of a 
 larger and nobler existence. Whatever helps the 
 imagination to visualize this, will, if not morbidly 
 dwelt upon, assist to make heaven a trifle more 
 tangible. 
 
 Whatever is best in this life will be with us in 
 heaven, or if not that, then something adapted to 
 meet the same need, but better. 
 
 The saddest funerals are not those where the 
 most tears are shed; the saddest are those where 
 every one is secretly glad, and where there is only 
 a hollow pretense of grief to satisfy the demands of 
 public decency. Grief is the thorny stem on which 
 bloom the fairest flowers of love. We could not 
 suffer if we did not love. 
 
 It is not certainty but faith that upholds us in 
 time of sorrow. ‘There can be no complete dem- 
 onstration of any of the finer things of life. Jon- 
 athan Brierley was no writer of cant, nor did he 
 write much of heaven. His was a faith for the day’s 
 
 264 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 work; but when he came to face death he did so 
 
 with the calm confidence that he knew whom he 
 had believed: 
 
 Death remains for us all a great venture. ““Who 
 knows,” says Euripides, “if life be death and death 
 life?’ On that “Who knows,” the great “Per- 
 haps,” countless multitudes of our fellow men have 
 been content to live and die. To us, with all the 
 light that comes from both science and religion, the 
 step from “here” to “there” we have all to take re- 
 mains still a step into the unknown. ‘The mystery 
 of living is kept up to its last moment. We are to 
 be on tiptoe all the time. The soul is not allowed to 
 support itself on any other material than faith. 
 And that it is so is surely well; fcr us it is best so. 
 Were certainty and clear vision better we should 
 have had it. But we are to trust the whole way and 
 go by trusting. We have been led too well and too 
 graciously to permit of our believing that we shall 
 be fooled at the last. 
 
 Faith in immortality is the highest tribute which 
 the mind of man has paid to the value of life. 
 When that faith is unselfish, intelligent and truly 
 religious, it is the highest and noblest form of ex- 
 pression of confidence in the fundamental sound- 
 ness of the universe and the eternal goodness of 
 God. 
 
 265 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 We shall not be satisfied to be told that our own 
 loved ones are forever gone from us, but that God 
 will give us other and compensating joys, for we 
 want the assurance that the love of this life is not 
 wasted. It is too precious a thing to lose with life. 
 If it were thus to be lost, God would mercifully 
 save us the bitterness of our grief. Grief is per- 
 mitted, that comfort may be abundant. 
 
 God does not send us strange flowers every year; 
 When the spring winds blow o’er the pleasant 
 places, 
 The same dear things lift up the same fair faces, 
 The violet is here. 
 
 Tt all comes back, the odor, grace, and hue, 
 
 Hach sweet relation of its life repeated; 
 
 Nothing is lost, no looking-for is cheated; 
 It is the thing we knew. 
 
 So after the death winter it will be; 
 
 God will not put strange sights in heavenly places; 
 
 The old love will look out from the old faces; 
 Loved one, I shall have thee. 
 
 The largest building Jesus ever saw on earth was 
 the Temple at Jerusalem. It was a house of many 
 rooms. When He journeyed thither with his par- 
 
 266 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 ents at the age of twelve, He asked, “Wist ye not 
 that I must be in my Father’s house?” 'The same 
 idea which He used of the Temple on that occasion 
 is expressed in the word which He used of heaven 
 in his last discourse with his disciples, though in 
 Luke 2:49 the noun does not appear. As the tem- 
 ple in Jerusalem was a house of many rooms de- 
 voted to a wide variety of purposes, but all 
 constructed with reference to the promotion of a 
 common end, so also was His Father’s house in 
 heaven: the eternal abode of the blessed. 
 Interesting as is his use of the word “house,” the 
 word “mansions” is even more so. It suggests a 
 degree of privacy, an element of personal and so- 
 cial relationship belonging to heaven and absent, or 
 at least not emphasized, in the popular conception 
 of what that place may contain. When we get to 
 heaven we are not going to camp out-of-doors in 
 the golden streets, surrounded by a mob of angels. 
 Heaven has its sacred privacies; its companion- 
 ships free from the rude intrusion of celestial gos-_ 
 sip. I should not like to translate it, “My Father’s 
 house is a great big apartment building,” but that 
 would be nearer the truth than to make it read, 
 267 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 “My Father’s house is a place where people do 
 nothing but attend public functions of a religious 
 nature.” 
 
 It is interesting, too, that our Lord said, “I go 
 to prepare.” That kind of preparation was usually 
 delegated to a servant. Peter and John had done 
 that with respect to the very room where Jesus 
 engaged in this conversation. ‘They had gone to 
 Jerusalem early in the afternoon to prepare the 
 guest chamber for Jesus and his disciples who came 
 in the evening. He told them that He was going 
 to heaven to do there what two of his disciples had 
 done for Him that very day. They had gone 
 ahead to prepare a place for Him. They had come 
 to Jesus asking, “Where wilt thou that we prepare 
 for Thee to eat the Passover?” (Matthew 26:17.) 
 He told them where to go and they had gone and 
 prepared this very room. Now, He, using the 
 very same word which they had used to Him, said, 
 “I go and prepare a place for you.” It is an inter- 
 esting bit of reciprocity, but we must not dwell 
 upon it, for our chief thought centers round another 
 word, the word here translated “mansions.” 
 
 The most interesting word in this verse and the 
 
 2638 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 one which is the key to its real meaning is “man- 
 sions.” It is a word which occurs in the New Tes- 
 tament as a noun only here and in a later verse in 
 this same chapter, where Jesus says that He and 
 the Father will enter into the lives of those who love 
 Him, “and make our abode with him.” (John 
 14:23.) But as a verb we have the word in a large 
 number of passages; and we find it both as noun 
 and verb in other Greek literature. By this process 
 of comparison we discover that the word has no 
 such settled and permanent connotation as the 
 word “mansions.” It is used of lodging places as 
 where Jesus lodged with Zaccheus (Luke 19:5) ; 
 and was asked to abide with the disciples (Luke 
 24:29). The same verb is used of Peter’s lodging 
 with Simon, the tanner (Acts 9:43); of Paul’s 
 boarding place with Aquilla and Priscilla (Acts 
 18:3), and of his visiting at Cesarea “a good many 
 days” (Acts 21; 7-8, 10). 
 
 It is interesting to discover in a reference like this 
 an incidental but still fairly clear indication of one 
 of the conditions of habit. So far as this verse gives 
 us any light at all, its suggestion is that of progress. 
 When we get to heaven we shall not settle down in 
 everlasting stagnation; we shall move on. 
 
 269 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 We shall move on in knowledge. These minds 
 of ours are not constructed for a sudden and explo- 
 sive expansion, either on earth or in heaven. ‘The 
 soul itself is not a physical entity; it is our capacity 
 for development. We struggle through this world 
 with painfully little knowledge, but normal life 
 never loses its capacity for growth and its eager- 
 ness to grow. We may reasonably assume that 
 heaven will be a place of progress in the exact sci- 
 ences, such as one quaint philosopher had in mind 
 when being asked of the occupation of God through 
 eternity, answered, “God geometrizes.”’ 
 
 And yet it will be a minor interest of heaven that 
 we shall discover in abstract pursuit; we shall grow 
 in knowledge in heaven and that normally, as Jesus 
 on earth grew in wisdom while He grew in stature. 
 “Now we know in part; then shall we know even as 
 also we are known.” 
 
 We shall move on in our capacity for mutual 
 helpfulness. Our whole mind and condition are 
 constructed with reference to social relationship. 
 We might as well expect to walk through heaven 
 on one leg as to suppose that we shall go through 
 with unsocial personality. 
 
 270 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 We shall grow in goodness. People sometimes 
 assume that the instant we get to heaven every 
 fault we have will be miraculously eradicated. I do 
 not believe anybody knows that to be true. It 
 seems to be the plan of God that we shall be per- 
 mitted to make a good many blunders here on earth 
 that we may learn by our mistakes. I know no rea- 
 son why we should suppose that God will instantly 
 and violently abrogate that method. I have heard 
 people say that if the highest archangel in glory 
 should commit one slightest sin that single viola- 
 tion of God’s law would cast him instantly down 
 to hell. Nobody knows that and I do not believe 
 it. I think that God who is so patient with us here 
 can afford to be and will be patient with us while 
 we slowly but surely learn better. 
 
 I have already spoken of the fact that the only 
 other place in the New Testament where the word 
 “mansions” is used as a noun is in this same chap- 
 ter, where Jesus says that He and the Father will 
 make their abode with those who love God. That 
 is a very precious promise, whose beginnings are 
 available now and whose reach extends to the 
 farther side of eternity. In heaven we shall be 
 
 271 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 moving on, but we shall always have companion- 
 ship. The golden streets have other traffic than 
 the celestial moving vans. We move on, but our 
 Heavenly Father and our gracious Saviour move 
 on with us. 
 
 It is a satisfaction thus to be assured that in the 
 next world, as in this, “Our God goes marching 
 on.” Progress does not halt, either on God’s part 
 or ours. This urge in the blood of normal human 
 life is not wholly a manifestation of our human 
 restlessness; it is a manifestation of something in 
 the heart of God that from the days of Israel’s 
 wanderings in the wilderness on through the tri- 
 umphal progress of heaven keeps God and us for- 
 ever moving. ‘The homing instinct of the soul that 
 drives us Godward is no more a normal part of our 
 nature than the adventurous push within us, spur- 
 ring us ever on to catch the rhythm of the Divine 
 music and keep step with God. 
 
 A good many years ago IJ had a visit by the road- 
 side with an unlettered preacher in the Kentucky 
 mountains. It was a hot day. We stopped to 
 water our horses where we crossed a stream and 
 then dismounted and sat for a little while upon the 
 
 272 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 bank. He first tried to interest me in a horse trade 
 and then proceeded to tell me of an illness which 
 he had experienced seven years before, which pro- 
 duced a remarkable change in him. It was typhoid 
 fever and for several weeks he was in delirium. He 
 told me that as a result of that sickness he found 
 himself for the first time in his life able to read the 
 Bible. He had attended school but a few weeks 
 in his childhood and Jearned a small number of 
 words out of Webster’s blue-backed spelling book 
 according’ to the method of instruction then in 
 vogue in the mountain schools, but he never had put 
 words together until after his sickness, when to his 
 delight he found himself able to read the Bible. He 
 did not pretend to have become very efficient at it, 
 but by spelling out some words and skipping the 
 hardest ones, he had the indescribable joy of being 
 able to read his Bible. I do not doubt but that what 
 he told me was true, and his case is not without 
 parallel in the records of psychology. 
 
 But he also told me that he died. He was con- 
 scious all the time while his friends gathered about 
 him and prepared his body for burial. He heard 
 what they said and knew what they were doing and 
 
 273 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 could see his body and knew that it was no longer 
 his, and it was a sorrow to him when finally he had 
 to reinhabit it and make those involuntary mani- 
 festations of life which caused his friends to desist 
 from their preparations for his burial. The doctor 
 called it by some name he did not know and in- 
 sisted that he never really had been dead, but he 
 knew better. Now people said he was crazy when 
 he told about it, but he knew that he was perfectly 
 sane and describing his actual experience. 
 
 He went to heaven, so he said, and to his great 
 surprise was not immediately ushered into the pres- 
 ence of all its joys; indeed he never got very far in. 
 He was just in the first room, which was more 
 beautiful than any he had ever seen. It was ceiled 
 with plain lumber and painted a dove color and 
 around him were beauties indescribable, but on the 
 farther side was an unglazed window at a height 
 where those in the first room could see through, and 
 the next room was as much more beautiful than the 
 first as the first room was than anything he had 
 ever seen on earth. But even this was not the end, 
 for he could see a similar window in the farther 
 partition of the second room and had a suggestion 
 of others in the rooms that were still beyond. 
 
 AT & 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 ? 
 
 He said “They call me crazy and say the fever 
 turned my head, but I know what I seen and it’s so. 
 You stay in the first room a thousand years and 
 think it’s only a day, for a thousand years are a day 
 with the Lord, and it takes you that long to see all 
 there is to see and learn all there is to learn in that 
 first room. And it takes you longer in the next 
 room, for it’s more beautiful than the first and you 
 never can get tired of it for you are always learn- 
 ing something you didn’t know and seeing some- 
 thing more beautiful than you ever dreamed. And 
 so you go on and on, room after room, and room 
 after room, always learning, always finding out 
 something, always increasing in your power to en- 
 joy more beautiful things and you never get to the 
 last one, for it’s worlds without end. Amen.” 
 [traveled in Palestine last year, and I was there 
 also before the day of automobiles. I am always 
 moved when I remember how our camp was struck 
 each morning and ready for us in a distant place at 
 night. Hach morning at five o’clock the servants 
 in the camp blew on instruments of discord, and 
 pounded on pans and pots and basins and marched 
 around the Jericho of our habitations, and the can- 
 
 275 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 vas walls of our abode fell down in just thirty 
 minutes after the first blast of the horn and bang 
 of the pan. If any of us had lingered in bed, and 
 was not dressed, it did him no good to shout in pro- 
 test, for the morning toilet had to be finished in the 
 open. By the time we were seated for our break- 
 fast in the dining tent, we beheld our tents, beds 
 and baggage all loaded on mules and camels, mov- 
 ing away we knew not where. Neither did we see 
 it as we rode, for often it went another way. 
 
 We did not see our camp at noon, for we lunched 
 in the shade of trees if there were trees, or of walls 
 where there were no trees, and sometimes we found 
 the peaceful “shadow of a great rock in a weary 
 land.” 
 
 But late in the afternoon as the sun was setting, 
 we rounded a turn in the road, or came to the top 
 of a hill, and there we saw our tents. And inside 
 of every several tent were the beds and basins and 
 the baggage all set and in waiting. It was a wel- 
 come sight. Never did we behold it without a thrill. 
 
 We live in a changing world, and here we have 
 no continuing city, but endeavor each day that we 
 may nightly pitch our moving tent a day’s march 
 
 276 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 nearer home. Year by year we have seen much 
 that we cared for that has moved on and left us 
 puzzled and bewildered, and sometimes in tears. 
 
 But we know what another traveler meant whose 
 name was once Saul, who is also called Paul, when 
 he said in effect, We know that if our earthly house 
 of this tent wherein we have our mortal life were 
 stricken down and collapsed so that it seemed dis- 
 solved in nothingness, we have awaiting and pre- 
 pared for us a building of God, a house not made 
 by hands, in the place toward which we journey. 
 Wherefore, we witness the moving forward of the 
 things we love not without some sorrow and con- 
 cern, but without utter dismay. For some time, 
 when the day is near its ending, we shall pass 
 through a valley that is shadowed but we shall go 
 without fear. And this hope is for all who have 
 like precious faith. 
 
 “Wherefore, comfort one another with these 
 words.” 
 
 I do not think we are in any danger of thinking 
 of Heaven in terms too beautiful. All our thought 
 must be in figures derived from this life, and is 
 probably very inadequate. But the truth is not 
 
 277 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 less than our faith. We are at liberty to believe the 
 very best that we can think, for if God is our 
 Father, and has planned this great gift for his 
 children, then there is nothing too good to be true. 
 
 I was riding on a train from New York to Chi- 
 cago. In the Pullman with me, among other pas- 
 sengers, rode a mother and a little girl of five. The 
 little girl and I got acquainted. She had a set of 
 dominoes, and we played a game of her own inven- 
 tion. We made beds. A domino stood on end 
 made a headboard, and two dominoes laid flat made 
 the mattress. We made single beds and double 
 beds and twin beds. We tried to make beds such 
 as the porter made up in the car, but we did not suc- 
 ceed so well. | 
 
 She and her mother were on their way to South 
 Bend. The little girl’s father had gone on to take 
 up anew position under the same firm for whom he 
 previously worked in New York. 
 
 When we reached Elkhart, I said to the little 
 girl, “This is Elkhart. It is one hundred and one 
 miles from Chicago. ‘This is our last long stop. 
 Here we cut off the dining-car, and here, perhaps, 
 we shall change engines. We run to Chicago in 
 
 278 
 
HEAVEN 
 
 two hours and twenty minutes, and South Bend 
 comes before Chicago.” 
 
 She said, “I don’t care if this old train never gets 
 to South Bend.” 
 
 I inquired of her why she held South Bend in 
 such low esteem, and she told me that it was because 
 in South Bend she would be required to learn “very 
 hard letters.” 
 
 With a little investigation I learned these further 
 facts: She had just started to go to school in New 
 York in the middle of September, and had attended 
 not more than three weeks when her mother re- 
 ceived word that her father’s position in South 
 Bend was assured, and the removal followed. The 
 little girl had heard her mother say that she was 
 sorry to leave just then, as the little girl had just 
 got nicely started in school, and now would have to 
 begin all over again. The little girl understood this 
 to mean that she would encounter in South Bend 
 an entirely new alphabet, and she dreaded the 
 “very hard letters.” 
 
 Now, if any of you ever learned the English al- 
 phabet, you will not blame that little girl. If you 
 have forgotten how hard it really is to commit to 
 
 279 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 memory the forms and names and phonetic value of 
 twenty-six arbitrary symbols, just learn another 
 alphabet as a wholesome exercise—the Greek, or if 
 you know that, the Hebrew. You may find the 
 Greek moderately easy, for the letters are very sim- 
 ilar to ours, but you will be thankful that the He- 
 brew alphabet has only twenty-two letters. This 
 little girls had learned twenty-six letters, and a 
 good many short words in three weeks, and when 
 she thought of the necessity of learning another 
 alphabet, she did not care whether the old train 
 ever reached South Bend, for she dreaded the “very 
 hard letters.” Her memories of the difficulty of 
 learning the alphabet were recent and vivid, and 
 she had reason to dread the learning of other and 
 possibly more difficult ones. 
 
 I told the little girl that I had journeyed through 
 South Bend a hundred times, and that I had re- 
 liable information that she would not need to learn 
 any new alphabet. I told her that the same twen- 
 ty-six letters were employed there, and that the 
 spelling was identical with that used in New York. 
 I told her that very few people in South Bend 
 spelled c-o-w with a “k”; that it was not considered 
 
 280 
 
HEAVEN 
 good form; and that d-o-g and c-a-t were spelled 
 exactly as they were in New York. 
 
 I succeeded in convincing her, and the informa- 
 tion comforted her. She grew more interested in 
 the approach of the end of the journey, and I think 
 she appreciated my great knowledge of the state of 
 education in South Bend. 
 
 It is in some such way I like to think of the rela- 
 tions of this life to that which is to come. Our ed- 
 ucation here is just begun, and we find ourselves 
 caught up out of this kindergarten of the soul and 
 taken to where it seems everything will be strange 
 and we shall have to begin all over again. I wonder 
 if our Heavenly Father has not some experienced 
 angels who have nothing better to do than to meet 
 us somewhere near the terminal, and tell us better. 
 
 Kind deeds, and loving words, and helpful acts, 
 and noble aspirations, and worthy resolves, and 
 heroic faith, and struggles to overcome temptation, 
 and desires to serve others, are the alphabet, the 
 primary forms, out of which, I am confident, all the 
 words in the unabridged dictionary of the language 
 of heaven are to be spelled. I do not think that 
 heaven is very far away, or that our friends who 
 
 281 
 
MY FAITH IN IMMORTALITY 
 
 have gone before us are remote, or that our life 
 here is of no concern to them, or theirs to us. I be- 
 lieve that there is a community of interest; that we 
 are to use the standards of that life as the measure 
 of this when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, as in 
 Heaven, so on earth,” and that we are to use the 
 experiences of this life as having permanent signif- 
 icance in their relation to the life of the Kingdom 
 of God. 
 
 This is my own faith, the faith which helps me, 
 and the faith which in the hour of sorrow I bring 
 for the comfort of those who mourn. It is a faith 
 that has its deep springs in the noblest and _ best 
 aspirations of human life, and its assurance of 
 validity in the promises of the Word of God. It 
 has the attestation of the Lord Jesus, who as He 
 entered the tomb and made it radiant with the hope 
 of immortality, said to his disciples, “If it were not 
 so, I would have told you.” 
 
 The train stopped at South Bend, and the little 
 girl waved me a farewell. 
 
 When I last saw her she was in the arms of her 
 father. 
 
 THE END 
 

 
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