LIBRARY 
 
 or THE 
 
 Theological Seminary, 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 BR 45 .H8A 1868 
 
 Perowne, J. J. Stewart 1823- 
 
 1904. 
 
 Immortality 
 
IMMORTALITY. 
 
 FOUR SERMONS 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE THE 
 
 Bnibeisit]) of €amlbiitrQC. 
 
 / / - BEING THE 
 
 HULSEAN LECTURES FOR 1868. 
 
 BY /' 
 
 J. J. STEV/ART 'PEROWNE, B.D. 
 
 Vkc-Triiicipal and Professor of Hebrew /« 6"/. David's College, Latnpeter 
 
 P rebcndary of St. David's, Exaininifig Chaplain to the Lord 
 
 Bishop of Norwich, Late Fellow of Corpus Christi 
 
 College, Cambridge. 
 
 NEW-YORK: 
 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH ^c COMPANY, 
 770 Broadway. 
 
 1870. 
 
S. W. GREEN, 
 Pkinter and Stereo typer, 
 
 16 and IS Jacob Street, New-York. 
 
TO 
 
 CONNOP THIRLWALL D.D. 
 
 Lord Bishop of St. David^Sy 
 
 WITH PKOKOU.\'D ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS AND LEARNING, AND WITH 
 A GRATEFUL SENSE OF MUCH PERSONAL KINDNESS RECEIVED. 
 
/r;rs°^*^ 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 The Future Life. 
 Modern theories-Materialism— Pantheisvi'-Spi- 
 rittialisni 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 The Hope of the Gentile. 
 The Egvptian-the Greek— the Oriental 40 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 The Hope of the Jew 7o 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 The Hope of the Christian. 
 
 // rests tcpon twofacts-the Resurrection of Christ— 
 the inner life of the Spirit .—The Resurrection 
 in accordance with the analogies of Nature 105 
 
 136 
 
 Appendix 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 These Lectures are a fragmentary contribution 
 to the literature of a great subject. Anything 
 like completeness, or even fulness, of treatment 
 was impossible within the limits to which I was 
 compelled to confine myself. And though in 
 printing, I have added some passages to the 
 Lectures, as originally delivered, I have still 
 found it necessary to omit many points of inter- 
 est and importance, which might naturally have 
 been discussed as belonging to my subject. For 
 an omission of this kind in the last Lecture, 
 some apology is due to my readers. Nothing is 
 said there on the question of future rewards and 
 punishments, although in the First Lecture it 
 was comprised within the scope of my argument. 
 I had said, that I hoped to show, that the Chris- 
 tain scheme satisfied us, not only of existence, 
 but also of recompense after death. But to do 
 anything like justice to such a question, it would 
 not have been sufficient to maintain that Christi- 
 anity satisfies our conscience, by its clear recog- 
 
VIU PREFACE. 
 
 nition of the truth, that future recompense will 
 be " according to the deeds done in the body." 
 It would have been necessary also to meet the 
 moral difficulties, arising from the application of 
 the term alcjvco; (''eternal"), to future punish- 
 ments ; and this would have involved a careful 
 investigation, both of the language of scripture, 
 and of the history of its interpretation, from the 
 days of Origen to our own. For such an inves- 
 tigation I have not as yet been able to command 
 the necessary leisure. 
 
 It may be well, perhaps, to state briefly what 
 is the scope of these Lectures. 
 
 In the First, I have endeavored to indicate 
 the leading features of three systems, each of 
 which professes to deal with the problem of a 
 Future Life, and each of which at the present 
 time counts numerous disciples. Without pre- 
 tending to discuss any of these systems at length, 
 I have satisfied myself with drawing attention 
 to some of their salient defects. Thus, Material- 
 ism assumes a great deal which it cannot prove, 
 and is supremely indifferent to facts, while pro- 
 fessing to deal only with facts. Pantheism de- 
 stroys personal identity in another life, and gives 
 such immortality as it has to give, only to an 
 intellectual aristocracy. Spiritualism, — under- 
 standing by that name the system which admits 
 a belief in God and the immortality of the soul, 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 apart from Revelation, — argues for the perpe- 
 tuity of individual existence, from the facts of 
 human nature and the constitution of the world, 
 and so far lends some confirmation to our hopes, 
 but fails to yield us that certainty which we 
 crave. 
 
 As attempts are constantly made, to get rid 
 of the argument from the witness in man him- 
 self to his own immortality, the object of my 
 Second Lecture was to show, in a summary re- 
 view of some of the principal systems of Pagan 
 belief and Pagan speculation, how real and how 
 wide-spread is the instinct in human nature, 
 which leads us to look beyond the grave. This 
 review seemed to tend to the conclusion, that on 
 the whole, there was a development of belief; 
 that generally speaking, in each nation the dog- 
 ma grew in distinctness, as time went on ; and 
 that in particular the moral element, the doctrine 
 of future retribution, did not belong to the 
 earlier stages of belief* But on the other hand, 
 it was equally plain, that in spite of this progress, 
 and in spite of the efforts of their most brilliant 
 thinkers, to solve the problem of man's destiny, 
 they all alike failed in casting any real light on 
 life and immortality. They all confess their im- 
 
 ^ See, on tliis growth of the moral element in the doctrine of 
 a Future Life, J. H. Fichte, die Scdenfortdauer unci die IVeltsiel- 
 I:r?g- des Me;tsc/ie;t, p. 304 ff. 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 perfection, ' they all wait for some satisfying 
 answer to their hopes and yearnings. 
 
 The Third Lecture deals with the problem, 
 how far a revelation of the Future Life was 
 made to the Jews under the Old Covenant. Of 
 the remarkable fact, that, in the Law of Moses, 
 the promises of a Future Life are never appeal- 
 ed to, as motives of obedience, I have not at- 
 tempted any explanation. I have merely sug- 
 gested some considerations, which should weigh 
 with us in dealing with the problem. But to 
 the wider question, what knowledge was actually 
 possessed by the saints of old, of a future exist- 
 ence, of retribution after death, and a resurrec- 
 tion of the body, I have endeavored to give an 
 answer, drawn from a comparison of all the 
 principal passages which have any bearing upon 
 the subject. The result of the investigation 
 was, to show that although there is very little of 
 a direct testimony to the belief of the Jew in Im- 
 mortality and a Resurrection, yet that such a 
 belief was virtually implied, in the fact of the 
 soul's conscious relation to a living God. 
 
 The Last Lecture explains the nature of the 
 evidence which is furnished by Christianity to 
 assure us of a future Life, and a Resurrection of 
 the Body. Christianity appeals to the fact of 
 Christ's Resurrection, as the evidence that we 
 also shall be raised, because by His close and 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 intimate union with us, as our Redeemer, His 
 Resurrection is the pledge and type of our resur- 
 rection. Christianity furnishes us also with the 
 inner witness to this fact, in the indwelling of 
 Christ's Spirit in our hearts, sanctifying our 
 bodies as well as our spirits, and so assuring us 
 that our bodies, raised from the dust and glori- 
 fied, shall be reunited to the glorified spirit. 
 The resurrection of the body is then shown to 
 be a reasonable inference from our natural con- 
 stitution, and the difficulty of supposing that 
 the body which turns to corruption can be raised 
 again, is met by recourse to natural analogies. 
 Christianity, therefore, gives us the positive evi- 
 dence we crave, and satisfies the irrepressible 
 yearnings of the human heart to ascertain its 
 future destiny. 
 
 That such a subject, at all times of intrinsic 
 interest, possesses at the present time a peculiar 
 importance, will not be questioned. Both at 
 •home and abroad may be seen abundant evidence 
 of the rapid growth of m^erialistic doctrines. 
 Men insist, more and more, upon the study of 
 what they are pleased to call facts, meaning by 
 that name, only such phenomena as come under 
 the observation of the senses, and either deny 
 or disregard, as unknown and unknowable, all 
 that lies beyond this narrow range of observation. 
 In Germany, the Pantheistic philosophy of Hegel 
 
Xll PREFACE. 
 
 and Schelling has yielded to the materialistic 
 doctrines of men like Vogt, Moleschott, and 
 others of the .same school. It is some evidence 
 of the prevalence of such doctrines that a man- 
 ual such as that of Biichner {Kraft und Stoff), 
 which, without laying claim to any original re- 
 search, summarizes, and puts in a clear and popu- 
 lar form, the chief arguments of the materialists, 
 passed in five years through seven editions, and 
 has now reached a ninth. 
 
 In France, if we are to credit the Bishop of Or- 
 leans {Les Alarines de F Episcopat justifies par les 
 faits), " Materialism is publicly taught, under 
 the sanction of the Minister of Public Educa- 
 tion, and is assuming every day more vast and 
 more threatening proportions." " It is triumph- 
 ant," he asserts, " in the School of Medicine in 
 Paris. We recollect," he continues, " those wild 
 cries of vive le materialisme, uttered last year 
 (1867) at the opening of the session:" and he 
 then cites passages from a number of theses, 
 admitted by the Faculty of Medicine, and by the 
 authority of the University, which maintain the 
 doctrines of materialism in their most extreme 
 and repulsive form, and formally deny the being 
 of a God, and the responsibility of man. The 
 same doctrines, it is alleged, are inculcated even 
 in some schools for girls, which were founded 
 with the professed design of training them as 
 
PREFACE. Xiil 
 
 librcs penseiiscSy and the distinctive feature of 
 which is, that morahty is taught apart from re- 
 ligion. 
 
 If there is less of systematic and formal in- 
 culcation of materialism in England, it cannot 
 be denied that there is a tendency in some of 
 our scientific men to use language, which un- 
 questionably has a materialistic coloring. Do 
 not let me be ranked with those who dread or 
 are hostile to science, because I say this. No 
 one rejoices more than I do in the progress of 
 all true science ; no one more heartily honors 
 the men who have devoted their lives to some 
 of the highest pursuits which can occupy the 
 mind of man ; no one is more thoroughly con- 
 vinced that there is nothing in science which can 
 be regarded with suspicion, as antagonistic to 
 religion or to our eternal hopes. Indeed I 
 deeply regret the language which is sometimes 
 used by theologians in reference to science and 
 scientific men, and the jealousy, the distrust, the 
 suspicion, which are thereby too often engender- 
 ed between those who, if they understood one 
 another better, might become fellow-workers in 
 a glorious cause, the most glorious to which man 
 can devote himself, the cause of truth. 
 
 I hope, therefore, I shall not be misjudged if 
 I venture to offer some comment on Professor 
 Huxley's paper in the Fortnightly Review for 
 
XIV . FEE FACE. 
 
 last month (February 1869) "On the Physical 
 Basis of life." I desire to speak with all courtesy 
 of a writer for whose abilities and attainments I 
 entertain a very sincere respect. Mr. Huxley 
 says, that he is " no materialist, but on the con- 
 trary believes materialism to inyolve grave phi- 
 losophical error" (p. 141) ; and I am bound to 
 believe him. I will go further and say, that his 
 theory of a protoplasm, supposing it to be estab- 
 lished, would not alarm me. I should not feel, 
 that in accepting the description of organic life 
 in the language applied to physical forces, I was 
 necessarily " placing my feet on the first rung of 
 a ladder which leads to the antipodes of heaven " 
 At the same time I must confess, that I am 
 wholly unable to see where the difference lies 
 between his language, at least in some portions 
 of his essay, and the language of the avowed 
 materialist. Thus, for instance, he quotes with 
 approval the following passage from one of 
 Hume's Essays : — 
 
 " If we take in hand any volume of Divinity, or School 
 Metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any 
 abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number ? No. 
 Does it contain any experimental reasoning concer?iing 
 matter of fact afid existence? No. Commit it then to 
 the flames ; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and 
 illusion." 
 
 And he then adds : — 
 
PREFACE. XV 
 
 "Permit me to enforce this most wise advice. Why 
 trouble ourselves about matters of which, however impor- 
 tant they may be, we do know nothing and can know 
 nothing ? We Jive in a world which is full of misery and 
 ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to 
 try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat 
 less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was be- 
 fore he entered it. To do this effectually it is necessary 
 to be fully possessed of only two beliefs : the first, that 
 the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an 
 extent which is practically unlimited ; the second that 
 our volition counts for something as a condition of the 
 course of events." 
 
 Is it putting an unfair construction upon this 
 remarkable paragraph to say, that Mr. Huxley 
 here expressly excludes everything, as a legiti- 
 mate subject of enquiry, but such phenomena 
 as can be tested by experiment and observation } 
 Does he not affirm that we do know, and can 
 know nothing of matters which lie outside of 
 this region, and in which must certainly be in- 
 cluded, the soul, its relation to God, and its 
 future destiny .? That in the same breath he 
 should allow that " matters may possibly be im- 
 portant," about which we not only "do know," 
 but ^^ can know nothing," is an inaccuracy which 
 I will not press. If he had said merely, — I, as 
 a physiologist or a natural philosopher, have 
 nothing to do with any but physiological ques- 
 tions ; psychology does not concern me : — such 
 
XVI r RE FACE. 
 
 a statement would have still left it an open ques- 
 tion, whether there were truths ascertainable by 
 other methods than those of "abstract" or " ex- 
 perimental reasoning." But unless I misappre- 
 hend him, Professor Huxley denies that there 
 are any such truths, or that if there are, they can 
 be known. This may not be materialism in 
 name, but it is materialism to all practical pur- 
 pose. And when he continues on the same 
 page :— 
 
 " In itself it is of little moment whether we 
 express the phenomena of matter in terms of 
 spirit ; or the phenomena of spirit, in terms of 
 matter ; matter may be regarded as a form of 
 thought, thought may be 7'egarded as a property 
 of matter — each statement has a certain relative 
 truth :" — the words in italics are a v/ell-known 
 materialistic formula, and I do not see that Mr. 
 Huxley's qualification takes off its edge. The 
 latter part of the paragraph, which I have quoted 
 above, fills one with astonishment. Why is it 
 "a plain duty" for each one of us, to do all in 
 our power to lessen the misery and the igno- 
 rance, which exist in the little corner we can 
 influence t Whence comes the sense of duty, 
 but from the sense of responsibility } And to 
 whom are we responsible, and what is the con- 
 sequence of neglect of duty } Are these ques- 
 tions about which we need not trouble ourselves, 
 
PREFACE. xvii 
 
 and to which wc can have no answer ? And is 
 it really the fact, that in order to exert ourselves 
 effectually to banish ignorance and misery, w'e 
 need but two beliefs, the belief " that the order 
 of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an 
 extent which is practically unlimited ; " and the 
 belief, that "our volition counts for something 
 as a condition of the course of events " ? Are 
 these the levers by which we are to move the 
 moral world ? Are these the motives which 
 shall lead, through self-sacrifice and devotion, to 
 the regeneration of society ? It must be con- 
 fessed that these are not the beliefs by which, 
 in past ages or in our own hitherto, the great 
 work has been accomplished. It has been ac- 
 complished, so far as it has been accomplished 
 at all, by men of humble hearts and holy lives, 
 who have not counted their lives dear unto them- 
 selves, whose motive has been, like that of the 
 Apostle, " the love of- Christ constraineth us," 
 and who, like him, have been able to look for- 
 ward to " a crown of righteousness," as the re- 
 ward of their patience, their labor, their self- 
 sacrifice. History as yet has not given her ver- 
 dict on the side of Professor Huxley. Nor is 
 there any obvious or plausible connection be- 
 tween the " duty " of which he speaks, and " the 
 beliefs" which are to bind us to that duty. 
 
 I can only repeat, that if I have misapprehend- 
 
XVlll PREFACE. 
 
 ed Mr. Huxley, I am sorry for it : but it is a 
 misapprehension which I share with many other 
 educated men, with some, I may add, of great 
 force and clearness of intellect. 
 
 The line taken by Mr. Herbert Spencer in 
 his Pi'inciples of Psychology (Part i. Chap. i. p. 
 48) is different, and perfectly fair and intelligi- 
 ble. He says, " It may safely be affirmed, that 
 Physiology, which is an interpretation of the 
 physical processes which go on in organisms 
 in terms known to natural science, ceases to be 
 Physiology when it imports into its interpreta- 
 tions any psychical factor, a factor which no physi- 
 cal research whatever can disclose, or identify, or 
 get the remotest glimpse of " This is of course 
 simply true. " But," says Professor Rolleston 
 (who quotes this passage in his Addj'ess on Phy- 
 siology, p. 23), " I apprehend if the Physiologist 
 wishes to become an Anthropologist he must 
 qualify himself to judge both sets of factors. 
 There is other science besides Physical Science, 
 there are other data besides quantifiable data. 
 Schleiden, a naturalist of 'the very first order, 
 compares the Physical Philosopher {Materialis- 
 inus der netieren dctUschen Wissenschaft, p. 48), 
 who is not content with ignoring, without also 
 denying the existence of a science based on the 
 consciousness, to a man who, on looking into his 
 purse and finding no gold there, should not be 
 
PREFACE. xix 
 
 4 
 
 content with saying * I find no gold here,' but 
 should go further and say, * there is no such 
 thing as gold either here or anywhere else/ " 
 Is not something very like this, the error into 
 which Professor Huxley has fallen ? 
 
 Mr. Huxley has quoted from Hume. Let me 
 quote the words of a far profounder philosopher. 
 This is the admirable picture which Pascal has 
 drawn of that very state of mind which is now 
 recommended to us as wisdom : — 
 
 " I know not who has placed me in the world, nor what 
 the world is, nor what I myself am. My ignorance on all 
 subjects is terrible. I do not know what my body is, or 
 my senses, or my soul, and that part of myself which thinks 
 what I utter, which reflects on everything, and on itself. 
 and has no better knowledge of itself than of all the rest. I 
 behold those appalling depths of the universe which shut 
 me in ; and I find myself tied to a corner of that vast 
 space, without knowing why I am placed in this spot, 
 rather than in another, nor why the little moment which is 
 given me to live, has been assigned to me at this particular 
 point, rather than any other in the whole of that eternity 
 which has preceded me, and the whole of that eternity 
 which is to follow. I see nothing but infinities on all sides 
 which enclose me like an atom, and like a shadow which 
 abideth but an instant and returneth not. All that I know 
 is that I must shortly die ; but that of which I am most 
 ignorant, is that very death from which I cannot escape. 
 
 "As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither 
 I go ; and I know only that when I leave this world, I 
 fall for ever, either into annihilation or into the hands of 
 an angry God, without knowing to which of these two 
 
XX niEFACE, 
 
 conditions I am for ever condemned. Behold my state, 
 full of misery, of weakness, of obscurity. And from all 
 this I conclude, that I ought to pass all the days of my 
 life without a moment's reflection on that which shall be- 
 fall me. Perchance I might find some ray of light to 
 guide me in my doubts ; but I will not take the trouble, 
 I will not take a single step to seek it ; and after treating 
 with contempt those who do engage in the task, I will go 
 without forethought and without fear to encounter so great 
 an event, and suffer myself to be led softly to death in ut- 
 ter uncertainty of what shall be my condition to all eter- 
 nity." " How can a reasonable man," says Pascal, 
 "entertain thoughts such as these?" "Nothing is so 
 important to a man as his condition ; nothing is so avv'ful 
 for him as eternity ; and that he should be found indiffe- 
 rent to the loss of his being and to the peril of an eternity 
 of miseries, is certainly not natural. The merest trifles 
 will stir a man to rage and despair ; and yet he can con- 
 template the loss of everything by death without an emo- 
 tion. It is a prodigy to see in one and the same heart, 
 at one and the same time, this sensibility to trifles, and 
 this insensibility to matters of the weightiest import. It 
 is an incomprehensible, preternatural infatuation, which 
 must be due to some cause of irresistible force." {Pen- 
 sSes, pp. 135 — 137, ed. Havet.) 
 
 Yes, whatever Hume and those who think 
 with him may say, we cannot escape from the 
 thought, the anxious and earnest investigation, 
 of subjects such as these. Nor are we doomed 
 only to barren and fruitless speculation. Not 
 only are there other truths than those which 
 fall within the province of " abstract " or '' experi- 
 
PREFACE, xxi 
 
 mental reasoning," not only are there higher 
 truths, and infinitely more important, but they 
 are more real, more certainly ascertainable, than 
 any facts in the material world. It is not only 
 the things we see, and hear, and touch, of which 
 we can attain to any knowledge. The soul, God, 
 eternity — these realities lighted up for us by the 
 light which falls on them from the words and the 
 life of Christ, and borne witness to by the voices, 
 accordant here, wherever else they may difter, 
 of the purest, and the noblest, and the truest of 
 our race — men, many of them who stand fore- 
 most in the ranks of intellectual distinction, as 
 well as great with moral greatness — are realities 
 which shall last when. " the sun himself shall 
 die." 
 
 *' Whether we be young or old, 
 Our destiny, our being's heart and home. 
 Is with infinity, and only there : 
 With hope it is, hope that can never die 
 Effort and expectation and desire. 
 And something evermore about to be." 
 
 Wordsworth, T/ie Prelude. 
 
 St. David's College, Lamteter, 
 JlLveh I, 1S59. 
 

 LECTURE L 
 
 THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 ECCLESIASTES III. 1 8 22. 
 
 / said ill mine heart conceniiiig the estate of the sons of 
 uien^ that God might manifest thejn, and that they 
 7night see that they themselves are beasts. For that 
 which befalleth the sons of iiien befalleth beasts ; even 
 one thing befalleth them : as the onedieth, so dieth the 
 other ; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man 
 hath no pre-eniinence above a beast : for all is vanity. 
 All go tinto one place J all are of the dust, and all turn 
 to dnst again. Who knozueth the spirit of man that 
 goeth iipzua7'dj and the spirit of the beast that goeth 
 downivard to the earth ? Wherefore I perceive that 
 there is nothing better', than that a man should rejoice 
 in his 01071 works j for that is his portion : for who 
 shall bring him to see what shall be after him ? 
 
 There are some questions which can never 
 lose their interest, and which from time to time 
 present themselves with fresh force and fascina- 
 tion. They are ever old and yet ever new ; 
 old as the heart of man and yet new as the dawn 
 of infancy. Men have thought they have found 
 a solution, or have abandoned them in despair, 
 
4 nniORTALITY. 
 
 and yet they start up and confront us again, as 
 if they had never gained attention, and as if no 
 answer had been given to them. A new age, 
 with new needs and a new science, refuses to 
 accept the solution of a former age, or with fresh 
 hope and irrepressible eagerness insists that the 
 problem, which baffled the thinkers of the past, 
 is not beyond the reach of the thinkers of the 
 present. Among these questions, none possesses 
 a more universal, a more commanding interest, 
 than the question of a Future Life. 
 
 " Who knoweth whether the spirit of man go- 
 eth upward, and whether the spirit of the beast 
 goeth downward to the earth .'' " This was the 
 question wrung from the Preacher in the bitter- 
 ness of his thoughts, as in the absence of any 
 clear and positive revelation concerning the fu- 
 ture, he tried to read the riddle of the world. A 
 selfish life had darkened his heart, and brought 
 him to the verge of a sceptical philosophy. He 
 was weary of the world, weary of the injustice 
 which he beheld, and, ready to accept the con- 
 clusion that there was no moral Governor of the 
 Universe, he was ready also to accept the con- 
 clusion that man perished like the beasts. And 
 hence he took refuge inevitably in that doctrine 
 which might have come from the mouth of Epi- 
 curus : " Wherefore I perceive that there is noth- 
 ing better, than that a man should rejoice in his 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 5 
 
 own works ; for that is his portion : for who 
 knoweth what shall be after him ? " Happily 
 the Preacher did not rest in this solution of the 
 problem. Happily God led him through the 
 painful discipline of life, through much disap- 
 pointment and much sadness of heart to a nobler 
 faith. Happily we see him emerging from that 
 tangled forest in which he had so long wandered, 
 torn by its thickets, and poisoned by its miasma, 
 and bitten by its deadly snakes, and coming forth 
 into the light of God's love and truth, and look- 
 ing with calm eye on death, and even beyond 
 death, and teaching to others that lesson of high- 
 est wisdom which he had learnt himself: " Fear 
 God and keep His commandments, for this is 
 the whole of man. For God shall bring every 
 w^ork into judgment with every secret thing 
 whether it be good or bad." 
 
 The question of the Preacher has since then 
 been put again and again. Men are never weary 
 of asking it, never weary of seeking an answer. 
 Even in this age, with its singularly positive 
 spirit, with its utilitarian tendencies, this question 
 is so far from being thrust aside, that it presents 
 itself in quarters where we should least expect 
 it. Even in this age, which has been termed 
 *' the golden age of the exact sciences, and of 
 industry, and the iron age of metaphysics,"* when 
 
 * E. Saisset. 
 
6 IMMORTALITY, 
 
 men seem to have grown weary of abstract spec- 
 ulations, are almost afraid to think, and are ab- 
 sorbed in the study of facts, material results, the 
 practical applications of science, still the shadow 
 of that other world of mystery haunts them. It 
 " broods o'er them like the Day, a master o'er a 
 slave," " a Presence which is not to be put by." 
 They cannot escape from it. The mind most 
 averse to what it considers speculative and there- 
 fore fruitless researches, the heart most engrossed 
 in the pursuit of earthly good, will have its mo- 
 ments of awakening, its hours of weariness and 
 dissatisfaction, when some whisper of these 
 strange problems will reach it. What am I .'' 
 Whence came r.-* Whither am I going.'' What 
 is the end which awaits me "^ 
 
 These questions, arising as it were spontane- 
 ously, cannot but suggest others as the result 
 of reflection. What is my body, that admirable 
 but fragile machine which the slightest shock 
 breaks to atoms .'' Organized matter, — the sub- 
 ject of hourly incessant changes, through which, 
 as through a sieve, there passes an ever-renewed 
 wave of changing particles. Must there not then, 
 if my body is to keep the form which constitutes 
 it, must there not be in it something which has 
 the power to hold it together, some hidden force, 
 some principle of life 1 And then besides my 
 organic life, do I not perceive within me some- 
 
TUE FUTURE LIFE. J 
 
 thing which reasons, which suffers, \Yhich hopes, 
 which rejoices, which wills, which wills not, a 
 thought, a soul ? How marvellous is my nature ! 
 A moment since, when I looked only at my 
 body, I thought myself a being of wonderful sim- 
 plicity : now I see in myself two beings — per- 
 haps three ; first my body, then the animal life, 
 and then beyond that life, another life more mys- 
 terious still. What am I then ? A double or tri- 
 ple being ? or is this complication only apparent, 
 thought being only a superior degree of life, 
 and life only a property of organized matters* 
 
 When once such questions are proposed, it is 
 difficult to set them aside. For if I am nothing 
 but a body analogous to those which I see around 
 me, I shall have the end of the worm I crush, of 
 the grass which I tread beneath my feet. A 
 child of the dust, when I give back my bones to 
 the dust, I shall give back to it all that I am. 
 Then the philosophy of despair is all that is left 
 to me ; " That which befalleth man befalleth 
 beasts ; as the one dieth, so dieth the other." 
 If, on the other hand, there is in me a principle 
 independent of the body, then that is a true phi- 
 losophy which says that " man is not a plant of 
 the earth, but a plant of heaven " ( (pvrov ova ey- 
 yetov, oc/l/l' ovpUviov), and then the present life, 
 which but now was everything to me, is but a 
 
8 nnWRTALITY. 
 
 day, an hour, a moment, in sight of the eternity 
 which awaits me. 
 
 It is obvious tliat our whole hfe must take a 
 coloring from the conclusion at which we arrive. 
 It is obvious that this is no merely theoretical 
 question, however men may be disposed to treat 
 it. It enters into the very heart of our being. 
 If we are but children of the dust doomed to re- 
 turn to the dust, then let this world absorb our 
 cares and bound our thoughts. If we are heirs 
 of immortality, then let our life here be guided 
 by those principles and shaped by those ends 
 which will best fit us for the life to come. 
 
 I propose, in this course of Lectures, to exam- 
 ine some of the grounds on which our hope of 
 Immortality rests : I propose to show, that in 
 Christ only and the Revelation of Christ is to be 
 found the answer to the question of the text. 
 With this object in view, I shall first of all glance 
 at some of the attempts, which have recently 
 been made, to answer the question, either in a 
 sense adverse to Christianity, or without any 
 recognition of its claims. I shall then review 
 the history of belief, so far as this doctrine is 
 concerned, first among the Pagans and next 
 among the Jews. And, lastly, I shall hope to 
 show that whereas, apart from Christianity, we 
 are left only to dim guesses and uncertain con- 
 jectures, Christ Jesus has " brought life and im- 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 9 
 
 mortality to light," and has met and satisfied the 
 deep instincts of the human heart, and the hopes 
 of the world. 
 
 It will indeed be impossible to offer more than 
 the outline of so vast a subject in the space al- 
 lotted to these Lectures. I cannot doubt that I 
 am speaking in the presence of some who will 
 discover defects of knowledge or of method in 
 what I shall advance. But as they will also know 
 better than others, how widely attempts have 
 been made, both in Germany and in France, 
 on the one hand, to substitute a pantheistic ab- 
 sorption for the hope of a personal immortality, 
 and on the other hand, to overthrow all belief in 
 the existence of the soul after death ; and how 
 such doctrines have been welcomed and propa- 
 gated, in our own country, by men who claim to 
 be thinkers and philosophers, they will feel that 
 some attempt to grapple with this question is not 
 out of place, and they will show some indulgence 
 to what does not profess to be more than a frag- 
 mentary contribution to the subject. 
 
 " Who knoweth whether the spirit of man 
 goeth upward, and whether the spirit of the beast 
 goeth downward to the earth } "* Let us glance 
 at some of the answers which, in our own day, 
 
 * I have adopted what I believe to be the better rendering of 
 the verse. 
 
lO niMORTAUTr. 
 
 have been given to this question. I shall select 
 three by way of illustration ; that of the Mate- 
 rialist, that of the Pantheist, and that of the so- 
 called Spiritualist, who rejects revelation. 
 
 I. There is, first, the answer of the Material- 
 ist, who tells you that beyond the grave there is 
 nothing, that this life is all. He maintains that 
 his philosophy must be true, because it is based 
 entirely upon facts. He says that he has laid 
 bare the secrets of man's nature, and that its 
 component parts are the same as the component 
 parts of all other objects in the universe. He 
 assures you that there are but two things in the 
 world, matter and force, and that neither of these 
 can exist apart from the other. " No force with- 
 out matter, and no matter without force ; "* this 
 is the first brief and pregnant and comprehen- 
 sive axiom of materialism. " Forces," says an 
 eminent physiologist, f " are not harnessed to 
 matter as horses are to a chariot, which you can 
 put in or take out at pleasure." Each material 
 molecule has its inherent properties, from which 
 it can never be separated. " A particle of iron 
 is the same thing whether it traverse the universe 
 in the aerolite, or roll in thunder on the railroad, 
 
 * BUchner, ICrafl ttnd Staff. 
 
 t Du Bois-Reymond, quoted by Buchner. See also P. Janet, 
 Le Materiallsme Contemporain, p. 20. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. II 
 
 or circulate in the blood-globule in the temples 
 of a poet." Hence it follows that the idea of a 
 creative force, separate from matter, governing 
 it according to fixed laws, is a pure abstraction. 
 To maintain the existence of such a force is to 
 transform an occult quality into an absolute be- 
 ing. Matter and force are inseparable ; matter 
 and force have existed from all eternity ; matter 
 and force constitute the universe, and constitute 
 man. 
 
 This is all that there is in man, the material 
 elements of which his body is composed, and the 
 forces which have helped to build up that body. 
 What then, according to this theory, is the soul 1 
 It is an organic function of the body, whose seat 
 is in the brain. Rejecting the monstrous and 
 self-contradictory theory of some earlier mate- 
 rialists,* according to which thought is a secre- 
 tion of the brain, later physiologists prefer to say 
 that thought is the action of the brain : and the 
 action of the steam-engine must not be con- 
 founded with the steam which puts the engine 
 in motion. Thought is the resultant of all the 
 forces united in the brain. This resultant can- 
 not be seen ; it is, according to all appearance, 
 
 * As for instance Cabanis. The abuse of the term " secre- 
 tion " is obvious. For a refutation of this theory see E. Naville, 
 La Vie Etenielle, p- 65. 
 
1 2 nnioR talitj:^ 
 
 but the effect of nervous electricity. " There is 
 the same relation," says one writer, " between 
 thought and the electric vibrations of the fila- 
 ments of the brain as between color and the vi- 
 brations of the ether." Finally, the whole doc- 
 trine has been summed up in these v/ords — 
 " Thought is a movement of matter."* In short, 
 the thesis of materialism is this, that beyond 
 matter and the laws of matter there is nothing, 
 and that consequently mechanics, chemistry, phy- 
 siology, suffice to explain all phenomena, the 
 production of thought as well as the production 
 of the flame of a candle, the sentiments of the 
 human heart as well as the color and weight of 
 a stone or a tree. 
 
 A conclusion such as this, which breaks down 
 the eternal barriers between mind and matter, 
 and which boldly says they are one, ought not 
 to be received without the strictest proof. And 
 what is the proof which is offered } It is of this 
 kind. The brain is the. seat and the organ of 
 thought ; wherever we find a brain, there we 
 find a thinking being, or one, at least, ni some 
 degree intelligent. Wherever the brain is want- 
 ing, intelligence and thought are equally want- 
 ing. There is, moreover, a constant ratio be- 
 tween the development of the brain and the de- 
 
 * IMoleschott. 
 
TUE FUTURE LIFE. • 1 3 
 
 veloi^ment of the mind. They increase and 
 decrease together ; what affects the one, affects 
 the other also. Age, disease, the difference of 
 the sexes, have an exactly corresponding influ- 
 ence upon the brain and upon the mind. There 
 is an invariable relation between the brain, which 
 is the organ of thought, and the thought itself, 
 and therefore the brain is the cause of thought.* 
 But, unfortunately for this conclusion, not one 
 of the three propositions on which it rests can 
 be said to be proved. The last is certainly con- 
 tested by some of the most eminent physiolo- 
 gists.! Science has yet vast strides to make 
 before it can establish with certainty the rela- 
 tion between the brain and thought. Some of 
 the foremost of modern authorities declare that 
 the physiology of the brain is yet in its infancy, J 
 and that the relations between the brain and 
 thought are absolutely unknown. Who knows 
 what takes place in the nervous extremities, 
 along the nerves, and in the substance of the 
 brain, when we receive, for instance, the impres- 
 
 * See P. Janet, Le Mater. Coiitemp. pp. 30, 31 and 116, 117. 
 
 t As for instance Lelut, La Physiologic de la Pensee, and by 
 Leuret and Gratiolet, V Anatomic Comparec du Systhnc Ner- 
 veux. See P. Janet, as above. 
 
 X Even the differences of structure between the brain of man 
 and that of the lower animals is still a subject of dispute. Ac- 
 cording to Bischoff, *'ovir knowledge of the finer structural re- 
 
14 • niMORTALITY. 
 
 sion of light or that of sound ? Who knows 
 what the condition of the brain is at the moment 
 when the will becomes the principle of a mo- 
 ment ? But suppose you could discover this. 
 Suppose you could ascertain the last fact in the 
 nervous system in the order of impressions, and 
 the first fact in the nervous system in the or- 
 der of the will. Suppose that long and patient 
 study shall at last have discovered the secret, 
 shall at last have led to the knowledge that to a 
 particular sentiment, a particular thought, a par- 
 ticular act of the will, there corresponds such a 
 vibration of the fibres, such a discharge of elec- 
 tricity, such a combination of phosphorus. What 
 follows .^ Would such a result of the science be 
 of any service to materialism } Assuredly not. 
 All that science will have done in that case, will 
 be to have established in detail the close and in- 
 timate union of two orders of phenomena in their 
 nature absolutely unlike. And the conclusion of 
 materialism will be — these phenomena are linked 
 together : therefore they are of the same nature. 
 Thought, feeling, will, are always in harmony 
 
 lations and the chemical composition of the brain is still very- 
 imperfect." A remark which however he quaUfies by saying, 
 that "much as there is marvellous and mysterious in the physi- 
 cal life of men and beasts, the structure of the brain contains 
 quite as many marvels and mysteries." Ulrici, Goti ttnd der 
 McJisch. I. 73. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 1 5 
 
 with a given condition of the material organs ; 
 therefore thought, feehng, will, are properties or 
 products of matter. The sophism is always the 
 same. It consists in saying : these facts corre- 
 spond to one another, they are closely united, 
 therefore there are not two facts, there is only 
 one.* It is like saying the magnetic force is al- 
 ways found in the loacfstone ; therefore the mag- 
 netic force is the product of the loadstone. Ma- 
 terialism, when it identifies the manifestations 
 of the soul with the phenomena of the body, 
 flings a rope across the chasm, and then declares 
 that the ch^sm no longer exists. 
 
 And as the materialist takes for granted in his 
 own science what he has to prove, and draws in- 
 ferences which are not warrantable, if his pre- 
 mises were granted, so he altogether shuts his 
 eyes to those other facts, with which neither the 
 anatomist's knife, nor the chemist's crucible can 
 deal. If you attempt to confront him with the 
 inner facts of human nature, with the thoughts 
 and anticipations of the human heart, he will tell 
 you calmly these form no part of his study, that 
 either a thing is reconcilable with reason and 
 experience and then it is true, or it is not so re- 
 concilable and then it is false ; it can find no place 
 
 * E. Naville, La Vic EterneUe, pp. 63—6; and see also Ap- 
 pendix, Note A. 
 
1 6 nniOR TALITY. 
 
 in any system of philosophy. Insist on it that 
 there is a deep inextinguishable desire of immor- 
 tality in the human heart, and that the very 
 thought of annihilation is repugnant to man ; 
 and he will reply — I quote words actually used — 
 that the thought of an everlasting life is infinite- 
 ly more terrible, that for himself he does not 
 hesitate for an instant to prefer everlasting anni- 
 hilation to everlasting life.* Such a perpetuity 
 of existence, such an impossibility of dying is the 
 most awful thing the human imagination can in- 
 vent : — if you would picture it to yourself in all 
 its awfulness, you have only to think of it as it 
 has been conceived and portrayed in the story 
 of the never-dying, ever-wandering Jew. And, 
 indeed, on his principles he is right, for he who 
 denies the Being of a God may well shudder at 
 the thought of immortality ; for, think for a mo- 
 ment of a community of beings, like ourselves, 
 each one continuing for ever, each one following 
 his own selfish path, each one without guide or 
 governor, each one the blind slave of his own 
 caprice, or humor, or desperate desire ; think of 
 human pride and passion and hate suffered to 
 prolong their malignant being to all eternity, un- 
 checked and unrestrained. Who does not feel 
 that annihilation is indeed to be courted, rather 
 
 * Biicliner, Kraft iind Stoff, p. 212. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. I 7 
 
 than immortality without God ? If, urging that 
 moral argument which has weighed with so 
 many pure and noble thinkers, you say that we 
 need, that we imperatively require, another world 
 to redress the inequalities of this life, a world 
 Avhere the mysteries which haunt and perplex 
 us now shall receive their solution ; the answer 
 of the materialist is, that it may be we are sur- 
 rounded with mystery, it may be that it would 
 be delightful if in heaven, as in the last act of 
 ' some moving drama, all the discords of earth 
 should be resolved into some sweet tender soul- 
 subduing harmony, all the perplexities and rid- 
 dles of life find their adequate solution ; but 
 science has nothing to do with what may be, her 
 business lies only with what is, and that facts 
 numerous and unquestionable drive us to the 
 conclusion that man perishes like the beast.* 
 Speak to him of duty, of saintly devotion, of 
 heroic self-sacrifice, of love, so pure, so high, 
 so heavenly, that it gives itself in spite of base- 
 ness and treachery, covering all sins with its 
 own glory and asking no return ; tell him of 
 the might of genius which creates an ideal 
 world, and the might of philanthropy which re- 
 creates the moral world, and ask him if he be- 
 lieves that such things are no more than the 
 
 * So for instance, Biichner, Kraft uiid StoJ)\ 
 
iS nniORTALITY. 
 
 dance of insects in the dying day, and he will 
 wonder tliat you should see in these any evi- 
 dence that the soul comes from God, and re- 
 turns to God ; they are but so many pulsations 
 of the material machine, to be quenched with it, 
 when it falls to dust, in everlasting night. And 
 if you enquire what hope is left you in the strug- 
 gle of life, he will perhaps reply, that duty is its 
 own reward, that your best hope is in the pro- 
 gress of the race, and he will give you the assur- 
 ance that when you die there is nothing lost to 
 the universe, not one particle of the elements of 
 which your body was composed, not one of the 
 forces w'hich built it up. Matter and force may 
 be transmuted, but they cannot perish- ; and 
 with solemn irony he will proclaim to. you this 
 gospel of consolation, that neither matter nor 
 force can die, and bid you find there the immor- 
 tality for which you seek. The answer which 
 the t'reacher gave to his own heart, in the hour 
 of his scepticism and despondency, is the only 
 true and satisfactory answer to man's self-tor- 
 turing spirit : " Man hath no pre-eminence above 
 the beast. As the one dieth, so dieth the other. 
 All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." 
 
 Entrenched within these double lines, of in- 
 ferences too hastily drawn from one class of facts, 
 and of absolute blindness to another class of 
 facts. Materialism is hard to be dislodged. Hap- 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 
 
 19 
 
 pily, however, such a theory of human nature 
 carries with it its own condemnation. We 
 need not the Hght of the Gospel of Jesus 
 Christ, my brethren, to show us its falseness. 
 The facts of man's nature are a witness against 
 it, the constitution of the world is a witness 
 against it. And they must indeed be in love 
 with death, who can look without shrinking on 
 the annihilation which is thus offered to us as 
 our only hope. Such a creed assuredly will never 
 be popular. The heart of man and the con- 
 science of man v;ill raise their everlasting jDro- 
 test against this cruel degradation ; the natural 
 majesty of man lifts itself up, as if with a sense 
 of wrong and insult, when you thus strip the 
 crown from its head, and in spite of all your ef- 
 forts to debase and dethrone it, asserts its high 
 lineage as an heir of immortality. 
 
 II. But besides the answer of the Materialist, 
 another answer has been given to the question 
 of the Preacher which at first sight seems far 
 more hopeful, far more attractive. For many 
 minds it unquestionably possesses a peculiar 
 fascination. This is the answer of Pantheism. 
 Pantheism does not rob us of one part of our na- 
 ture. Pantheism acknowledges the rights and 
 the dignity of the human soul. It assures you 
 that the soul came from God and returns to God. 
 But as it does not acknowledge a Personal God, so 
 
20 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 it does not truly recognize a personal soul. It 
 maintains that there is in each of us that divine 
 thing which cannot die, but that divine thing is 
 but a portion of the great informing, self-evolving 
 Spirit. Separated for a moment from the whole, 
 the individual phenomenon returns to the whole. 
 According to the well-known figure of the East- 
 ern poet, the drop from the Fountain of Life, 
 which has been enshrined in the frail crystal 
 globe, only exists, as long as that globe exists, 
 as a separate drop. When that globe is shat- 
 tered, it will mingle again with the Fountain 
 whence it came. 
 
 This is the immortality of Pantheism, this is 
 the eternal life which it offers. The soul does 
 not die, the spirit does not perish, the separate 
 drop does but mingle with its native ocean. 
 Nothing is lost. But is it the fact that nothing 
 is lost ? Is the loss of the individual conscious- 
 ness no loss ? Is the extinction of personality 
 nothing .'* On the contrary, is not everything 
 involved in this } The substance, the metaphy- 
 sical base of my being you tell me remains, it is 
 only my separate existence which has come to an 
 jend. But if the life of consciousness, of thought, 
 of feeling, if that which distinguished me from 
 others is gone, swallowed up in the universal, 
 unconscious, undistinguishable spirit-sea, in what 
 respect does this differ from annihilation and 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 21 
 
 death ? For if it be true, * I think, therefore I 
 am/ it must also be true, ' I cease to think, there- 
 fore I cease to be.' What reparation do you 
 make, what consolation do you offer, when you 
 assure me that my substance cannot perish ? 
 IJy substance ? /have ceased to be, I have no 
 substance any longer. You hold out to me the 
 fair vision of immortal life. But what life .'* 
 Whose life .'* Not my life, for it is no longer 
 mine. I and my personal history come to an 
 end with death. The consciousness at least of 
 all I have been is swept away. What once be- 
 longed to me may remain, but it remains in a 
 form which I am no longer able to recognize, in 
 a form which does not possess even a shadowy 
 outline of being, in a form for which I am unable 
 to feel even one passing emotion of interest.* 
 
 * By precisely the same method of reasoning the immortality 
 of the body might be made out. For when the body perishes 
 and turns to its dust, not a single particle of it is lost. The sub- 
 stance is not destroyed ; it merely returns back to the mass 
 from which it was taken, earth to earth, dust to dust, and 
 a new life springs from the mouldering carcase. But would 
 it be reasonable therefore to maintain that the body is immortal ? 
 Is this return of the constituent particles of the body to the 
 great mass of universal matter anything else but death ? Can 
 I persuade myself that my body does not perish because every 
 particle of it remains, though imder other conditions, and in dif- 
 ferent forms of combination ? If any one can find a consolation 
 in such a reflection, he may perhaps console himself with the 
 thought that his soul is immortal, though it is lost and swallowed 
 up in the vast ocean of universal soul. 
 
2 2 nniOHTALITi' 
 
 This abstract notion of immortality, even if it 
 v/ere possible, is not worth contending for. It 
 could give no strength to the heart in the trials 
 of life, it could not shield it against the terrors 
 of death. 
 
 There is one and one only immortality which 
 can be of any interest to me, the immortality of 
 my individual self There is that in me, of which 
 I am conscious, and of which none other shares 
 the consciousness with me. Shall I, — will that 
 particular soul which has felt and thought and 
 suffered and loved and acted and struggled, dur- 
 ing a life of longer or shorter duration, — will thrs, 
 I say, survive the shock of death ? Will this 
 continue, — the memory of its former self unim- 
 paired.? Will this retain the character, the 
 physiognomy, so to speak, which it has created 
 for itself distinct and separate ? This is t/ie only 
 innnortality zvhicJi can touch vty Jicart, But strip 
 the soul of all that is distinctive, of thought, of 
 feeling, of will, and tell me that its substance 
 survives, and you leave me as insensible to my 
 future destiny, as if you had preached to me an- 
 nihilation. 
 
 Yet strange to say, in the very act of robbing 
 us of personal immortality, Pantheism claims for 
 itself all the greatness of moral elevation. It 
 contrives to throw over its scheme of existence, 
 all the charm, all the fascination of self-sacrifice. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 2 7 
 
 It tells you that the popular theology, with its 
 system of rewards and punishments after death, 
 appeals only to the lower part, to the unreason- 
 ing instinct, to the selfish principles of our na- 
 ture. It tells you that the very desire for the 
 existence of the individual after death is a selfish 
 desire. It bids you discard that 'sentimental 
 tenderness for the individual I.' It is far nobler 
 to reconcile yourself to share the common lot, 
 even though it be a lot of destruction, to resign 
 willingly that brief space of personal existence 
 which has been allotted you, when you have ful- 
 filled its ephemeral purpose. And in the mean 
 time it assures you, that you have a far better 
 immortality, than that vague and distant and 
 chimerical immortality to which you aspire. It 
 offers you a present immortality, one that is real, 
 one that may be grasped by each one of us at 
 any moment. It is not a form of the future life, 
 it is a form of the present life. It is to be real- 
 ized on one single condition, that in thought we 
 unite ourselves with the Eternal Principle, with 
 the Absolute Substance of things. This it is 
 which makes us divine. This it is which secures 
 for us our immortality. It is childish to look for 
 an eternal life beyond the grave. When we re- 
 cognize our dependence, when we feel ourselves 
 cradled and upheld on the bosom of the Eternal 
 substance, which for a single moment holds our 
 
2 4 IMMOETA LITT. 
 
 frail personality suspended over the abyss of 
 nothing, then we possess the only true immor- 
 tality. There is none other for man, all else is 
 but a dream and an illusion. " The thought of 
 immortality," says one writer, " is immortality." 
 " The true heaven," says another, " is in the 
 spirit, the thought, the human consciousness, 
 that sublime mirror in which universal life is 
 reflected and transfigured." " Heaven," says a 
 third, "is within us. Our future existence is 
 realized every moment. The individual has but 
 one existence, but it depends on himself to en- 
 large its circle by extending the horizon of its 
 soul. Each man is the artificer of his own life 
 and his own immortality, because he is the arti- 
 ficer of his own progress." 
 
 Now observe the consequence which follows 
 directly from this view. The law of recompense, 
 which is one of the most essential elements of 
 the future life, is marvellously fulfilled in this 
 world. Each one has that immortality which he 
 merits, the distribution is infallible, because that 
 which constitutes in each of us this immortality, 
 that which fixes the degree of it, is exactly the 
 perfection to which we attain. He is immortal 
 in the fullest sense who has most realized the 
 Divine, in his life or in his thoughts, by know- 
 ledge or by virtue. All that is good in his life, 
 all that is true in his thoughts, this it is which 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 25 
 
 establishes his participation in the Eternal. The 
 measure therefore of this knowledge and this vir- 
 tue are the measure of his immortality. They, 
 on the other hand, are altogether excluded from 
 this divine life who fall down into the world of 
 appearance, who separate themselves from the 
 Universal Principle, whether by the baseness of 
 their actions, or the baseness of their thoughts, 
 who give themselves up a prey to unworthy de- 
 sires, to selfish pleasures, to the humiliating ty- 
 ranny of the senses. It is not God who banishes 
 these men from Himself, it is they who banish 
 themselves from Him. At every step that they 
 take away from truth their thought becomes dark- 
 ened, the taste of divine things is extinguished in 
 them, till they reach the last deep of misery and 
 degradation, which is to have no longer any sense 
 of the divine at all. They live in time which is 
 the true death, instead of living in the thought 
 of things eternal, which is the true, the only im- 
 mortality.* 
 
 Now, apart from a certain stoic grandeur 
 which unquestionably lends much of its attrac- 
 tiveness to this Pantheistic scheme, do we not 
 seem to hear running through it certain echoes, 
 however faint and confused, of the strains of a 
 higher and more heavenly harmony } Might we 
 
 * For the substance of the last two paragraphs I am indebted 
 to Caro, V Idie de Dim, p. 370, &c. 
 
26 UIMORTALITV. 
 
 not almost dream for a moment that its hope is 
 the Christian's hope, its triumph the Christian's 
 triumph ? How hke they are and yet how 
 unhke ! 
 
 For Christianity like Pantheism holds out to 
 us union with God, the Everlasting Fountain of 
 Life, as the highest object of attainment ; but, 
 unlike Pantheism, Christianity teaches, that the 
 God in whom we live and move and have our 
 being is not an abstraction, but a Person, not 
 the Eternal Substance, but the Eternal Father. 
 Christianity like Pantheism bids us find the best 
 evidence of our immortality in this union with 
 God, but unlike Pantheism she bids us attain to 
 it, not by " the thought of immortality," but by 
 faith 'in Jesus Christ. Christianity like Panthe- 
 ism insists upon it, that eternal life is a present 
 possession, but unlike Pantheism she no less 
 emphatically assures to the individual an indivi- 
 dual permanence after death, and a righteous 
 retribution according to the deeds done in the 
 body. But there is one point, on which it can- 
 not be pretended, that eveniany shadow of like- 
 ness exists, between the immortality of the Pan- 
 theist and the immortahty of the Christian. 
 There is one point in which the divergence 
 between the two is marked, absolute, final. On 
 the principles v/hich Pantheism lays down, there 
 is no immortality but for the elite of humanity. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 27 
 
 If the sense of immortality is immortality, and 
 if I am eternal because I think of the eternal, 
 then there is no immortality for the crowd. 
 There is no future life but for thinkers. It is 
 not the inalienable heritage of the race, it is the 
 prerogative and privilege of the few. And we 
 must add of the very few. For if immortality 
 depends not only upon our thought of God, but 
 upon our thought of so abstract a being as the 
 God of Pantheism, and if our share of eternity 
 depends on the development which Vv^e give to 
 this idea, then the majority of mankind is for 
 ever robbed of all right to eternal life. The 
 poor, the wretched, the struggling, the vulgar 
 and ignoble crowd, v/ho are doomed to eat their 
 bread in the sweat of their brow, these are not 
 worthy of so great a gift. The multitudes who, 
 because they have the hearts of men, look to 
 heaven in their sorrow, and cry to God above, to 
 give them hereafter the peace and rest which 
 are denied them here, are full of aspirations, as 
 vain and mistaken, as they are selfish. The 
 wail of anguish which has gone up into the ear 
 of God ever since the world was made, and to 
 which men have so often thought they heard an 
 answer, has but been mocked and derided. 
 There is no answer. There is no hope. " I can 
 see no reason," says a recent writer, " why a 
 
28 nniORTALITY. 
 
 Papuan should be immortal." * But if the 
 fundamental principle of all Pantheism be true, 
 there is no reason why ninety and nine in a 
 hundred of the human race should be immortal. 
 Immortality is the privilege of an intellectual 
 aristocracy, and it is a privilege which they 
 make for themselves ; for they create their own 
 immortality. 
 
 I need scarcely remind you, how wide is the 
 diversrence between such a scheme, and the 
 message of the Gospel, with its large hopes and 
 glorious promises embracing all mankind. It is 
 emphatically the glory of the Gospel that it ad- 
 dresses itself to the universal heart. It knows 
 no distinction, when it makes the offer and gives 
 us the w^arrant of eternal life, between the pea- 
 sant and the sage. But keenly alive to the 
 miseries, the sorrows, the sufferings, the fears, 
 the hopes of the race, it addresses itself to all 
 alike. It confirms the just instincts of the 
 heart, it ratifies the verdict of the conscience. 
 It leaves no cloud on man's future destiny. 
 " To them who by patient continuance in well- 
 doing seek for honour, and glory, and immor- 
 tality," it promises " eternal life." But " to them 
 who obey not the truth " it threatens " indigna- 
 tion and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon 
 every soul of man that doeth evil." 
 
 * Renan, Essais dc Morale et de Cj-itiqiie. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 29 
 
 III. Materialism slays our hope. Pantheism 
 mocks us with a false hope. But it must not be 
 forgotten that there are .teachers of a better 
 philosophy, who, without professing to accept 
 the Christian revelation, have striven to estab- 
 lish on sure grounds our hopes of immortality. 
 They have given no doubtful answer to the 
 question of the Preacher. They have adopted 
 his later and better language. They have main- 
 tained that when the body falls into dust, the 
 spirit returns to God who gave it, and they have 
 sought to establish at the same time its distinct 
 personality. And the grounds on which they 
 encourage us to build our hopes of a future life 
 have with some minds considerable weight. 
 They appeal first to the constitution of man, 
 and next to the constitution of the world.* 
 
 i. They appeal first to the constitution of 
 man. If man is destined to a life beyond the 
 grave, then if God is wise and good and right- 
 eous. He has written in human nature some 
 prophecy of that life. 
 
 (i) Look, then, at the heart of man, see how 
 
 * In what follows, I am greatly indebted to Jules Simon, 
 Religion Naturelle, who thinks that he has demonstrated from 
 such considerations the immortality of the soul. Strange to 
 say, he takes no notice of the argument from conscience, which 
 to other thinkers appears the strongest of ^'all. See M'Cosh, 
 I\[dIiod of the Divine Qavernmenf, p. 514, sixth edition. 
 
30 nniORTALITY. 
 
 vast a thing is human love. Conceive of it in 
 any form you please, the love of family, the love 
 of father, child, wife, friends ; or the love of art, 
 or glory, or country, or mankind. Whence 
 comes that marvellous force of love .'* It is not 
 the object which creates the love, for the heart 
 may set itself upon an unworthy object, and the 
 object which to one seems loveliest may possess 
 no attractions for others. It is the love which 
 clothes the object with ideal loveliness. No- 
 thing shows more strikingly than this fact that 
 we are something in ourselves, that we do not 
 depend entirely upon our senses, and upon the 
 outer world. Look above all at that soul which 
 lavishes itself without one thought of self, which 
 only lives and breathes for the happiness of 
 another, which thinks no sacrifice too great, 
 which cannot be disenchanted, which death can- 
 not rob altogether, which even treachery and 
 contempt cannot alienate, which sheds all its 
 treasures of affection on a deformed body, a 
 sickly spirit, an ungrateful heart. Is that mighty 
 force of love no more than the flame of a candle 
 which at last goes out in the socket } Nay more, 
 when rising above the works of God to God 
 Himself, love fastens itself immediately on the 
 supreme object of love, shall it be frustrated in 
 its hopes .-* Shall that love, at once so holy and 
 so strong, be for ever shattered by deatli ? Shall 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 3 1 
 
 God never show himself? Shall God never give 
 Himself? Shall that which seemed the most real 
 thing in life, prove only to be a deception and a 
 torture ? No, the heart of man prophesies his 
 immortality. 
 
 (2) Look again at the intellect of man. This 
 likewise is too large for the world ; eternity is 
 in its eye, and ujDon its forehead. How " con- 
 fined and pestered " it is " within the pinfold " 
 of the body ! How it strives to vanquish space 
 and to triumph over time. How it ranges 
 through the past and anticipates the future. 
 How boldly it endeavors to gather all pheno- 
 mena however scattered into the common unity 
 of Universal laws. Does it not seek to grasp 
 eternity ? Does it not desire to know God ? And 
 does not every fresh discovery that we make call 
 forth in us, as it were a new power, impelling 
 us, with ever fresh and sustained ardor, on the 
 path of further investigations ? Can we recognize 
 in such facts no footsteps of a Divine purpose ? 
 Shall we only behold afar off the Promised 
 Land, and never be suffered to enter into its 
 borders ? Surely the intellect of man, like the 
 heart of man, prophesies his immortality. 
 
 (3) Once more, look at the conscience of man. 
 Is there not a Law to which we involuntarily do 
 homage ? Do we not know and feel that there 
 is an Eternal Right which claims our allegiance ? 
 
3 2 nniOR TA LITY. 
 
 And do we not strive to render that allegiance, 
 whilst we are ever painfully conscious that we 
 fall far short of its just and acknowledged de- 
 mands ? It is of no consequence to the argument 
 what view we hold as to the origin or the edu- 
 cation of Conscience. It is the fact that such 
 an authority exists, that such an authority is felt 
 to be binding. There is implied, in every re- 
 cognition of duty the sense of a law, and there- 
 fore, we instinctively feel, of a Lawgiver, who is 
 also a Judge, and who will punish the transgres- 
 sion of duty. Conscience reminds us of per- 
 petual failure, short-coming, transgression, and 
 conscience sets before us the penalty, and not 
 content with the retribution here extends it into 
 the world to come. It is not merely the Chris- 
 tian conscience which thus speaks, it is the con- 
 science of all men. St. Paul scarcely describes 
 more feelingly, than many a heathen moralist 
 and poet, the terrible disruption of the inner 
 man, the knowledge of the Law and the obe- 
 dience to appetite, the sense of right and the 
 slavery to evil. Christianity scarcely speaks 
 more clearly, than many a heathen religion, of 
 the retribution which the Righteous Judge shall 
 mete out on the final day of reckoning. " Every 
 man feels," it has been said, "as if he had at the 
 end of his earthly career to appear before his 
 Governor, and as if there was to be a reckoning 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 2)Z 
 
 at the close of the day of life. The time and 
 manner of the judgment are unknown, but the 
 judgment itself and the law are so far revealed. 
 There is a feeling of this kind originating in 
 deep internal principles, and strengthened by 
 the observation of retribution in the providence 
 of God, haunting mankind all through their life, 
 and coming on them impressively at a dying- 
 hour. Such a day of account evidently implies 
 a future world, and a separate state." * 
 
 But this is not the only part of the witness of 
 conscience. There is the witness which arises 
 from the sincere effort to obey, as well as the 
 witness from a sense of opposition to the law. 
 All these honest, broken, imperfect struggles, 
 ever baffled, ever disappointed, are they all with- 
 out meaning, and without aim } If the very frag- 
 mentariness of human hopes, and efforts and 
 aspirations, may be taken as any indication, that 
 the heart and the intellect shall ultimately find 
 their completeness, much more may we argue, 
 that the highest part of man's nature is not 
 intended to be always stunted and deformed. 
 The knowledge of God, and obedience to God 
 were not intended to be imperfect. Most surely 
 the day will come when " we shall know even as 
 we are known," when we shall " be perfect, even 
 
 * M'Cosh, as quoted above. 
 
34 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 as our Father which is in heaven is iDerfect." 
 The conscience of man, more clearly than heart 
 or intellect, prophesies his immortality. 
 
 Such is the ajopeal made by the advocates 
 of Natural Religion to the constitution of man. 
 They appeal to the heart of man with its mighty 
 capacity of love never satisfied till it has laid 
 hold on God. They appeal to the intellect of 
 man with its mighty capacities of knowledge, 
 never satisfied save as it seeks to track the ways 
 of God. They appeal to the conscience of man, 
 that witness to an Eternal Right, ever acknow- 
 ledging the authority of God, ever struggling 
 more or less imperfectly to fulfil His will, yet 
 ever, as it falls short, confessing that hereafter, 
 if not here, His will shall be done upon earth 
 even as it is in heaven. Thus the heart of man, 
 and the intellect of man, and the conscience of 
 man, alike refuse to accept the sentence of anni- 
 hilation. 
 
 ii. Not less convincing is the argument drawn 
 from the constitution of the world. There is 
 evil in the world, physical evil and moral evil. 
 And evil cries out against the power or the good- 
 ness or the justice of God. Physical evil is not 
 difficult to account for; nor. yet the mere fact 
 that some portion of evil attaches to us as creat- 
 ed beings. We must be imperfect. It would be 
 absurd to complain that God, who has made us 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 35 
 
 in His image, has not made iis His equals. But 
 it is not so easy to understand why God, who 
 has given us all the same nature, the same name, 
 the same destiny, has not given us all the same 
 means and opportunities of success, that He has 
 made one poor and auQther rich, that he has set 
 the imperishable crown of genius on the head of 
 one, and has given to another a degree of intelli- 
 gence scarcely above that of the brutes, that He 
 assigns to each, in such unequal measure, his 
 portion of good and evil, filling the cup of one to 
 the brim with every pleasure that can gratify the 
 sense, taking away from another, by an arbitrary 
 sentence, health, honor, wife, children, all that 
 makes life sweet, all that supports, and strength- 
 ens, and consoles. No stoic philosophy can 
 charm us into insensibility to these facts. But 
 this inequality in the distribution of good and 
 evil weighs upon us far more heavily, when we 
 see the good man bowed down with undeserved 
 misery, and the sinner prosperous and triumph- 
 ant. It is a shock to the best part of our nature 
 to witness such contradictions. It would crush 
 us, if we were to believe that they shall be for 
 ever without redress. It is quite true that, the 
 good man would love goodness apart from future 
 recompense ; but so long as there is the sense of 
 justice in his heart, you can never bring him to 
 believe, that wickedness deserves success and 
 
36 immortality: 
 
 goodness defeat. If we can form any true idea 
 of righteousness, and if God is righteous, then 
 who will pretend to say, that in the present con- 
 stitution of the world His righteousness is fully 
 vindicated ? The hard, grasping, money-loving, 
 money-getting man, who grinds the faces of the 
 poor, and rises to affluence on the stepping- 
 stones of human lives, is prosperous and honor- 
 ed, and takes his seat in Parliament, and fares 
 sumptuously every day, and is buried magnifi- 
 cently, and has a proud epitaph on his tomb. 
 And the poor Lazarus at his gate starving, and 
 with scarcely a rag to cover him, sees his wife 
 and children pining with sickness and hunger 
 before his eyes, and drags his miserable existence 
 to an end, with no hand to smooth his pillow. 
 The proud and delicate and highborn woman 
 lives her easy, fashionable, luxurious life, insen- 
 sible to every claim but the claim of her own 
 •canity ; and in yon miserable garret, her poor 
 sister is toiling through the long hours of a 
 winter's night, with weary eyes and weary heart, 
 the fatal flush on her cheek, and the sharp, quick 
 cough shaking her to pieces, and the hot tear in 
 her eye as she feels her strength failing, and so she 
 sinks, unknown and uncared for, into her early 
 grave. Who can believe that there we see the end 
 of the tragedy } It is not poetry ; it is the divinest 
 justice, it is the truest truth, which gives us to 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 37 
 
 see in the other world the reverse of the picture : 
 " And now he is comforted and thou art tor- 
 mented." Yes, either there is no justice and 
 therefore no God, or there is a life to come, in 
 which the naked horror of wickedness shall ap- 
 pear, stript alike of its covering and its preemi- 
 nence, and the pure beauty of goodness shall be 
 everlastingly revealed. 
 
 By these and other like arguments, men have 
 sought, even apart from Revelation, to build up 
 and confirm their hope of Immortality. But it 
 cannot be said, whatever those who advance 
 them may claim for them, that such arguments 
 make a future life certain. They do unques- 
 tionably confirm the instinctive hope of the 
 human heart. They make a future life not 
 improbable, but they do not prove it ; they leave 
 us still with a doubt in our hearts and perhaps a 
 trembling on our lips. So far as they are strong, 
 it is because in a degree which we little suspect, 
 we bring them in aid of our Christian faith ; but 
 apart from that faith they have no solid ground, 
 Take away the Christian truth of a resurrection, 
 assured to us by the Resurrection of Christ, and 
 these- arguments lose their force. You are left 
 in a world of shadows. You are struggling in 
 vain to assure yourself of your personal existence 
 hereafter. The immortality of the soul is _ a 
 phantom which eludes your eager grasp. Natu- 
 
3S nniORTALITY, 
 
 ral religion can never make a future life certain ; 
 such arguments as I have mentioned are only 
 corroborative of a foregone conclusion. The 
 Christian doctrine of the Resurrection, as I shall 
 hope hereafter to show, alone meets the instincts 
 of the human heart, alone satisfies us both of ex- 
 istence and of recompense after death. 
 
 Meanwhile, what is it to us, my brethren, that 
 we possess that Revelation of Life and Immor- 
 tality unless we are walking in the light thereof 1 
 What is it to us that the Son of God has come, 
 and having in our flesh died and risen again, is 
 our Precursor in the path of Immortality, unless 
 in the strength of His life we are triumphing 
 over sin and death .'* We may indeed reject the 
 Materialist's creed. We may profess to look 
 upon it with horror and aversion. Those words 
 which we have been taught to repeat from our 
 earliest years, linked with so many holy associ- 
 ations, " I believe in the Resurrection of the 
 body, and the life everlasting," may linger still 
 like some echo of a far-off world in our minds, 
 and we may not be able — God forbid we ever 
 should be able — to make deliberate shipwreck of 
 our Christian faith. But they may, alas ! have 
 lost their hold upon us. The m.aterialism of the 
 senses, or the materialism of the intellect, may 
 have enslaved and enthralled us, till, having 
 brought ourselves to live like the brutes, we may 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE. 39 
 
 even desire to perish like the brutes. If this be 
 so with any here, may God open their eyes to 
 their folly, ere it be too late. May He teach 
 us to know that for all our human life, for every 
 act, every word, every thought. He will bring us 
 into judgment. May He rouse, and sober, and 
 solemnize us. May He give us grace " to cast 
 away the works of darkness and put upon us the 
 armor of light ;" that quickened by His life, we 
 may stand erect before Him, in the full con- 
 sciousness of our high privilege as sons of 
 grace, heirs of God, and " candidates for Immor- 
 tality." 
 
LECTURE 11. 
 
 THE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 
 
 2 Timothy I. lo. 
 
 . . . Who hath abolished Dcath^ and brought Life and 
 l7nviortality to light through tJic Gospel. 
 
 In my last Lecture I glanced at some of those 
 philosophical systems which, having their origin 
 later than Christianity, profess to deal with the 
 problem of a Future Life. 
 
 I purpose in this Lecture briefly to pass in re- 
 view some of the doctrines of heathen religions, 
 and some of the speculations of heathen philoso- 
 phers on the Life to come. In the religious 
 system, we may recognize the voice of man's 
 heart and conscience ; in the philosophical 
 speculation, we shall trace the effort to give cer- 
 tainty to the instincts of nature by the aid of 
 reason and experience. We shall observe — 
 however it may be accounted for — that there is 
 for the most part a growth and development of 
 
THE HOPE OF THE G ENTILE. 41 
 
 belief. The primary, elemental belief, that death 
 is not the end of man, may be said to be as 
 wide as the human race. Even in such systems 
 as those of Buddha and Confucius, which have 
 sometimes been held either formally to deny, or 
 at any rate to pass by in silence a life beyond 
 the grave, there may be found traces of such a 
 belief, and whatsoever the sage may have held, 
 or the philosopher have thought, there can be 
 no doubt as to the popular persuasion. The 
 worship of ancestors in China, the infinite series 
 of transmigrations through which the Buddhist 
 must pass, before he can hope to attain Nirvana, 
 are witnesses to that indestructible instinct of 
 the human heart, which refuses to admit the an- 
 nihilation of so divine a thing as man. But this 
 universal, ineradicable belief has assumed a 
 variety of different forms. Its first and simplest 
 expression has been in the respect shown for the 
 dead, in the interment, in the treasuring of the 
 ashes in the urn, in the tomb however simple 
 and unadorned. Its first attempt to conceive of 
 another life has been by assigning to the soul a 
 form, and by imagining, that the jDursuits and 
 occupations of the next world were a mere con- 
 tinuation of the pursuits and occupations of the 
 present world. In a later stage of culture, when 
 the moral problems of life have begun to press 
 more heavily, and the moral sense has been 
 
4 2 nniOE TALITY. 
 
 * 
 
 more keenly exercised, we see men not content 
 with the bare belief in a future existence, but 
 picturing it to themselves, as the great theatre 
 of Divine Righteousness, as a state in which the 
 final severance shall be made between the good 
 and the wicked, as everlasting joy to the one, 
 and everlasting confusion to the other. And, 
 finally, as marking a yet higher degree of the 
 reflective analysis or of the Divine education, we 
 find a belief, more or less clearly implied, that 
 the body itself shall be redeemed from corrup- 
 tion, and raised to share with the spirit an 
 endless and incorruptible life. 
 
 Let us glance at some of the more salient 
 forms which the belief in a Future Life has as- 
 sumed, and let us take them as they have been 
 developed in Egypt, in Greece, in Asia. 
 
 What is the language of the most ancient doc- 
 uments to which we can appeal } We shall find 
 it, as we might anticipate, not in a formal trea- 
 tise, but in a popular expression, and, strange to 
 say, in an Egyptian romance. There is in the 
 British Museum an old papyrus, brown and crum- 
 bling, covered with mysterious characters, traced 
 two and thirty centuries ago by the hand of the 
 scribe Annana. He was, in all probability, a 
 contemporary of Moses, and the story which he 
 has written, and which has recently been deciph- 
 ered, bears in some particulars a curious resem- 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 43 
 
 blaiice to the history of Joseph, as recorded in 
 Genesis. It is full of interest, both from its 
 many points of contact with the rites and tradi- 
 tions of other countries, and also from the singu- 
 lar light it throws on the manners and customs 
 and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians. But the 
 special interest, for our present purpose, lies in 
 the way in which throughout it implies a belief, 
 not only in the transmigration of souls, but also 
 in the separate existence of the soul from the body. 
 Two brothers figure in the story. The soul of 
 one goes into the topmost blossom of a cedar- 
 tree while he is still alive. After a time he dies, 
 and then his brother, seeking three years for the 
 soul, finds it at last in the fruit which has fallen 
 from the tree. He places it in a vessel of water, 
 and it revives, and enters again into his brother. 
 After this, his brother is changed into a bullock, 
 and then, when the bullock is slain, the soul 
 passes into a tree, retaining in each of its trans- 
 migrations the power of speech, and the recol- 
 lection of his former life.*' Such is perhaps the 
 earliest account to be found, in any heathen na- 
 tion, of a belief in an existence after death. It 
 is in many respects coarse and material ; it is 
 
 * For a full account of this papyrus, see Brugsch, Atts dan 
 Orient. I have given a translation of it in " Good Words " for 
 Feb. 1867. 
 
44 nniORTALITT. 
 
 confused in its expression. It stands in strange 
 contrast with those yet earlier words of a Jewish 
 book : " And Enoch walked Avith God, and he 
 was not ; for God took him : " but it has its value 
 as an ancient testimony to man's instinctive as- 
 surance of his own immortality. Granted that 
 this takes the form of metempsychosis, still, in 
 one noticeable respect, it differs from later sys- 
 tems in which the same doctrine appears. The 
 soul preserves its personality. Whatever body 
 it may assume, it remembers its former existence. 
 It drinks no water of oblivion as in the myths of 
 Plato, or in the fantastic pictures of some mod- 
 ern philosophers. It is however in the " Rituals 
 of the Dead," that we look for the fuller and 
 more definite statements of the Egyptian creed. 
 These documents, rolled up in a cylindrical form 
 and placed not unfrequently in the Sarcophagi, 
 were intended to serve as a guide-book for the 
 soul, in her pilgrimages in the train of Osiris 
 through the regions below ; and they furnish us 
 with ample evidence, that the old Egypfian be- 
 lieved in an individual immortality, and a judg- 
 ment after death. Here, as in almost every an- 
 cient system, the life to come is conceived of as 
 little else than a continuation of the life that is. 
 If the soul survives, it cannot be regarded as a 
 pure spirit, it must still possess some of the pro- 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GEXTILE. 45 
 
 jDcrties of the material body.* Hence, " at an 
 Egyptian funeral, common articles of food and 
 dress and certain implements of war, of business, 
 and of pleasure, were deposited with or near the 
 corpse : the scenes of daily life were pictured on 
 the mummy-cases, not so much in order to ex- 
 press the piety of survivors, as to gratify and 
 stimulate the dead : a string of prayers and other 
 formulae were also buried with him for his con- 
 stant admonition, and as passports through the 
 unknown world to which he had been destined ; 
 and at length when he was entering ' the dark 
 place' itself, the popular belief assigned him 
 bread and drink, and slices of flesh off the table 
 of the sun ; when he traverses the fields of the 
 blessed, corn and barley are given to him, for 
 he is provided as he was upon earth."! But the 
 Egyptian, if he thus conceived of a quasi-mate- 
 rial soul, did not on that account make light of 
 the body. If we do not find any mention of the 
 resurrection of the body, yet the body was evi- 
 dently regarded as partaking, in some mysterious 
 manner, of the immortality of the soul. In no 
 other way can we explain the care taken in em- 
 balming, or that lofty title given to the mummy, 
 
 * Animos enim per se ipsos viventes non poterant mente com- 
 plecti; formam aliquam figuramque quosrebant. Cic. Tusc. I. 
 
 t Hardwick, Christ ajid Other Masters. Ft. IV. pp. 79 — 90. 
 
46 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 which designated it as ^ the habitation of Osiris/ 
 or the prayers offered to the same god for its in- 
 corruptibility, or the sepulchre built as it seemed 
 to defy all time, which the Egyptian might well 
 call his dwelUng-place and * everlasting home.' 
 It would detain us too long, to enter at any length 
 into that very remarkable portion of the Egyp- 
 tian creed, which relates to a judgment after 
 death. But as they held that the personal in- 
 dividuality was not lost, and as they cherished 
 the belief in some close and mysterious connec- 
 tion between soul and body after death, so also 
 they believed in a future state of rewards and 
 punishments. " Each one must submit, as he 
 enters the unseen world, to the awful judgment 
 of Osiris and his assessors, Truth and Justice. 
 The heart of the deceased is weighed in the fatal 
 balance, and if he cannot declare himself free 
 from sin, he is handed over to the ministers of 
 vengeance, and after passing from one bestial 
 shape to another, is at last plunged into a lake, 
 whose waters of flame and waves of fire are of 
 the most intense and unconquerable heat, while 
 the thirst of the dead in it is unquenchable ; and 
 they have no peace in it because it is filled with 
 weeds and filth."* The spirit, on the other hand, 
 which has been prdnounced free, passes into the 
 
 * Birch, as quoted by Hardvvick. 
 
THE UOFE OF THE GENTILE, 47 
 
 abodes of the blessed, and at last attains to per- 
 fection by absolute union with Osiris, the Sun- 
 god. ' This great god speaks to them and they 
 speak to him ; his glory illuminates them in the 
 splendor of his disc, while he is shining in their 
 sphere.' It is scarcely necessary to remark, how 
 much there is in such a theology as this, which, 
 if it is not the echo of an earlier revelation, finds 
 at least some points of contact with the Christian 
 faith. That lake of fire and that thirst unquench- 
 able, do we not find them in the words of our 
 Master and the writings of His Apostles } That 
 union with the true God and blessed converse 
 with Him, is not this the hope which, beyond 
 all things else, animates the Christian, as he 
 seeks to pierce within the veil, and pictures to 
 himself a glorious immortality 1 I do not indeed 
 pretend to put the one belief on a level wifh the 
 other. Still less would I be thought to imply, 
 that the one is in any true sense the anticipation 
 of the other. But no more striking proof could 
 be given of the testimonhnn anhncB natiiralitcr 
 ChristiancB ; no clearer evidence that the heart 
 and the conscience of man are witnesses to the 
 truth. What Christ did was not, for the first 
 time, to teach immortality and a judgment to 
 come ; for God had written these things in hu- 
 man nature at the creation. But He dispelled 
 the doubts which perplexed and tortured men 
 
48 nnioETALiTr. 
 
 in the prospect of death. By His own Resur- 
 rection He annulled death, and in the light of 
 that Resurrection made Life and linmortality 
 sure. 
 
 From the Egyptian we turn to the Greek. 
 And here again we encounter, first and in its 
 earliest stage, the popular doctrine — the ac- 
 cepted fact of an existence after death, and an 
 attempt to conceive, and to set forth to the 
 popular mind, the nature of that existence, the 
 pursuits and employments of the world below. 
 But the Homeric representation is indistinct, 
 confused, even contradictory. The dead have 
 lost their true conscious personality, yet they 
 can be recognized ; they still retain their earthly 
 image and lineaments. They have a form, but 
 it is an unsubstantial form which eludes the 
 grasp. " Such is the lot of mortals," exclaims 
 the mother of Ulysses, " when they die ; the 
 muscles no longer hold together the flesh and 
 bones, but they perish in the fire when the 
 breath leaves the body, and the soul flits hither 
 and thither like a dream." They have neither 
 speech nor power of recognition, till they taste 
 the blood of the victims, which Ulysses has 
 poured into the trench ;* for in the blood is the 
 life. They dwell in a region of thickest dark- 
 
 * Od. XI. vv. 142 — 390. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 4g 
 
 ness. So profound is the gloom that settles even 
 on the noblest spirits, that nothing can charm 
 it away. It is in vain to soothe Achilles by 
 reminding him that, as he was honored like a 
 god when alive, so now he is supreme ruler of 
 the dead. He puts away the consolation, and 
 declares that he would rather be the hireling of 
 a man of no substance, and of cramped and nar- 
 row means, than be lord of all the dead. One 
 thing only touches his heart with joy, and that 
 is, to hear that his son bears himself bravely 
 in the fight, and sustains the honor of his name. 
 Such then is the future life, as it presented 
 itself to the early thought of the Greeks, and such 
 is the popular mythology. The body falls to dust, 
 even the spirit perishes for ever ;* but the soul 
 exists, and its dwelling-place is beneath the 
 earth : it lives a cold, sad, gloomy, dream-like life ; 
 it lives mindful of its former pursuits, but no 
 longer able to enjoy them. Of the doctrine of a 
 retribution, we find only the germ in the genu- 
 ine portion of the Homeric jDoems. The crime 
 of perjury is singled out for mention, as one 
 which draws down upon it vengeance in another 
 life. The judgment of Minos in the sha'des 
 below, and the Tartarus and Elysium, the abode 
 severally of the just and unjust, are doubtless 
 
 * Nagelsbach, d/e Ilomcrische Theologie, p. 397, 398. 
 
5 O IJLMOR TA LITY. 
 
 subsequent accretions, the embodiments of a 
 later mythology, which, however, grew and took 
 more definite shape, till they became an acknow- 
 ledged element in the popular creed.* 
 
 In the dramatic Poets of a later age, the pic- 
 ture is not very different : except in the greater 
 prominence given to the punishrhent of the 
 wicked, the representation is to all practical 
 purpose the same. The dead, says ^schylus, 
 sleep " in light which is not light, but darkness 
 visible" {C/w. 311) : they are past feeling ; they 
 " have lost the wish even to rise again." Darius, 
 though a king below, yet like Achilles, finds no 
 joy in his kingly dignity, and bids the suppliants 
 who had evoked him to reap pleasure while it is 
 yet day, "for the dead are shrouded in thick 
 gloom, where wealth avails not." 
 
 In one respect however the view of ^schylus, 
 as has been recently pointed out, is one of pecu- 
 liar gloom and severity. For him there exists 
 no Elysium for the blessed, no reward for good- 
 ness in the life beyond the grave. " ^schylus 
 has not one word of true hope for a future state, 
 not one image of another field of labor, where 
 the character trained by sorrow here shall find 
 exercise for its chastened power. It is scarcely 
 too much to say, that for him the other world, 
 
 * Nagelsbach /// sttpra, p. 407. He points out how confused, 
 and even contradictory, the Homeric representations are. 
 
THE IIOFE OF THE GEXTILE. 5 1 
 
 and the powers by which it is governed, exist 
 only for the guilty. There remains an awful 
 and just punishment for all who sinned in life 
 against God, or strangers, or parents : — 
 
 For Hades is a stern inquisitor 
 
 Of men beneath the Earth, and views their deeds, 
 
 And enters them in the tablets of his mind 
 
 The lewd offender shall not, when he dies. 
 Escape arraignment in the shades below. 
 Even there, another Zeus, as legends tell, 
 Gives final judgment on the crimes of men. 
 
 And so it comes to pass that the retribution is 
 completed there, which the Erinyes had begun 
 on earth."' . . . But " the fulness of human 
 life is on earth. The part of man in all his 
 capacity for passion and action is played out 
 here ; and when the curtain falls, there remains 
 unbroken rest, or a faint reflection of the past, 
 or suffering wrought by the ministers of inexo- 
 rable justice. The beauty and the power of life, 
 the manifold ministers of sense, are gone. They 
 can be regretted, but they cannot be replaced. 
 Sorrow is possible, but not joy." * 
 
 But there were those whom neither the popular 
 mythology, nor the deeper theology of the poets 
 could satisfy. The philosopher, questioning 
 with himself concerning himself, asked for some 
 
 * Westcott, Theology of A^sc/iylus, in Coiitcvip. Rev. for Nov. 
 1866. 
 
5 2 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 clear evidence of immortality, and speculated 
 concerning the nature of a life beyond the 
 grave. In Plato the question recurs again and 
 again. It arrests and fascinates him. Never 
 was a nobler effort made by man, to attain to 
 certainty on any question affecting his ov/n 
 nature and destiny. And nowhere is to be found 
 a more signal proof, that by the unaided rea- 
 son of man such certainty cannot be attained, 
 that, as Socrates himself confesses, man needs 
 a Divine teacher to dispel his ignorance and to 
 cast light upon life and immortality. In the 
 Phccdo, Socrates considers himself to have 
 proved, that the soul cannot die, though he ad- 
 mits that there may be ground for disputing the 
 soundness of his reasoning. In the Republic, 
 he thinks that he has established beyond the 
 reach of doubt, the immortality of the soul. But 
 in the Apology, true to his principles, he confes- 
 ses iiis ignorance. To fear death, would be to 
 pretend to a knowledge which he does not pro- 
 fess, for no one knows what death is ; for ought 
 that appears to the contrary, it may be the 
 greatest of blessings, and yet men fear it as if 
 they knciv it to be the greatest of evils. For 
 though he does not know what shall be here- 
 after, yet he does know that injustice and dis- 
 obedience to one who is better than ourselves, 
 be he god or man, is evil and base. Death, he 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GEXTILE. 53 
 
 says, is one of two things. Either it is the ex- 
 tinction of all perception, like a dreamless sleep, 
 and then it is a wonderful boon — for who would 
 find many days and nights in his life to be pre- 
 ferred to a night which he has slept all through 
 without a dream ? — or it is the migration to an- 
 other place, where the rest of the dead are gath- 
 ered, and there it will be a pleasure to mingle 
 with the great men who have gone before, to 
 l^ass under the scrutiny of the three judges who 
 cannot be corrupted, like earthly judges, to con- 
 verse with the great poets, such as Orpheus and 
 Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer, or to cross- 
 examine the great heroes of the Trojan war, 
 and to compare his experience with theirs. 
 
 Although Plato's doctrine of a future life is 
 troubled by the Pythagorean dream of a metem- 
 psychosis, still he does not hesitate to teach in 
 no doubtful language, that the future state is a 
 state of rewards and punishments, in which each 
 man receives his sentence, according to the 
 things he hath done in the body. Those re- 
 wards and punishments are not arbitrary, but 
 follow by a natural law ; for the soul takes with 
 it to Hades nothing but the results of its edu- 
 cation and growth, which immediately begin to 
 manifest their effects. In the magnificent myth 
 with which the Phcedo closes, he thus expounds 
 the law of retribution ; — r^' When the dead reach 
 
54 nniORTALITY. 
 
 the place whither their genius carries them, they 
 obtain their sentence, and those, whose hves 
 have been neither very good nor very bad, are 
 conveyed along Acheron to the Acherusian 
 lake, where they are purified of wickedness by 
 punishment, and receive the reward of their 
 good deeds. Those who are judged to be in- 
 curably guilty, owing to the greatness of their 
 sins, are thown into Tartarus, from which they 
 never come out. Those again, whose sins are 
 very great, but not past all cure, are thrown, for 
 so it must be, into Tartarus ; but after a year they 
 are carried by Cocytus or Pyriphlegethon to the 
 Acherusian lake, where with loud cries they call 
 on those whom they wronged, beseeching them 
 for pardon, that so they may leave their place of 
 torment and come to them ; and if their prayer 
 is heard, it is well ; if not, they return to their 
 place of suffering, for they gain no respite till it 
 is granted by those whom they injured. Those, 
 lastly, who have lived with conspicuous holiness, 
 are they who are freed from their prison-house 
 in the lower realms, and rise aloft to radiant 
 habitations, and dwell upon the earth which I 
 have described. And such as have purified 
 themselves sufficiently by philosophy live wholly 
 without bodies for the future, and rise to habi- 
 tations more glorious than these, which it were 
 hard to paint. . . . But I think what I have 
 
TUE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 55 
 
 said shows that we must strive by all means to 
 gain virtue and wisdom in our lives. The prize 
 is glorious and the hope is great." The myth 
 in the Gorgias is not less striking and not less 
 explicit. In both the same truths are enforced. 
 As Plato has insisted in the Republic, that the 
 brief space between childhood and old age is too 
 short for the reward of virtue, so now he show 
 us, how both virtue and vice receive their just 
 recompense in the life to come. He sees that 
 punishment may be exemplary as well as reme- 
 dial. He does not shrink even from the awful 
 sentence of everlasting woe, pronounced upon 
 desperate and incurable wickedness. He sees 
 the holy and the just crowned with everlasting 
 felicity. In the use which he makes of these 
 myths, Plato shows his power as a religious 
 teacher. The popular allegories for him con- 
 tain the profoundest of moral truths. They are 
 the poetry of the. conscience and of the heart. 
 Surely there is no " half smile playing upon the 
 lips of the divine old man which betrays his 
 scepticism without showing his contempt."* 
 The philosopher and the moral teacher finds his 
 lessons confirmed by the beautiful fictions of the 
 popular creed, which he embellishes and exalts, 
 and reads in them a living: confirmation of his 
 
 't> 
 
 Cousin, (Eiivres de Platon, i. p. 179' 
 
56 niMORTALITY. 
 
 teaching, that " we must strive by all means to 
 gain virtue and wisdom in our lives." It was a 
 noble attempt to marry the wisdom of the sage 
 and the religion of the vulgar, to show that rea- 
 son did not contradict faith, but that the truth, 
 which was reached through the conclusions of 
 the intellect, had already its support in the con- 
 science and in the instinctive belief of mankind. 
 So far as philosophy can accomplish the task, it 
 may be said that Plato has established by solid 
 reasoning the immateriality of the soul, the abso- 
 lute distinction between mind and matter. The 
 triumph was great ; and yet Cicero with all his 
 admiration for Plato, confesses how slight an 
 impression such reasoning produced. Plato, he 
 tells us, seems to have convinced himself, and 
 to have made others wish, that he was right.* 
 " Whilst I am reading his treatise," he says, " I 
 assent to his reasoning ; when I lay down the 
 book and think over the question of immortality 
 myself, my assent slips away from me." f But 
 in truth, as we have seen, Socrates himself 
 shrinks from a positive affirmation of his belief. 
 And it is evident, as has been remarked by 
 some of Plato's most accomplished critics, that 
 no reasoning can do more than make the life 
 to come probable. " Philosophy demonstrates/' 
 
 *Cic. Tusc. I. 21, § 49. tib. I. II, § 25. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 57 
 
 says one of them, "that there is in man a prin- 
 ciple that cannot perish. But that this principle 
 reappears in another world with the same order 
 of faculties and the same laws which it has here, 
 that it carries with it there the consequences of 
 the good and evil actions which it has commit- 
 ted this is a sublime probability, which 
 
 does not admit perhaps of rigorous demonstra- 
 tion, but which is authorized and consecrated by 
 the secret trust of the heart and the universal 
 consent of the world." * 
 
 Yes, a sublime probability, and " probability is 
 the very guide of life." And yet something more 
 is necessary, if religion is to lend her sanction to 
 morality. If the future life is to sway and rule 
 the present life, if a man is to sacrifice the plea- 
 sures of time to the joys of eternity, if he is to 
 resist the fascinations of sense and the strong 
 grasp of covetousness, if he is to master the 
 swelling of passion, and turn a deaf ear to the 
 voice which bids him take his ease, eat, drink 
 and be merry, then he needs something more 
 than a wavering hope to be the anchor of his 
 soul. Then he needs a voice that he can re- 
 cognize as that of God, to confirm his doubts 
 and fears. Then he needs the word and the 
 promise and the example of One, who rising 
 
 * Cousin, CEuvres de Plato?:, i. p. 178. 
 
58 nniORTALITT. 
 
 Himself in human flesh from the grave, has 
 brought Life and Immortahty to Hght. 
 
 If our examination of ancient systems of be- 
 hef and of speculation were to stop here, we 
 might conclude with Cicero that the belief in 
 the Immortality of the soul is like the belief in 
 God, universal. But we must not omit all notice 
 of forms of religion which count their disciples 
 by millions. The East as well as the West 
 claims our consideration. Whilst Greece was 
 advancing on the path of civilization, another 
 civilization was developing itself between the 
 Indus and the Ganges. Two vast rival systems 
 of religious belief have there sprung up, and 
 struggled for the mastery, the system of the 
 Brahmin, and the system of the Buddhist. Full 
 of interest, at any time, to the student of man's 
 nature and history, these systems derive a fresh 
 interest, from the singular coincidence which 
 they often present with the course of modern 
 speculation. In fact it is not too much to say, 
 that " the history of mind in India, corresponds to 
 the same history in Europe : " and that " Every 
 system that has appeared in the West, has had 
 its counterpart in the East."* 
 
 As in Egypt, and in Greece, so in India we 
 can trace distinctly the development of doctrine. 
 
 * Hunt, Pantheism., p. 18. 
 
TUE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 59 
 
 In the most ancient religious poems of the 
 Aryans, in the earliest Vedic hymns, the future 
 life is scarcely mentioned ; the fears and hopes 
 of the present life occupy the foremost place, in 
 the midst of a pantheistic worship of the forces 
 of nature, not wanting either in grandeur or in 
 poetry, but in which the notion of a wise and 
 righteous Providence can scarcely be discerned. 
 Even there, however, we meet with the doctrine 
 of transmigrations, though in a form less extra- 
 vagantly grotesque than that which it subse- 
 quently assumed. And there too is the germ 
 of future recompense, though the palm is given 
 not to moral virtue, but to the zealous practice 
 of ceremonial observances. 
 
 In the more matured system of the Brahmins, 
 the world is an ever-fluctuating development of 
 the great soul of Being ; it issues from, and is a 
 part of Brahma Himself, as the stream issues 
 from its source, as the tree from the seed, as the 
 spider's web from the spider. The universe is 
 the theatre of a perpetual movement, in conse- 
 quence of v^hich souls find themselves, now 
 nearer, now further removed from their native 
 source. They pass from body to body, they 
 visit in succession the bodies of stones, plants, 
 animals, gods, men, without truce, and without 
 repose, doomed according to their merits or de- 
 merits, to ascend or descend the eternal ladder, 
 
6o nnioiiTALiTY. 
 
 plunged now it may be in all the horrors, ex- 
 quisite and prolonged, of the eight and twenty 
 hells, or raised to the rank of higher beings, in 
 an existence above that of this world, till at 
 length the vast sum of revolutions being com- 
 pleted, they are absorbed in the great principle 
 of the Universe, the immovable Brahma, in 
 whose immovable void, existence is the only 
 perfection, and the only bliss.* 
 
 When in the Vedanta, the question is asked, 
 " What is the nature of that absorbed state 
 which the souls of good men enjoy after death ? " 
 the answer is : " It is a participation of the 
 Divine nature, where all passions are utterly 
 unknown and consciousness is absorbed in 
 bliss." 
 
 Everlasting metempsychosis, everlasting evo- 
 lution, with everlasting reabsorption, this is the 
 future life in which sixty millions of the human 
 race at this day believe. 
 
 Buddhism was a reformation of Brahminism. 
 With the exception of Christianity, no religious 
 system that the world has seen, has ever pro- 
 duced so mighty a revolution, has ever inculca- 
 ted a morality so pure, or breathed so Divine a 
 charity, or spoken words of such tender compas- 
 sion to the Pariah and the outcast. Its founder 
 
 *Taine, Noiacciiix Essaic dc Critiqtce et dVIisloirc, pp. 327, 
 32S. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 6 1 
 
 Sakya Muni lived some five centuries before 
 the Christian era.* The son of a king, and 
 accustomed to all the pleasures and luxury 
 of an oriental court, he at an early age became 
 profoundly convinced of the vanity of the world. 
 The spectacle of the miseries of life, of sickness, 
 old age and death, touched his heart, and he set 
 himself with noble purpose to deliver men from 
 the curse which weighed upon them. With this 
 object in view, he made no distinction of caste 
 or race or sex. He broke down the barriers of 
 prejudice and of custom. He called all to salva- 
 tion, the king and the slave, the Brahmin and 
 the Tschandala, the pure and the impure, his 
 own countrymen and strangers, men and women. 
 The good news which he preached, was deliver- 
 ance from the burden of existence. Our suffer- 
 ings, he said, spring from our passions, and are 
 the punishments for sins committed in a former 
 state of existence. Our aim, then, must be to 
 crush our passions, to crush every desire which 
 binds us to life. When this is accomplished we 
 shall find rest, we shall find it in non-existence, 
 in freedom from that existence which is itself a 
 penalty from sin. It has been much disputed 
 whether the Nirvana, the final rest which he 
 promised to the perfected disciple, is or is not 
 
 * See Earlhelemy St. Hilaire, Le Boitddha et le Bottddhisine. ■ 
 
62 niMORTALITY. 
 
 equivalent to annihilation. It would ill become 
 one, who has not made a study of the original 
 texts, to pretend to pronounce a decision on this 
 question. Great authorities are arrayed on 
 either side. But even if Sakya Muni himself 
 proclaimed annihilation as the crown and reward 
 of perfection, it may be certainly affirmed that 
 this teaching has since been greatly modified.* 
 Nirvana is to the Buddhist rather the negation 
 and opposite of the present existence, than an- 
 nihilation in the sense in which we commonly 
 understand it. It is that state "which is followed 
 by no birth, and after which there is no renew- 
 ing of the miseries of existence. It is beyond 
 the world of sensation and of change. Here 
 there is coming and going, change and motion, 
 fulness and manifoldness, combination and indi- 
 viduality. In Nirvana is rest and stillness, 
 simplicity and unity for ever. Here are birth, 
 sickness, age and death, virtue and vice, merit 
 and demerit ; there, there is Eternal repose, com- 
 plete deliverance from existence and all the con- 
 ditions of existence. The soul can no longer 
 be born, and therefore no longer die. The '/' 
 is extinguished as plants no longer watered, as 
 
 * It may fairly be questioned whether Buddha himself taught 
 nihilism, but if he did, his teaching was certainly not generally 
 received. See Max IMiiller, Chips from a Gcnnan JVorkshoJy, 
 Vol. I. p. 233. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GENTILE. 6;^ 
 
 trees whose roots have been dug up from the 
 earth, or as the Hght goes out when the oil fails 
 in the lamp." * 
 
 Such, roughly sketched, are the systems of 
 the Brahmin and the Buddhist, such is their 
 consolation in death, such their hope of a life to 
 come. Widely differing in many respects, the 
 two systems are alike in this, that they both 
 tend to the destruction of the individual person- 
 ality. The one destroys the individual by 
 plunging him in the Absolute Being. The 
 other destroys him, if not by actual annihilation, 
 by robbing him of all character, of all thought, 
 and feeling, and will, and action. Both look for 
 something after death ; both deny the only im- 
 mortality which is worth contending for, the 
 immortality of the conscious individual life. 
 
 We have directed our glance in tu.rn to Greece 
 and to India, to the West and to the East. A 
 day came in the history of the world, when in 
 consequence of the great political events which 
 modified ancient society, the East and the West 
 met on the shores of the Mediterranean. Then 
 took place that wonderful fusion of the thoughts 
 and hopes of the world, all the fruits of which 
 we have not even yet gathered ; and not only 
 did the East and the West meet, but at the same 
 
 * Hunt, Puiii/tcisiii, pp. 24, 25. See also Tainc at supra, p. 340. 
 
64 niJIOETALITr. 
 
 epoch religion and philosophy stretched each to 
 the other her hand. It was a solemn moment. 
 What was the result } 
 
 Let us transport ourselves into Greece in 
 the fifth century of our era * Athens, glorious 
 Athens, the illustrious mother of thought, and 
 of the arts, was near to her fall ; that * bright 
 particular star' in the heaven of mind was about 
 to set for ever. But at the moment when the 
 star was touching the horizon, it shot forth one 
 last gleam of surpassing splendor. A numer- 
 ous youth, gathered from all parts of the Roman 
 Empire, crowded the amphitheatres of the city, 
 which was still the capital of the intellectual 
 world. In those large assemblies were heard 
 the words of a man, whom some venerated as a 
 god. He styled himself the Universal Pontiff. 
 He was the most esteemed of philosophers, and 
 the most erudite of priests ; he seemed to sum 
 up in his person the whole moral and intellec- 
 tual growth of past centuries, all philosophy and 
 all religion. The name of this man was Proclus. 
 He was the last in a long series of sages, and 
 his doctrine contained the result of four centu- 
 ries of intellectual toil. This doctrine was that 
 of the famous school of Alexandria. To form 
 
 * E. Naville, La Vie Eternelle, to whom I am greatly in- 
 debted in what follows, thougli he hardly docs justice to Proclus 
 or to the Alexandrian School. 
 
THE UOVE OF THE GENTILE. 65 
 
 that school East and West had united. Into it, 
 as into some vast reservoir, two mighty streams 
 had poured their treasures of thought and learn- 
 ing. It was the teaching of this school that 
 Mythology was the bark and rind of truth, and 
 that Pantheism was the inner heart of truth. 
 For the living God, the First cause of the Uni- 
 verse, the Alexandrians substituted an abstract 
 and barren conception, a God without intelli- 
 gence, without liberty, without power. Far from 
 making any successful attempt to assure to us 
 immortality after death, the whole practical 
 result of their doctrine was to do away with such 
 a belief The Greek myths, those graceful fables, 
 which gave life and movement to all around, 
 were no more than the airy and transparent 
 clothing of the gloomy thoughts and conceptions 
 of Asia. The dogmas of the Brahmins were 
 erected under a different form in the country of 
 Homer and of Plato. Such was the result of 
 the meeting between the thought of the East 
 and the thought of the West. 
 
 It was a crisis in the intellectual progress of 
 the world. Ancient wisdom seemed to be 
 gathering all its forces, as if again to assert its 
 pre-eminence. Never was it animated by a 
 deeper enthusiasm of activit}^, never had it' 
 armed itself for a more resolute, a more des- 
 perate struggle. The representatives of the an- 
 
66 nnioETALiTr. 
 
 cient world strove in vain to marry the brilliant 
 fictions of fable to the profound conceptions of 
 genius. Another and a mightier power was 
 sweeping past them, and advancing to conquests 
 for which they could not dare to hope. And why .'' 
 — because in a distant province, four centuries 
 before, One who had studied neither the wisdom 
 of the East nor the philosophy of the West, One 
 whose garb and speech were those of a Galilean 
 peasant, had preached eternal life and the resur- 
 rection from the dead to a few boatmen on the 
 Lake of Gennesareth ; because a man, named 
 Paul of Tarsus, forgetting his Greek and Jewish 
 lore, had been content to know nothing else but 
 Jesus crucified and risen from the dead ; because 
 at the preaching of this word, there had been 
 kindled in hearts far and wide. East and West, 
 North and South, a hope so full of immortality, 
 that men went to meet martyrdom, as they 
 would have gone to a festival, not because they 
 were weary of this world, but that they might 
 attain to the palm of an endless life. Nothing 
 could arrest the development of the new doc- 
 trine. The seed had become a sapling, the sap- 
 ling had shot up and spread itself into a 
 mighty and umbrageous tree. Just as the pine 
 of the forest stretching its branches to the 
 sun covers with its shadow the lesser under- 
 growth, killing the vegetation whose nourish- 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GE STILE. 67 
 
 ment it absorbs, so Christianity, as it grew, 
 robbed of air and light the gods of Olympus, 
 and covered the earth with the fragments of an- 
 cient theories, all whose life it had drained, all 
 whose meaning it had gathered into its own 
 bosom. Have we ever tried to picture to our- 
 selves the struggle of which the world was at 
 that time the theatre ? Have we ever tried to 
 conceive what must have been the feelings of 
 the citizens of Rome, when that proud city was 
 asked to renounce all that pomp, in which the 
 ceremonies of religion lent splendor and dignity 
 to the service of the State, that Capitol in which 
 were gathered the spoils of the Universe, those 
 triumphs in which the princes of the world did 
 homage to the majesty of the sovereign people? 
 Can we understand what must have been the 
 feelings of those young men, who were bidden 
 to give up their pleasures, their festivals which 
 were the charm of their life, the brilliant poetry 
 which fascinated their imagination, and all this 
 for a word rugged and uncouth as it was new, 
 for a message of which it might justly be 
 doubted, whether it were in a greater degree 
 foolishness to the wise, or a stumblingblock to 
 men of the world ? And yet that word had con- 
 quered. The ancient religions, long assailed 
 alike by the force of reason and by the protests 
 of conscience, at length fell, as Dagon fell before 
 
6S niMoiiTALiTr. 
 
 the Ark, on the day when outside the walls of 
 Jerusalem, Jesus of Nazareth was nailed to the 
 cross, in the midst of women who bewailed Him 
 and a people who derided Him. Thus did the 
 Wisdom of the old world pale before the Word 
 which shed light upon life and immortality. 
 
 Yes, the foolishness of God is wiser than the 
 wisdom of men. It was so then, it is so now. 
 System after system has sprung up and perish- 
 ed. Even in the last few years, in the full light 
 of Christianity, we have seen men building up, 
 with a force of genius worthy of a better cause, 
 theories of metempsychosis and transmigration, 
 pretending to explain the world and man with- 
 out any recognition of God and of Providence, 
 denying to the human race the hope of immor- 
 tality, substituting the immortality of the race, 
 or of works, of matter and of force, for the im- 
 mortality of the soul, and a personal existence 
 after death. We listen with fainting heart to 
 these prophets of destruction. We listen per- 
 chance more hopefully to the advocates of a 
 better wisdom, who yet bid us shut our Bibles, 
 because Reason suffices of herself to place on 
 sure grounds our eternal hope, to construct for 
 us the charter of our immortality. And as we 
 turn away, with our doubts and fears still thick 
 about us, our misgivings and perplexities unal- 
 layed, our eye falls on the page, written from his 
 
THE HOPE OF THE GEXTILE. 69 
 
 prison in Rome, by one of whom the world was 
 not worthy. He was no dreamer, he was no 
 fanatic. He was a man of cultivated intellect, of 
 large heart, of profound convictions. He writes 
 to a friend in the near prospect of death, but no 
 shadow of gloom darkens his spirit ; there is no 
 faltering, no fear, but the light of eternity is in 
 his eye, and the great peace of God is in his 
 heart, and it is thus he wTites : " I am now 
 ready to be offered up, and the time of my de- 
 parture is at hand. I have fought the good 
 fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the 
 faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the 
 crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the 
 righteous Judge, shall give me at that day." 
 And if you ask. Whence this high confidence, 
 this unshaken hope, this holy joy.'* the answer 
 is to be found in other words in the same letter i 
 " I know whom I have believed ; I am the herald 
 and the apostle of Him who has abolished death, 
 and brought Life and Immortality to light." 
 
LECTURE TIL 
 
 THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 
 
 Luke XX. ij, 38. 
 
 Now that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed at the 
 bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abrahaiii, 
 and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is 
 ?iot a God of the dead, but of the living : for all live 
 1171 to him. 
 
 We have already reviewed some of the prin- 
 cipal systems of Gentile belief, and Gentile 
 speculation, concerning the life to come. Apart 
 from any other value which they may have, 
 they are witnesses for God, they are signs of 
 man's moral nature, evidences of an inner reve- 
 lation of the heart and conscience, v/hich pro- 
 claims a future life and a future judgment. 
 When we turn from these beliefs and specula- 
 tions to those records of Jewish faith which we 
 have in the Old Testament, we might certainly 
 and reasonably expect that, if here we have a 
 more distinct, personal revelation of God, here 
 also a clearer light would rest on the joroblem 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JE]V. J I 
 
 we are considering. For the knowledge of God 
 and the knowledge of man are inseparably as- 
 sociated. Whatever throws light on the one 
 must throw light on the other also. In propor- 
 tion as the belief in God's nature and attributes 
 is pure and elevated, in the same proportion 
 will man form a right conception of his relation 
 to God, and therefore of his future destiny. 
 And this expectation would be strengthened, by 
 observing that there is a vital continuity be- 
 tween Judaism and Christianity,* that the New 
 Law is in some of its most essential features 
 but a development and spiritual interpretation 
 of the Old. The, God of Moses is the God of 
 Christians ; the general principles of morality — 
 notwithstanding some obvious and admitted ex- 
 ceptions — are the same in the Pentateuch and 
 the Gospel. In both, there is the same close 
 and intimate connection between morality and 
 religion ; in both, the same precept to love our 
 neighbor, flowing out of the one great primary 
 command to love God ; in both, the same trust 
 in the infinite wisdom and justice and goodness 
 of God, the same submission to His providence, 
 the same belief in the efficacy of prayer. It 
 would have seemed but natural therefore, that a 
 judgment to come which forms so powerful a 
 
 * This has been strikingly illustrated in Lord Hatherley's re- 
 cently Dublished Volume, " The Continuity of Scripture." 
 
72 nnroETALTTr. 
 
 sanction in the Christian scheme, should have 
 had its due place in the sanctions of the Law of 
 Moses. 
 
 And yet it is remarkable that, whilst not only 
 the unity of God, but the holiness, the truth, 
 the loving mercy of God are presented in the 
 Old Testament, in a manner not very unlike 
 that in which they are presented in the New, 
 and in the most marked contrast with the gross 
 and revolting conceptions to be found in the re- 
 ligious systems of the heathen, and the feeble 
 and imperfect conceptions of the most enlight- 
 ened of pagan philosophers, — it is remarkable, I 
 say, that so little should be revealed concerning 
 the final destiny of man. The Future Life, as a 
 doctrine, occupies no prominent place in the re- 
 ligion of Moses and the Prophets. The immor- 
 tality of the soul is neither argued nor affirmed. 
 The resurrection of the body is kept in the 
 background, and not fully disclosed till towards 
 the end of the Old Testament dispensation. 
 Darkness rests upon the grave and upon all be- 
 yond it ; and the rewards and punishments of 
 the Future Life are either unknown, or appa- 
 rently exercise no practical influence on men's 
 conduct here. At first sight, and on a cursory 
 examination, there seems to be no advance 
 whatever upon the pagan systems, so far as this 
 article of faith is concerned. 
 
THE UOPE OF THE JEW. 73 
 
 In the Pentateuch the silence is profound. 
 Only a hint is dropt here and there, suggestive 
 of a belief, which is never explicitly stated. 
 The immediate derivation of man's life from 
 God,* the translation of Enoch, vA\o was taken 
 early from the world because he pleased God,t 
 the prayer of the dying Jacob,J the wish ex- 
 pressed by Balaam, — who however was a Gen- 
 tile, not a Jew, — that he might die the death of 
 the righteous,§ these are all, or nearly all, the 
 intimations, certainly neither very many nor 
 very clear, of hopes reaching beyond this world, 
 to be found in the Books of Moses. In later 
 Books, the recognition of another life grows 
 somewhat more distinct. There we find, for in- 
 stance, the belief that they who are separated by 
 death shall meet again in another life, and this 
 thought was David's consolation, when the 
 child he loved was 'taken from him.|| We find 
 even a belief, that it was possible for the dead 
 to revisit the earth, and hold converse with 
 those that they had known here, as in the ap- 
 pearance of Samuel to Saul.^T And so far there 
 would seem to be evidence, that the Jew, what- 
 ever other conceptions he might form of the un- 
 seen world, felt assured at least, that the soul 
 
 * Gen. ii. 7. t Gen. v. 24, comp. Ecclus. xliv. 16. 
 
 X Gen. xlix. 18. ^ Num. xxiii. 10. 
 
 II 2 Sam. xii. 23. IT I Sam. xxviii. 
 
74 nniORTALITY. 
 
 did not perish with the body, that there was 
 a true continuation of personal existence after 
 death. But nevertheless, in the near prospect 
 of death, the other world is even to faithful 
 spirits full of gloom and terror. The represen- 
 tations of Sheol, in the religious poetry of the 
 nation, are not very different from the represen- 
 tations of Hades among the earlier Greeks. 
 The same obscurity hangs over the dwelling of 
 the dead ; there is the same recoil from its 
 dreary darkness. Read such complaints as 
 these : 
 
 " What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to 
 the pit ? 
 Shall the dust give thanks to Thee ? 
 Shall it declare Thy truth ?"* 
 
 " In death there is no remembrance of thee, 
 
 In the unseen world who shall give Thee 
 thanks ?"t 
 
 " My life draweth nigh unto the unseen world, 
 I am counted with them that go down into the pit 
 
 Like the slain lying in the grave,... 
 Whom Thou rememberest no more, 
 
 But they are cut off from Thy hand."| 
 
 " Wilt Thou show wonders unto the dead 1 
 Shall the shades below arise and give Thee thanks ? 
 Shall Thy loving-kindness be told in the grave, 
 
 * Ps. XXX. 9. t Ps. vi. 5. X Ps. Ixxxviii. 3 — 5" 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW, 75 
 
 Thy faithfulness in destruction ? 
 Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark ? 
 
 And Thy righteousness in the land of forgctful- 
 ness ?' * 
 
 Or read again the elegy of Hezekiah, written 
 on his recovery from sickness : 
 
 " I said in the cutting off of my days, 
 
 I shall go to the gates of the unseen world... 
 
 I said, I shall not see Jah, 
 
 (Even) Jah in the land of the living 
 
 I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of 
 
 the world. 
 ****** 
 
 The unseen world cannot give Thee thanks. 
 
 Death cannot celebrate Thee : 
 
 They that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy 
 truth. 
 
 The living, the living, he shall give Thee thanks. 
 As I do this day ; 
 
 <'The) father to (the) children shall make known con- 
 cerning Thy truth." f 
 
 I do not insist here upon the language of the 
 Preacher asking in utter perplexity if there be 
 any difference between the death of man and 
 the death of the brute.f For his words are 
 manifestly the utterance, not of his higher, but 
 of his lower self. A worldly life, devotion to 
 material objects, the pursuit of selfish ends, had 
 
 * Ps. Ixxxviii. 10 — 12, t Is. xxxviii. lo, II, l8, 19. 
 
 X Eccl. iii. 21. 
 
76 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 engendered that cynical scepticism which, los- 
 ing its hold on God, loses also its hold on im- 
 mortality. And before the writer closes that 
 journal of his inner life, you see that faith has 
 vanquished doubt, and that in the light of that 
 triumph he can look beyond death and the 
 grave. But take only such passages as these I 
 have read, and what is the impression left upon 
 the mind ? Is not the picture dark as that in 
 Homer ? The dead are without sensation and 
 without hope, forgotten of God, and unable to 
 praise Him. It may be said, indeed, that in 
 such passages, sickness and pain and distress of 
 mind have wrought their natural effect, and that 
 the dark colors of the picture are the unhealthy 
 projection of a disturbed and melancholy mood. 
 Yet one feature at least is the same in another 
 song, where the feeling expressed is anything 
 but that of dejection or despondency. It is in a 
 liturgical Psalm, it is in a Psalm sung by the 
 whole congregation gathered before God in 
 Zion, it is in the midst of a loud strain of 
 triumph and thankfulness and exultation, that 
 we meet with such lines as these : 
 
 " The dead cannot praise Jah, 
 Neither all they that go down into silence,"* 
 
 ■^ Ps. cxv. 17. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. yj 
 
 It cannot be denied, then, that so far as any 
 distinct knozvledge of a Future Life went, the 
 Jew had no advantage over the Gentile. Like 
 the Gentile he thought that in some form, he 
 knew not what, his existence would be prolonged 
 after death. To him, as to the Gentile, Sheol 
 was a gloomy, sunless abode, and life in this 
 world more blessed than life in the next even 
 for the righteous. But there is one marked and 
 characteristic difference between the thought of 
 the Jew, and the thought of the Greek, as they 
 look upon death. Both chng to life, both recoil 
 from the awful shadow that sits at the portal of 
 the grave. But the Jew clings to life, not for 
 the sake of its pleasures or its gifts, but because 
 here he can know and love and praise God ; he 
 hates death, because there he is cut off from 
 God, forgotten of His hand. The Greek clings 
 to life, because it is life, because the sun is 
 bright, and there is much animal and sensible 
 enjoyment ; he hateS death, because with death 
 all his earthly pleasures are extinguished. 
 The thought of God is far from him, the thought 
 of this world only is in his heart. 
 
 With conceptions thus imperfect respecting 
 existence in the unseen world, we cannot be 
 surprised that the doctrine of a fiiULve retribiUion 
 is, at least during the earlier periods, but vague- 
 ly hinted at in the Old Testament Moreover, 
 
78 UnrORTALITY. 
 
 the promises of temporal prosperity for the 
 good, and the threat of punishment, swift and 
 visible in this world for the wicked, tended no 
 doubt to fix men's gaze on the present scene, 
 and to darken, if not absolutely to hide from 
 them, the future recompense. Hence the judg- 
 ment upon the wicked is not misery in hell, but 
 speedy extinction here. When the Psalmist ex- 
 claims in triumph, " The wicked shall be turned 
 into hell,"* — it is the unseen world, Sheol, not 
 the place of torment, Gehenna, • of which he 
 speaks, and what he anticipates is, not that the 
 wicked will be punished hereafter, but that they 
 will speedily come to an end here, and be cast 
 into the abode of darkness and forge'tfulness. 
 Even in a Psalm like the 49th, where the con- 
 trast is so striking between the rich in this 
 world, who in their folly live like the brutes, and 
 think to build for themselves an immortality 
 here, and the servant of God, sustaining his 
 faith in the hope of everlasting union with God, 
 there is nothing said of future punishment. 
 
 * Ps. ix. 17. Yet, owing to the ambiguity of our English 
 word "hell,'*' which, though now denoting commonly the 
 place of torment, originally meant nothing more than the sepa- 
 rate state of spirits, the hidden place, without reference to bliss 
 or woe, this text is usually quoted in our pulpits, as teaching the 
 future punishment of the wicked. I may be allowed to refer to 
 my Commentary for an exposition of this, and the other pas- 
 sages, quoted in this Lecture from the Psalms. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 79 
 
 " Like sheep they are gathered to the unseen world, 
 • Death is their shepherd : 
 
 And the upright have dominion over them in the 
 morning ; 
 And their beauty shall the unseen world consume, 
 That it have no more dwelling-place." 
 
 Whatever sense be attached to the morning — 
 whether the morning of deliverance for those 
 who have been sighing as it were in a night of 
 misery and suffering, crushed and trodden down 
 by their oppressors, or the morning of the resur- 
 rection, when the triumph of the righteous shall 
 be complete, when the tables shall be turned, 
 and they and not the wicked shall have 
 dominion, still defeat and darkness, not groans 
 and despair, are the portion of the unjust. It is 
 the same in the 73rd Psalm. The problem of 
 life which there weighed so heavily upon the 
 Psalmist's heart was this, that the constant 
 prosperity of the wicked, the constant suffering 
 of the righteous, seemed to impugn the very 
 righteousness of God. The facts of the world 
 were a glaring contradiction to His government. 
 It was this which perplexed the . Psalmist's 
 spirit, as he strove to reconcile those facts with 
 his conscience, and his conscience with his 
 faith. And when at last, tried and shaken, and 
 well nigh swept from his foothold by the waves 
 of doubt, he finds a shelter in the sanctuary of 
 
8o IMMORTALITY. 
 
 God from the wreck which threatened him, still 
 the light which is cast on the justice of God 
 falls rather on retribution in this life than on re- 
 tribution in the life to come. 
 
 '• Oh how suddenly are they destroyed as in a moment ; 
 They come to an end, they are cut off because of ter- 
 rors ; 
 As one despiseth a dream when he awaketh, 
 (So) Thou O Lord, when Thou arousest Thyself, de- 
 spisest their image." 
 
 The wicked perish in the very bosom of their 
 prosperity, their end is as sudden as it is fearful, 
 their hard, selfish, unloving life is gone, like a 
 hideous dream, which in our waking moments 
 we forget. No trace is left of that image, which 
 once seemed so fair and so proud. God has 
 poured His contempt upon it, and it has van- 
 ished from the earth. 
 
 Even in the magnificent song of 'triumph 
 which the prophet Isaiah raises over the King 
 of Babylon, where he pictures in language, the 
 poetic force and vividness of which have never 
 been surpassed, the descent of the overthrown 
 monarch into Hades, the judgment which falls 
 upon him belongs more to this life than to the 
 next : 
 
 " Hell [Sheol, the unseen world] is moved from beneath 
 for thee, 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW, 8 1 
 
 To meet thee at thy coming. 
 
 It stirreth up for thee the shades below, 
 
 All the mighty of the earth : 
 
 It maketh to arise from their thrones 
 
 All the kings of the nations. 
 
 All of them answer and say unto thee : 
 
 Thou also art become weak as we ! 
 
 Thou art made like unto us ! 
 
 Thy pomp is brought down to Sheol, 
 
 The music of thy harps. 
 
 Under thee the worm is spread, 
 
 And worms cover thee. 
 
 How hast thou fallen from heaven, 
 
 O Lucifer, son of the morning ! 
 
 How art thou cast down to the earth, 
 
 Thou that didst lord it over the nations !"* 
 
 I do not forget that this is the language of 
 poetry, and the language of poetry, it will be 
 said, is not to be pressed. But so far as we 
 catch here any glimpse into the unseen state, it 
 is a state very different from that which our 
 Christian belief is wont to portray, it is a state 
 in which even the externals of the present life 
 are in some measure at least prolonged. The 
 kings of the earth are still kings below, each 
 one sitting on his throne. They have the 
 memory of their former greatness, they triumph 
 in the fall of a proud and oppressive rival, who 
 comes to take his place among them, but who in 
 
 * Is. xiv. 9 — 12. 
 
82 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 that abode of darkness can exercise no sove- 
 reignty, and who shorn of his power can inspire 
 no terror. 
 
 I am not aware that there is a single passage 
 / in the Old Testament, which represents the un- 
 seen world as a place of punishment for the un- 
 godly. The final judgment is indeed announced 
 in clear terms by the prophet Daniel, but he is 
 speaking of retribution, not as following imme- 
 diately on the separation of the soul from the 
 body, but as following on the sentence pro- 
 nounced after the resurrection. And let me 
 say in passing, does not this fact, that so impene- 
 trable a cloud of darkness rests on the future 
 condition of the wicked, account, partly at least, 
 for much of that language which has so often 
 shocked sensitive minds, in which Jewish bards 
 and prophets cry out for vengeance, on proud 
 tyrants and faithless friends : 
 
 " Let death come hastily upon them, 
 Let them go down aUve into Sheol."* 
 
 " Let his days be few, 
 And let another take his office. "I 
 
 " The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth their ven- 
 geance. 
 He shall wash his footsteps in the blood of the 
 wicked ".'']: 
 
 * Ps. Iv. 15. t Ps. cix. 8. X Ps. Iviii. 10. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. S^ 
 
 May it not be pleaded in justification of those, 
 who, hating wickedness with all their hearts, 
 saw it great and prosperous in this world, and 
 knew not its terrible chastisement in the world 
 to come, that they longed to see God's 
 righteous judgment executed here, and hoped 
 themselves to be the instruments of His justice ? 
 Is it not exactly what we might expect ? If to 
 the saints of old, as to us, had been preached " a 
 worm that dieth not and a fire that is not 
 quenched," w^ould not some accents of sorrow, 
 or of intercession, have mingled with their in- 
 dignation ? Would no balm of pity have been 
 shed upon their verse, no prayer for forgiveness 
 have softened, or turned away those impreca- 
 tions, wdiich now are poured in a hot lava- 
 stream upon the head of the wicked ? Surely 
 had the eyes of the Hebrew Poet been opened 
 to see the terrors of the world to come, his 
 prayer would have been not, ' Blot them out of 
 Thy book,' but rather with Him who hung upon 
 the cross, * Father, forgive them, for they know 
 not what they do.'* 
 
 But although the next w^orld is itself shrouded \ 
 in darkness, and although there is no positive 
 revelation concerning future happiness for the 
 
 * I have entered more fully on this subject in the Introduc- 
 tion to my Commentary on the Psalms, Vol. I. p. Ixxiii. and in 
 a note on Vs. xxxv. 22. 
 
O.I. nnioiiTALiTr. 
 
 good, and future misery for the wicked, yet 
 Faith ever and anon asserts her prerogative, as 
 the evidence of things not seen, the confident 
 assurance of things hoped for. The hope of the 
 righteous is not altogether hidden from their 
 eyes, like the doom of the wicked.* 
 
 When the saint of God, in the midst of the 
 discouragements and sorrows of this life, looks 
 for refuge to God, he wins for himself bright, 
 though passing, glimpses of a happiness in store 
 for him beyond the grave. A risen Saviour has 
 not yet indeed taken the sting from death, or 
 robbed the grave of its victory, but the faith 
 which clings to God can rest assured, that God 
 will not forsake it, but will make the soul that 
 trusts in Him, partaker of His own immortality. 
 It was in this faith, that David resisted the 
 temptation which beset him, to forego his 
 heavenly hope for an earthly. The nations of 
 the world, by whom he was surrounded, were 
 distin2:uished in art and science,- and consDicu- 
 ous in all that could give lustre and strength to 
 empire. Wealth and commerce, luxury and 
 power, contributed to recommend and illustrate 
 the seductive idolatries of the vast and aggres- 
 sive kingdoms, by which the Syrian shepherds 
 were hemmed in. The god of this w^orld was 
 
 '^ See note on Ps. Ixxiii. i8. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 85 
 
 ready with his whisper, 'All these things will I 
 give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship 
 me.' And how was it that the fascination was 
 broken ? How was it that the Poet-king could 
 say with righteous scorn, 
 
 " Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer, 
 Neither take their names upon my lips "?* 
 
 It was because he had tasted a purer joy, a 
 holier pleasure. It was because he could say to 
 the eternal God, 
 
 " Thou art my Lord : 
 I have no good beyond Thee." 
 
 It was because he could claim for himself a 
 blessing like that of Levi, 
 
 " Jehovah Himself is my portion," 
 and triumphantly exclaim, 
 
 " I have set Jehovah always before me ; 
 Because He is at my right hand I shall not be 
 moved." 
 
 Could he dream for a moment, that death should 
 sever between him and his God ? In that hour 
 of resolve, and joyful self-consecration, and ar- 
 -^ dent cleaving of the soul to God, could it doubt 
 its own immortality } The life of God which 
 Vv^as its life, was its own sufficient and trium- 
 
 * Ps. xvi. 4. 
 
S6 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 phant witness. That life could never perish. 
 The breath of God was not breathed into man 
 in vain. It must impart even to the frail taber- 
 nacle, which it had helped to fashion, something 
 of its own eternity. Hope resting on God 
 made all the future its own : 
 
 *' Thou wilt make me know the path of Life, 
 Fulness of Joy in Thy Presence, 
 Pleasures at Thy right hand for evermore." 
 
 No philosophic reasoning comes to the aid of 
 the Hebrew, as he questions with himself con- 
 cerning a life hereafter. He can construct no 
 argument for the immateriality of the soul, he 
 can build up no plausible hypothesis, and find 
 no legends of his race which shall stay his 
 trembling heart in the hour of his dissolution. 
 He does not reason, ' I think ; therefore I am ;' 
 * I shall continue to think ; therefore I shall 
 continue to be.' He does not argue with him- 
 self, The soul is one and indivisible ; therefore it 
 cannot perish. He does not draw his hopes 
 from the constitution of man, from his memory, 
 his affections, his intellect, his sense of law and 
 duty. Even in face of the terrible problems of 
 life, and in sight of all the prosperous wrong- 
 doing, which was so great a trial to his constan- 
 cy, he does not escape from his perplexity by 
 any chain of reasoning, by any analogies that 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 87 
 
 Nature might suggest and philosophy confirm. 
 He does not infer, that, because the world is out 
 of joint, God's righteousness must have a larger 
 sphere of action, than this world and the short 
 years of man, and so conclude that there is a 
 life to come, in which the vindication of God's 
 moral government shall be complete. His is a 
 grander logic, for it is the logic of the heart. 
 His conclusions are reached, not in the schools, 
 but in the sanctuary of God. There, drawing 
 near to God, who is his Life, in penitence, iii 
 humility, in adoration, in faith, he can but won- 
 der that he should have so "pierced himself" 
 with the goads of doubt, that he should have 
 been like the beasts in his ignorance and folly.* 
 There, casting himself into the Everlasting 
 arms, he knows that these shall be beneath him, 
 though heart and flesh should fail. There, hold- 
 ing sweet converse with his Eternal Friend, he 
 is sure, that the God who has stooped to speak 
 to him, as a friend, will not suffer him to drop 
 into the abyss of annihilation. His life is no 
 passing phenomenon. He is not like the tree, 
 or the flower, or the bird, or the beast, creatures 
 of God's hand who know Him not, and do but 
 yield Him. the homage of a reasonless praise. 
 He knows God, he has spoken to God, he has 
 
 ^ Vs. Ixxiii. 21, 22. 
 
88 IMMORTALITY. 
 
 heard the voice of God in his heart. Tliis is no 
 ilkision, but the most blessed, as it is the most 
 certain, of all truths. Faith and love have won 
 their everlasting victory in those words, which 
 will for all time remain the noblest expression 
 of the soul pouring itself out towards God : 
 
 " But as for me — I am ahvays by Thee, 
 Thou hast holden me by my right hand. 
 Thou wilt guide me in Thy counsel, 
 And afterwards Thou wilt take me to glory. 
 Whom have I in heaven but Thee ? 
 And beside Thee, there is none upon earth in whom I 
 
 delight. 
 My flesh and my heart may fail, 
 But God is the rock of my heart and my portion for 
 
 ever."* 
 
 This great truth, then, of a continuity of ex- 
 istence is felt out, rather than reasoned out, by 
 the Jew. And hence we so often find that the 
 doctrine of Immortality is implied rather than 
 expressed, in tha Old Testament. We infer its 
 presence, where the language does not directly 
 convey it. When a Psalmist writes, 
 
 " Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days 
 of my life, 
 And I will dwell in the house of Jehovah for ever ;"f 
 
 v/e are certainly not justified (unless it be for 
 
 * Ps. Ixxiii. 23—26. t Ps. xxiii. 6. See Calvin, in loc. , 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 89 
 
 our own private edification) in interpreting his 
 words to mean, tliat lie expected to dwell for 
 ever in God's j^resence in heaven. But we are 
 justified in concluding from the very largeness 
 of the expression, that he is uttering a ho|3e and 
 a conviction, that the God, whose loving-kind- 
 ness he has tasted all his life long, will not suffer- 
 him to drop, like a withered leaf from the tree, 
 only to mingle with the dust beneath. Or again, 
 who that reads such words of bounding joy in 
 God, such intensity and greatness of affection, 
 pouring itself out upon God, as we find in the 
 63rd Psalm, 
 
 '* O God, Thou art my God, 
 My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh pineth for Thee, 
 For Thy loving-kindness is better than life ;" 
 
 — who that reads words such as these can per- 
 suade himself, that the affection thus centered 
 upon God could believe itself mocked, could for 
 a moment conceive, that the love of God, which 
 is the life of God, v/ould pass away like water or 
 an untimely birth ? The Love of God is Im- 
 mortality. So likewise, what is the meaning of 
 that sublime hymn, which, written by Moses in 
 the desert, is now emphatically the Christian's 
 funeral anthem .-* Is it only a wail over disap- 
 pointed hopes } Is it nothing but an exceeding 
 
90 niMORTALITY, 
 
 bitter cry over the transitoriness of human life ? 
 Does it sum only the years of our mortal pilgrim- 
 age, and shut out all beyond ? If so, then 
 whence the instinct of the Christian Church, 
 which bids us use it as Christians, strong in 
 hope, by the grave of those we love ? In those 
 words we discern the hope which rises above 
 this world. For what means the prayer, 
 
 "So teach us to rxumber our days, 
 That we may gather a heart of wisdom,"* 
 
 if that wisdom come to an end with the seventy 
 years of our pilgrimage ? Or why speak of the 
 eternal Jehovah, as " the dwelling-place " of man 
 " in all generations,"! if the hearts He has gath- 
 ered into that home drop from it and are no 
 more remembered ? No, whatever doubt and 
 darkness might rest upon the grave, however at 
 times the Jewish believer might shrink in vague 
 terror from death and the uncertainties beyond 
 death, yet he who could say, ' O God, thou art 
 my God,' had the witness within himself, that 
 his life could never perish, that neither Death 
 nor Hell could pluck him out of the hand of 
 God4 
 
 It may possibly have appeared to some minds, 
 
 * Ps. XC. 12. \ Ps. XC. I. 
 
 X In the very able Lectures of my immediate predecessor, 
 Mr. Pritchard, substantially the same view is taken of the Jew- 
 ish hope of immortality. See his Htdscan Lectures, pp. '^'^ — 35. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 9 1 
 
 that I have not given sufficient weight to more 
 direct testimony, expressive of the future hopes 
 of the saints of old. I cannot disguise my con- 
 viction that some passages, alleged in proof of 
 that hope, do not bear the full stress of the ar- 
 gument based upon them. In particular the 
 doctrine of a Resurrection, which, it must be re- 
 membered, is quite distinct from the belief in a 
 future existence, holds by no means a promi- 
 nent place in the Old Testament. It first ap- 
 pears distinctly in the Prophet Isaiah.* Ezekiel's 
 parable of a national resurrectionf may be taken 
 as evidence that the doctrine was not unknown 
 to him. Daniel expresses it in clear and unam- 
 biguous terms. if- But these are all the certain 
 witnesses, whose voice makes itself heard along 
 all the centuries of Old Testament Revelation. 
 The celebrated passage in the Book of Job, § 
 when once fairly rendered, and taken in connec- 
 tion with the general scope of the book, is seen 
 to have no bearing on the question. Our 
 English Version has so imprinted this sense 
 upon our minds, and the association of those 
 grand and impressive words with some of the 
 most solemn scenes of our earthly existence has 
 so consecrated them to us, as the utterance of 
 
 * ch. xxvi. 19. t ch. xxxvii. 
 
 X ch. xii. 2. § ch. xix. 23 — 27. 
 
92 nniORTALITY. 
 
 our Christian faith, that it requires some courage 
 to Hsten to any other interpretation. It is a 
 shock to us to be asked to give up the familiar 
 rendering. We shrink from tampering with it. 
 Yet that rendering is certainly false. There is 
 no allusion I believe either to a resurrection or 
 to a future existence. The two great Continen- 
 tal Scholars* who maintain a reference here to 
 a future life, do so only by substituting the 
 forced and unnatural and improbable rendering, 
 " zvithout my flesh I shall see God," for the sim- 
 ple and straightforward one, ^^ from my flesh 
 shall I see God." And most certainly if there 
 be any expression here of a hope reaching be- 
 yond this world, then there can be no doubt, I 
 think, that Job looks for a resurrection, not 
 merely for a future life. But on the other hand 
 I am quite unable to see how, even supposing 
 the words capable of such an interpretation, it 
 can be made to harmonize with the context, and 
 especially with the very next answer of Job to 
 his friends, where, contrasting the lot of men in 
 this Life, — one man "dying in full strength, be- 
 ing wholly at ease and quiet," and another " dy- 
 ing in the bitterness of his soul, and never 
 eating with pleasure " — he sums up their end 
 alike, 
 
 * Evvald and Renan. See more in the Appendix. 
 
THE ROPE OF THE JEVr. 93 
 
 "■ They shall lie down alike in the dust, 
 And the worm shall cover them ;" 
 
 never hinting at anything beyond. The close 
 of the Book, where Job is recompensed z/i this 
 life for all his losses and all his calamities, com- 
 ports best with the obvious meaning of his 
 words in the passage under consideration, that 
 he hopes in this life, in the body, in his flesh 
 which he now wears, to see God face to face, as 
 his righteous Avenger, maintaining his cause, 
 and putting his adversaries to confusion. It 
 was precisely because Job had no clear vision of 
 the life to come, that he was so oppressed with 
 the problem of God's moral government here. 
 It was precisely on that account, that it weighed 
 upon his heart, " heavy as lead and deep almost 
 as life." Had the sunrise of conviction once 
 flashed upon his mind, that his body laid in the 
 dust should be raised again to a glorious immor- 
 tality, in the presence of God his Redeemer, 
 could he have fallen back again immediately into 
 the tone of distress and perplexity, which con- 
 tinues to pervade his language t Was there any 
 need for God to appear for his rebuke } Must 
 not the drama have appropriately closed, with 
 this lofty recognition of Eternal Righteousness, 
 misunderstood here, manifesting itself in all its 
 integrity hereafter } 
 
 That view of the Old Testament revelation 
 
94 nUIORTALITV. 
 
 respecting a future state which I have endea- 
 vored to establish, is singularly confirmed by 
 the argument of our Lord as recorded by three 
 of the Evansrelists. He teaches us to find im- 
 mortality and a resurrection in the Old Testa- 
 ment, but He teaches us to find it in the spirit 
 rather than in the letter. He teaches us to look 
 for it, not as a dogma but as a life, not as a re- 
 velation, but as implied in and. underlying all 
 revelation. He refuted Sadducean scepticism 
 by an appeal to the writings of Moses, by an 
 appeal to those very writings, which to a super- 
 ficial observer seem to make almost an ostenta- 
 tion of reticence on the subject. And it is im- 
 portant to observe what is the exact nature of 
 His appeal. How does He frame His argu- 
 ment } He might have appealed to some pas- 
 sage, such as that in Isaiah, " Awake and sing, 
 ye that dwell in dust," or that in Daniel, " Many 
 that slee^D in the dust of the earth shall wake 
 and arise." But in the very fact that He omits 
 all reference to these more obvious passages. 
 He seems to imply, that there is but little of a 
 direct witness to this truth in the Old Test^i- 
 ment. If He had quoted these, the Sadducee 
 might have argued, that they were as nothing, a 
 mere speck, in the whole mass of Revelation, or 
 he might have ventured even to question the 
 authority of the Book of Daniel. But our Lord 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 95 
 
 leaves no door for such fencing with texts. He 
 does not attempt to hang so important a doc- 
 trine on one or two passages, which, it might be 
 alleged, stood alone in their bearing. His di- 
 vine philosophy goes far deeper ; it lays bare 
 the inmost heart and spirit of the Old Testa- 
 ment. He shows us how inevitably a Resurrec- 
 tion follows, from the very recognition of that 
 relation between God and man of which Moses 
 speaks. If the Eternal God has made men His 
 friends, if He has takeji them into covenant with 
 Himself, and declared to them His counsel, if 
 He has given them their names, singling out 
 His friends from the world, and vouchsafing in 
 infinite grace to call Himself their God, then 
 He does not mock them with fleeting hopes and 
 transitory promises". He does not bid them stay 
 themselves on Him, for threescore years and 
 ten, and then cast them into the abvss of anni- 
 hilation. Even a human father would not let 
 the day come, if he could help it, when his child 
 should cease to know and love him ; even a hu- 
 man friend would never cast from him the 
 friend, whose heart was bound up in his own. 
 Much less does the Eternal Father and the 
 Eternal Friend, — much less does He whose 
 name is Life and Love, suffer His children and 
 His friends to perish. God is not a man that 
 He should lie or change. His is an Everlasting 
 
96 IMMORTALITV. 
 
 Love. And because He calls the man His 
 friend, because He calls Himself the God of the 
 individual, singled out by name, therefore the 
 whole man must survive the shock of death. It 
 is not the spirit's immortality which alone is se- 
 cured. It is not a mere prolongation of exis- 
 tence, of which the pledge is given. The body 
 as well as the soul is God's. In the body. He 
 calls these men His children ; on the body. He 
 sets the seal of His covenant. And therefore, 
 though the flesh may turn to corruption, and 
 the worm may feed upon it, yet from their flesh 
 shall they see God, see Him not only in this 
 world, the Avenger of their cause, but see Him 
 in the world to come, the Judge who metes out 
 to them their recomj^ense, the Rewarder of them 
 who diligently seek Him. 
 
 Yes, a Resurrection is everywhere in the Old 
 Testament to him who can look beneath the 
 surface. It lurks in every word which expresses 
 a sense of personal relation to God. It breathes 
 in every prayer of faith. It is the life of every 
 hymn in vv^hich the soul lifts itself, on wings of 
 light and love, to the Throne of the Eternal. 
 Before you can expunge that doctrine from its 
 pages, you must expunge the name of every one 
 of the heroes of Faith, you must blot out the 
 burning words of Psalmists and Prophets, you 
 must deny the reality of every aspiration after 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEy\\ 97 
 
 truth and holiness and purity, you must assert 
 that God is the God of the dead not of the liv- 
 ing ; in a word, you must assert the empire of 
 universal death ; for " all who live, live unto 
 Him." 
 
 We see reason, then, to correct our first im- 
 pression. Though we meet in the Old Testa- 
 ment, for many centuries, with no express reve- 
 lation of a Future Life, though darkness seems 
 for the most part to rest upon the grave, yet the 
 hope of the faithful Jew is, after all, brighter and 
 truer than that of the wisest of the heathen ; for 
 though not kindled by direct jDromise, it res'ted 
 nevertheless on a known and manifested God. 
 And if we trace the history of Jewish belief be- 
 yond the Old Testament scriptures, through the 
 four hundred years which intervened between 
 the last of the Prophets and the Advent of 
 Christ, we shall see that this belief gains greatly 
 in distinctness of expression. Thus the Author 
 of The Wisdom of Solomon has portrayed, in 
 language full of truth and beauty, the solemn 
 retributions of eternity. He has drawn the 
 picture of the ungodly leading their lives of sel- 
 fish merriment, saying, "Come, let us enjoy the 
 good things of youth, let us crown ourselves 
 with rosebuds ere they be withered, and let no 
 flower of the spring pass by us ;" and justifying 
 their conduct by the plea that '' in the death of 
 
9 8 nniOE tality. 
 
 a man there is no remedy, neither was there any 
 man known to have returned from the grave." 
 And he rebukes them for their bhndness : 
 " Such things they did imagine and were de- 
 ceived, for their own wickedness hath bhnded 
 them. As for the mysteries of God, they knew 
 them not ; neither hoped they for the wages of 
 righteousness, nor discerned a reward for blame- 
 less souls. For God created man to be immoi^- 
 tal, and made hint to be an image of -His ozvn 
 eternity^* Then looking on the end of the 
 righteous he exclaims : " But the souls of the 
 righteous are in the hand of God, and there 
 shall no torment touch them. In the sight of 
 the unwise they seemed to die, and their depar- 
 ture is taken for misery, and their going from 
 us to be utter destruction ; but they are in 
 peace. For though they be punished in the 
 sight of men, yet is their hope full of Imuoktkli- 
 TY."f And again, " The righteous live for ever- 
 more ; their reward also is with the Lord, and 
 the care of them is with the Most High. 
 Therefore shall they receive a glorious king- 
 dom, and a beautiful crown from the Lord's 
 hand."J 
 
 It is in the sure hope that they shall attain to 
 "a better resurrection," that the Martyr-bro- 
 
 * Chap. ii. 21 — 23. t Chap. iii. 1—4. t Chap. v. 15 — 16. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 99 
 
 thers in The Maccabees refuse to accept the ty- 
 rant's mercy, proffered on the condition that they 
 shall deny their God. Thus with his last breath 
 does one of them declare his faith, " Thou like 
 a fury takest us out of this present life, but the 
 King of the world shall 7'aise tts tip, who have 
 died for His laws, unto everlasting life."'^ And 
 the heroic mother standing by, and looking with 
 undaunted spirit on the agonies of her sons, 
 exhorts them to a like courage and constancy, 
 saying, "Doubtless the Creator of the world, 
 who formed the generation of man, and found 
 out the beginning of all things, will also of His 
 own mercy give you breath and life again, as 
 ye now regard not your own selves for His laws' 
 
 sake."t 
 
 A hope thus clear and thus explicit seems al- 
 most to anticipate on this point the Christian 
 revelation. There is no longer any gloom, any 
 shrinking from death, even in its most terrible 
 forms. The future recompense and the resur- 
 rection from the dead are unquestioned articles 
 of the popular belief. 
 
 We have traced thus far the growth of be- 
 lief We have marked its several stages. 
 First, there is the belief (at least implied) in a 
 fnture existence, the continuance after death of 
 
 * 2 Mace. vii. 9. t lb. vor. 23. 
 
lOO nniORTALITY. 
 
 the personal life, though evidently this was held 
 amidst much uncertainty as to the nature of that 
 existence. We observe next, how the doctrine 
 oi"^ future retribution gradually took shape ; and 
 finally, how the doctrine of a Resurrectio^i be- 
 came at last an admitted article of the popular 
 Creed. And we have seen, further, that the 
 principal factor in this belief, thus gradually for- 
 cing itself into light, was not a distinct revelation, 
 but the living consciousness of the soul's rela- 
 tion to God. He who knew and loved God did 
 so, because he had the life of God, and therefore 
 had within himself the witness that he could not 
 perish. Hope, the hope of the future, was root- 
 ed in Faith and Love, and like these made eter- 
 nity its own. And so it was, as the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews teaches us, that the saints of old 
 " confessed that they were strangers and pil- 
 grims " here, and " desired a heavenly country, 
 and looked for a city which hath foundations 
 whose builder and Maker is God." 
 
 We might conclude here. But a question 
 arises out of this investigation into the nature 
 and growth of the Jewish belief which cannot be 
 altogether put aside. That there was in the re- 
 velation given to Moses a strange reticence on 
 this subject cannot be denied. Are we able to 
 account for it } Why was there this silence } 
 why v/as there only a gradual and partial disclo- 
 
THE UOPE OF THE JEW. lOI 
 
 sure, for many ages of Jewish life, on a subject 
 which is of so absorbing importance, which Hes 
 so near to the heart of man, which is so essen- 
 tial a part of all religion, and which did in fact 
 form a leading feature of every heathen system ? 
 One thing is perfectly clear, that Moses could 
 not have been ignorant of the truth. For Moses 
 was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, 
 and the Egyptians, as we have seen, went be- 
 yond all other nations in their assertion of per- 
 sonal immortality and a judgement after death. 
 His silence is not the silence of ignorance. Is 
 it the silence of a deliberate reserve, or how 
 shall we account for it ? The phenomenon is so 
 remarkable, that it has engaged the attention of 
 great thinkers in all ages of the Church. Au- 
 gustine and Chrysostom, Aquinas and Leibnitz, 
 Bossuet and Warburton have each attempted to 
 solve this problem, but they scarcely win from 
 us a partial assent. The very elaborate attempt 
 of a recent writer* to deal with the same diffi- 
 culty is anything but convincing. It is scarcely 
 possible to read it, without feeling with how 
 much satisfaction the contrary thesis would have 
 been maintained, had the language of Scripture 
 happened to be the other way. With what a 
 
 * Th. H. INIartin, L<^ Vic Future, suivant hi Raisoii ct S7ii-ja7ii 
 la Foi. 
 
102 nnwETALiTr. 
 
 tone of triumph would the Christian Apologist 
 have then appealed to such a revelation, as the 
 most convincing proof of the moral superiority 
 of the Jewish faith to that of the Gentile. But 
 though we may not be able wholly to explain the 
 phenomenon, some light falls upon it from two 
 considerations. 
 
 I. First let us rem.ember that God does not 
 always teach us as men would have Him teach. 
 There is no haste, no impatience, no crowding 
 of truth upon truth in His teaching.* His les- 
 sons are deliberate and orderly, and to us who 
 are always in a hurry may seem but slowly im- 
 parted. But He who works in Eternity and is 
 not cramped by time makes no haste in what He 
 does. One principle runs through all the Di- 
 vine Education. He speaks to us as we are able 
 to bear it, here a little, and there a little. Thus 
 He imprints His lessons upon our minds. 
 Thus He helps us to educate ourselves. Things 
 ra^Didly learnt are easily forgotten ; truths which 
 we attain to through discipline and struggle and 
 failure and disappointment, through much self- 
 questioning, and much self-denial, and much 
 earnest striving, are those which lay hold of us, 
 enter into us, form as it were the staple of our 
 
 * On this slowness in the Divine teaching, see Mr. Pritchard's 
 Hithcan Lectures. Lect. III. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE JEW. 1 03 
 
 character. They are those to which we cHng 
 most steadfastly, and which are most serviceable 
 to us in the long run. So it was with the truth 
 of the soul's immortality : the very struggles 
 through which God's saints had to pass to as- 
 sure themselves of the truth, may have been the 
 very reason, why the truth at last appeared to 
 the Jew, with a brightness, a distinctness, a pu- 
 rity, which it never possessed for the Gentile. 
 
 2. But we may, I think, see a Divine purpose 
 in this reticence.* God was teaching the 
 fathers of the Jewish Church the primary truth 
 on which all other truth was to rest, that He- 
 and nothing else was their sufficient portion. 
 " I am thy shield and thy exceeding great re- 
 ward," this was His great word to Abraham. It 
 was by this that Abraham lived. The whole 
 discipline of his life had this purpose in it, to 
 lead him to find the everlasting God, his 
 strength, his portion, his all. He was called 
 " the friend of God," and he who had God for 
 his friend could need, could have, nothing more. 
 On this fact Abraham's life was built, on this, 
 the lives of all his . true children. The Jews 
 were not merely designed to be witnesses to the 
 world of the Unity of God. They were this no 
 doubt, but they were far more. They were wit- 
 
 * See my Comvieiitary on the Psalms, Vol. i. pp. Ixxvi, Ixxvii. 
 
104 n£3I0RTALITY. 
 
 nesses to a better truth, that the Eternal God 
 loves men, and calls them His children and His 
 friends, and that men can be, and can know 
 themselves to be. His friends and His children. 
 It is of this truth that Psalmists and Prophets 
 are full. The poetry of the Hebrews, it has 
 been well said, is "5 poetry of friendship be- 
 tween God and man."* And it seems to have 
 been designed, that the truth of this Divine 
 communion should occupy so commanding a 
 position, that no other truth should be suffered, 
 as it were, to come into competition with it. 
 This was to stand alone in its grandeur, because 
 upon it man's life was to be built. We must 
 rest upon the broad foundation of faith, before 
 we can have the hope that maketh-not ashamed ; 
 and never can there be a sublimer heroism of 
 Faith than that, which, claiming no promise of 
 future recompense, goes down into the mystery 
 of Darkness, leaning only upon God. 
 
 * Herder. 
 
LECTURE IV. ' 
 
 THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN. 
 John XL 25, 26 and XIV. 19. 
 
 . . . / am the Resiin-ection and the Life : Jie that believeth 
 in Me, though he tvej-e dead, yet shall he live : and 
 whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall fiever die. 
 
 . . . Because I live, ye shall live also. 
 
 We have watched hitherto the instinct of the 
 human heart, struggHng to assert, in the face of 
 death and corruption, its hope of immortality. 
 We have seen how deep-rooted the conviction 
 of another hfe is, and at the same time, how un- 
 able Reason is to attain to certainty respecting 
 it. On the one hand, man craves and yearns 
 for immortality : on the other hand, a future life 
 seems to sliiD away from him in proportion as he 
 strives to satisfy himself of its reality. Reason 
 and Conscience are alike witnesses to the truth, 
 but they can neither create the truth, nor dis- 
 cover the truth, nor prove the truth. Only 
 v/hen the truth comes, can they recognize it and 
 embrace it as the truth. 
 
I O 6 niMOR TALITT. 
 
 Now the Revelation of God addresses itself to 
 us, as having needs and instincts of the heart 
 and conscience, and it satisfies those needs and 
 confirms those instincts. Strictly speaking, it 
 does not bring before us something strange, 
 novel, unheard of, something far removed from 
 our nature and our modes of thought, and bid 
 us accept it with a wondering faith, because it 
 comes from above. No, — beyond all things else, 
 God's revelation of Himself to us, is also a reve- 
 lation to us of ourselves. It is a discerner of the 
 thoughts and intents of the heart, not only be- 
 cause it lays all " naked and opened " before 
 God, but because it discovers to ourselves the 
 depth and the meaning of our own hearts, their 
 motives, their impulses, their yearnings, their 
 inmost being. Man cannot understand himself; 
 he cannot express rightly his own thoughts ; 
 when he essays to do so, he speaks with lisping 
 tongue, like an infant ; and, like an infant, he 
 struggles for the word which shall express his 
 meaning, which shall utter and convey his 
 thoughts. And Christ, the Eternal Word, gives 
 him the word he needs, interprets his heart, and 
 helps him to interpret it to himself. No revela- 
 tion can be a true revelation, which does not 
 thus explain to us our inmost selves, which does 
 not break the fetters that limit and circumscribe 
 our thought and knowledge, which does not set 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN. 107 
 
 free our stammering tongues, teaching us to 
 speak plainly. That which gives it its right and 
 its power over us is, that coming from without, 
 it seems to be the voice of all that is purest 
 within ; that the truth which it declares is in 
 fact our own truth, the truth v/hich we are long- 
 ing to find and to utter, the truth which we 
 need. It was this ' divine word ' for which a 
 Socrates was seeking, that upon it, as ' a securer 
 vessel,' he might make his journey without peril, 
 and for lack of which, he was obliged to content 
 himself with ' the best of human words,' trusting 
 to it, as to a raft, for the voyage of life. It was 
 this ^divine word ' which a Paul had found, when 
 he wrote, " for we knozu that if the earthly house 
 of our tabernacle were dissolved, we have a 
 building of God, a house not made with hands, 
 eternal in the heavens."* We listen to Socrates, 
 in his prison at Athens, ere yet the hour is come 
 when he must drink the hemlock, discoursing 
 with calm dignity of death and immortality, but 
 confessing his uncertainty as to what shall be 
 hereafter, and solacing himself with the thought, 
 that at the worst death is but a dreamless sleep. 
 We turn to the letter which Paul wrote, from 
 his prison at Rome, to his Philippian friends, 
 and there is no shadow of doubt or uncertainty 
 
 ^ 2 Cor. V. 1. 
 
I08 UDIORTALITY. 
 
 here : every word is lit up with the radiance of 
 joy and hope, as he contemplates the approach 
 of death — " I have a desire to depart and to be 
 with Christ, which is far better ;" '' to me to live 
 is Christ, and to die is gain." 
 
 It is impossible to read such words, without 
 feeling, that, to the Apostle Paul, Christ Jesus 
 was no phantom of the imagination, but a true 
 and living person. It is plain, moreover, that it 
 was in consequence of his own conscious rela- 
 tion to Christ, that he had so calm and so sure a 
 hope for the future. That hope rested, he as- 
 serts again and again, upon the Resurrection of 
 Christ, as an historical fact to which he could 
 appeal, and upon the risen life of Christ, as an 
 experienced fact, of which he had the witness in 
 himself St. Paul must have had his doubts and 
 his perplexities like other men ; one whose heart 
 was capable of such deep tenderness and such 
 deep sadness as his, could never have escaped 
 from them altogether. Yet it is not by any ar- 
 guments, except such as were based on the Re- 
 surrection of Christ, that he seeks to remove 
 doubts, and to plant in other hearts the hope 
 which had given courage to his ov/n. St. Paul, 
 trained in the school of the Pharisees, had been 
 taught from his earliest years to accept the re- 
 surrection, as an article of religious belief; yet 
 he never falls back on that teaching as the 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHIUSTIAX. 1 09 
 
 ground of his hope. In Christ alone did he 
 find " the rock of his heart, and his portion for 
 ever." It was because Christ Hved, that he lived. 
 Christ was his life here ; Christ was in him, the 
 hope of glory hereafter. It was this certain as- 
 surance of a risen Christ, this conscious relation 
 to a risen Lord, which filled him with such con- 
 fidence and exultation in the prospect of death, 
 which made him even " desire to depart," that ];c 
 might " for ever be with the Lord." And here, 
 too, has been the secret and the strength of all 
 Christian hope, from the Apostle's days to our 
 own. It rests upon this double fact, the exter- 
 nal fact of the Resurrection of Jesus, and the 
 internal fact of a present participation in that 
 risen life. Hence it is that Christian hope de- 
 rives the confident certainty, by which it is dis- 
 tinguished from all other hope whatsoever. 
 
 Now this is the point upon which I am 
 anxious to insist. : I am anxious to put before 
 you — or rather, let me say, to indicate, to sug- 
 gest, briefly and imperfectly though it must be, 
 the outlines of a philosophy of Christian hope. 
 Man and the world are alike, in their very con- 
 stitution, prophets of immortality. Man puts 
 away from his lips with loathing the cup of anni- 
 hilation which you offer him, as the anodyne of 
 his misery. But where shall he find the ambro- 
 sia of immortality "i How shall he be quite sure 
 
no niMORTALITT. 
 
 of — not desire merely, nor tremblingly expect, 
 nor doubtfully anticipate or dread, a life beyond 
 this life — how shall he be sin^e, that Death has 
 no power to destroy him ; but that he, the same 
 person, the same in his memory, in his thoughts, 
 in his affections, in his will, shall continue, 
 knowing himself to be himself, and perpetuating 
 his own individual existence beyond the grave ? 
 Christianity answers by two facts : 
 
 I. First by the Resurrection of Christ. 
 
 II. And next by the Life of Christ communi- 
 cated to us. 
 
 I. First, by the Resurrection of Christ. 
 Christian hope differs emphatically from all 
 other hope in this, that it rests, neither upon any 
 instinct of the human heart, nor upon any infe- 
 rence from human reasoning, nor even upon a 
 promise sent from heaven to earth, — and capa- 
 ble, as all words are, of a variety of interpreta- 
 tion — but upon a fact, upon a Person. One is 
 set before us, who born into this world, as we 
 ourselves are, and living here a chequered human 
 life, in no way removed from our common lot, 
 bearing upon it the unmistakable impress of hu- 
 man thoughts and feelings, has in that human 
 form achieved the victory over death. It is a 
 human history we are reading, when we read the 
 history of Christ. We can follow it step by 
 step, a series of facts, apart from any theory 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAX. Ill 
 
 we may form of it, or from any coloring with 
 which imagination may invest it. If a future Hfe 
 had merely been announced, we might have built 
 upon the announcement what hopes and what 
 hypotheses we pleased. But here we see One 
 made like unto us, in all points tempted like as 
 we are, united to us in the fellowship of our trial 
 and suffering and death, rising again from the 
 dead and taking with Him the nature which He 
 wears, into the very presence of the Majesty on 
 high. Hence we have the visible pledge and the 
 type of our own resurrection. 
 
 It is indeed quite conceivable, that such a 
 spectacle might not be sufficient of itself to as- 
 sure us of our own resurrection to life. We 
 might argue, and on reasonable grounds, that 
 such a resurrection, after all, was not a type and 
 a prophecy, but an exception to a universal law. 
 The very perfection of our Lord's human cha- 
 racter might seem to merit some exclusive dis- 
 tinction. The cases, it might be said, are not 
 really parallel. That life of spotless beauty 
 stands alone in the world's history. It may well 
 be crowned with glory. But why should the 
 crown wherewith God has crowned that perfect 
 life, be placed on the head of those who, if they 
 strive at all to lift themselves towards heaven, 
 strive with poor, feeble, broken efforts, which 
 seem to end in nothing but disappointment ? 
 
1 1 3 nniOE TA LITT. 
 
 How shall we, born in sin and all our life tainted 
 with corruption, gather from Christ's resurrec- 
 tion any hope, since assuredly we have no claim 
 to His reward ? Most certainly, if Jesus Christ 
 were only man, this argument would remain in all 
 its force. The resurrection of one perfect man 
 could be no valid ground for expecting the re- 
 surrection of millions of beings imperfect as 
 ourselves. But the Incarnation of Jesus gives 
 its true and proper significance to His Resurrec- 
 tion. It is no longer a unit of the human race, 
 v^ho has been singled out for special favor. It 
 is no longer a solitary individual, having no 
 other relation to the race than this, that like 
 them he has flesh and blood. It is One who, as 
 equal with the Eternal Father, has the power, as 
 He has the right, to take up the manhood into 
 God. The Divine Word did not unite Himself 
 to a man. He was " made flesh." He became 
 man. He took our na.ture, and therefore in all 
 that He does and is, our nature has a share. 
 He took it in its weakness, that He might re- 
 deem, purify, exalt it. He took it in its liability 
 to death, that in it He might vanquish death, 
 and set free those, " who through the fear of 
 death, were all their life-time subject to bond- 
 age." By this His union of the human nature 
 with the Divine, He became the Second Head 
 of our race, and therefore in the truest and deep- 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHEISTTAX. 1 13 
 
 est sense its Redeemer. For he did not stand 
 aloof from us to save us ; He did not stretch out 
 His hand from heaven to pluck us from the jaws 
 of hell ; He did not come as a conqueror to 
 break our chains ; but as a friend He placed 
 Himself in our prison house, and refused not to 
 share our bondage. All that the First Adam 
 had brought upon us of ignominy, degradation, 
 and death, the Second Adam took upon Him- 
 self, and by taking it, He put it for ever awa}^ 
 Sin had made human nature corrupt and foul, 
 and the Sinless Man cleansed it from the awful 
 taint. Death had made man his prey and set 
 up, as it seemed, a Universal Empire, and the 
 human Lord of Life broke in jDieces that dread 
 dominion. He did not merely reverse the sen- 
 tence of death, by an arbitrary annulling of it, 
 but He did so by the actual victory of Life over 
 Death, in the same nature v/hich had become 
 subject to Death. The Life of God in man van- 
 quished Death : it was impossible that that life 
 could be holden of Death. The First Adam was 
 made " a living soul," and therefore could only 
 transmit to his posterity the natural life, tainted 
 with sin and containing in it the seed of death. 
 The Second Adam was " a quickening spirit," 
 having life in Himself, and of power to impart 
 that life to others : because the First Adam was 
 
1 1 4 niMOR TA LITY. 
 
 "of the earth * earthy ;" the Second Adam was 
 " the Lord from heaven." 
 
 The Resurrection, then, of Christ Jesus, both 
 God and Man, is to us the pattern and the sure 
 pledge of our own resurrection, because He is 
 inseparably united to us as the Second Head of 
 our race. 
 
 n. But again, Christianity establishes our 
 hopes, not only by pointing to an outward fact, 
 but by the experience of an inward fact, the 
 communication of the life of Christ to all who 
 believe in Him. Jesus Christ is the Resurrec- 
 tion because He is the Life, and He imparts that 
 life to us, " Because I live, ye shall live also." 
 There is a sense in which it may almost be said, 
 that the resurrection is begun here, because the 
 germ of it is to be found in every renewed and 
 sanctified nature. A power has been put forth 
 upon the man, which must issue in his final and 
 complete glorification. A life has been begun, 
 which in its very nature can never end, because 
 it is the life of God Himself. The resurrection 
 to life, though it is sometimes described as a 
 gift, is also to be regarded as the natural and 
 necessary development of the work of grace. 
 Both truths are stated by our Lord in His dis- 
 course with the Jews, recorded in the 5th chap- 
 ter of St. John's gospel : " Verily, verily I say 
 unto you. He that heareth my word and be- 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CIIRISTIAX. I T 5 
 
 lieveth on Him that sent me. hath cverlastins^ 
 life, and shall not come into condemnation, but 
 is passed from death iinto life. Verily, verily I 
 say unto you. The hour is coming and now is, 
 when the dead shall hear the voiee of the Son of 
 God ; and they that hear shall live. For as the 
 Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to 
 the Son to have life in Himself, and hath given 
 Him authority to execute judgment also, because 
 He is the Son of Man." Here, as in so many other 
 places of the New Testament, we are taught that 
 eternal life is not merely to be looked for beyond 
 the grave, but is a present reality. There is a 
 quickening of the spirit to newness of life here, 
 as well as a quickening of the body hereafter. 
 Of this twofold life, Christ is the saurce 
 Christ gives eternal life to all who believe in 
 Him ; Christ raises the dead : and He does both 
 the one and the other, by virtue of that Divine 
 life which He receives from the Father and yet 
 has in Himself,* of which He is at once the Au- 
 thor and the Giver. It was to give this life that 
 He came into the world : " I am come that they 
 might have life, and that they might have it 
 more abundantly."! It is from Him that this 
 life is derived ; it is only by communion with 
 
 * John V. 26 ; comp. vi. 57. t John x. 17. 
 
lib nnionTALiTr. 
 
 Him that this life can be sustained. So he de- 
 clares : " I am the living bread which came down 
 from heaven : if any man eat of this bread, he 
 shall live for ever."* And again : " Except ye 
 eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His 
 blood, ^e have no life in yoiL. Whoso eateth my 
 flesh and drinketh my blood Jiath eternal life ; 
 and / will 7'aise him np at the last dayT^ . Here 
 likewise there is a reiteration of the same truths ; 
 here there is the same intimate connection be- 
 tween the present gift of eternal life, the present 
 partaking of Christ, and the future resurrection 
 to glory. You cannot separate these things. 
 That which is spiritual is in its very nature eter- 
 nal. Death is but as the episode of a sleep ; it 
 has no power to touch the heart of that life 
 which is "hid with Christ in God." That life 
 given here in the body imparts to the body a 
 share in its triumph over death, is the seal and 
 the pledge, that even though the body fall into 
 dust, it shall be raised again from the dust, in- 
 corruptible. So essential, indeed, is this connec- 
 tion between the life eternal and the resurrec- 
 tion of the body, that it is almost the only view 
 (Of the resurrection which is presented to us in 
 Scripture. There are, I believe, but two pas- 
 sages in the New Testament, in which the re- 
 
 " J^J'-^ vi. 51. t John vi. 53, 54. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRIST! AX. . llj 
 
 surrection of the wicked is so much as men- 
 tioned ; once by our Lord, when he speaks of a 
 resurrection of damnation, to which they that 
 have done evil shall come forth from their 
 graves f and once by St. Paul, when he ac- 
 knowledges, as a truth common to himself with 
 his Jewish opponents, a resurrection both of the 
 just and the unjust.f But with these excep- 
 tions, the other view of the Resurrection is ex- 
 clusively presented ; it is invariably spoken of as 
 the fruit and result of a spiritual life, of which 
 Christ is the fountain and source. The one, as 
 it were, by a moral and spiritual necessity, im- 
 plies the other. " Even the universal resurrec- 
 tion," it has been truly said, " shall be but the 
 natural development of that which now works in 
 the children of God." J 
 
 Sometimes the same lofty and mysterious 
 truth is presented to us under another aspect ; 
 and the Resurrection is associated with the in- 
 dwelling in our hearts of a Divine Person. 
 Thus, for instance, St. Pa.ul speaks of Christ as 
 "our Life," as "living in us," as "in us the hope 
 of glory." And again, he says, " If the Spirit of 
 Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in 
 you, He that raised up Christ from the dead 
 shall quicken your mortal bodies also on account 
 
 * John V. 29. t Acts xxiv. 15. 
 
 t Archer Butler. 
 
1 1 8 nnioji tality. 
 
 of His Spirit that dwelleth in you." * The Re- 
 surrection follows from such inhabitation : those 
 bodies, in which He has vouchsafed to make His 
 tabernacle, are not destined merely to be the 
 prey of the worm and to be left in corruption. I 
 know it may be said, that to speak of such a Di- 
 vine life and such a Divine indwelling is mysti- 
 cism. It may be set down as a pious sentiment, 
 or the dream of a disordered imagination. Yet 
 a heathen f will rebuke the hasty speech and the 
 shallow thought, which deny- that man's heart 
 can be the chosen abode of a heavenly visitant, 
 and will tell us, that " there dwells in us a Holy 
 Spirit, who keeps watch over our thoughts and 
 actions." And surely unless we are prepared to 
 deny the possibility of so high and blessed a gift 
 of grace, unless we are prepared to maintain 
 that the noblest and purest of our race, the men 
 of the loftiest aims and holiest lives, have been 
 the victims of a mere delusion, we must admit 
 the reasonableness of the scheme, which con- 
 nects the life here with the life hereafter ; we 
 must admit the force of the conclusion, that the 
 body, which God has deigned to sanctify, shall be 
 raised again to a glorious immortality. If it be 
 true, that Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word of the 
 Father, has as the fruit of His own Death and 
 
 * Ro:n. viii. 1 1. t Seneca. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHFIST/AX. II9 
 
 Resurrection sent the Holy Ghost, to dwell in 
 our hearts and to make our bodies His temple, 
 then that Divine visitant sheds His sanctifying 
 influences upon the whole man. Every member 
 of the body is consecrated to the service of the 
 most High God. The eye, the ear, the hands, 
 the feet, all have been baptized with the Divine 
 baptism. " Holiness to the Lord " is written 
 even on the outermost edge of the garment of 
 the flesh. Not only is the heart filled with joy 
 and peace, with meekness and gentleness, with 
 faith and hope and love, but the body in all its 
 appetites and desires is governed and sanctified 
 by the same holy Presence. Those imperious 
 lusts, those ungovernable passions, which na- 
 turally hold the dominion of the body, till the 
 flesh imposes its thraldom upon the spirit, and 
 the soul itself, made the slave of lust, becomes 
 transubstantiated into flesh,* are not crushed and 
 extirpated by the crushing and extirpating of the 
 body, but are brought into obedience to the law 
 of the Spirit of Life. The body as well as the 
 spirit is holy. One part of our nature is not left 
 to curse and barrenness whilst the dew of hea- 
 ven falls richly upon the other. When St. Paul 
 exhorts the Colossians, as partakers of a spiri- 
 tual resurrection together with Christ, to " mind 
 
 * Anima victa libidine fit caro. — Au£Tustinc. 
 
I 2 O IJLUOE TA LITY. 
 
 the things above," connecting the exhortation 
 with the thought of Christ's appearing, and the 
 future glory of the Christian, he immediately 
 adds : " Deaden therefore your members which 
 are upon the earth ;" * and he proceeds to enu- 
 merate sins of the flesh, sins for which the body 
 in its members and organs furnishes the instru- 
 .ments. And when writing to the Romans, in 
 the passage already quoted, he speaks of the re- 
 surrection, as effected on account of the indwell- 
 ing of the Spirit, he subjoins the exhortation : 
 " Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the 
 flesh to live after the flesh. For if ye live after 
 the flesh, ye shall die : but if ye through the 
 Spirit do deaden the deeds of the body ye shall 
 live." t The body is to be reverenced and sanc- 
 tified, because the Spirit of God dwells in it, and 
 because by His mighty power working in it, it 
 shall be raised from death. Thus, then, accord- 
 ing to the Christian scheme, our hope is doubly 
 assured. It is assured not only by the Resur- 
 rection of Christ as an outward fact : it is as- 
 sured by the gift of eternal life, by the indwelling 
 of Christ and of His Spirit in our hearts, there 
 reigning and ruling, sanctifying the whole man ; 
 not purifying the spirit only, but shedding a di- 
 vine unction upon the body, and so giving the 
 
 * Coloss. iii. I — 10. t Rom. viii. 12, n.. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAX. 121 
 
 pledge and the foretaste not only of immortality, 
 but of a Resurrection to life and glory. 
 
 Such a hope, consistent in itself, and satisfy- 
 ing the deepest needs of our nature, essential- 
 ly differs from and transcends all pre-Christian 
 hope. 
 
 What was the hope of the best and wisest of 
 pagan philosophers ? At most, a bare hope of • 
 Immortality, a bare hope of personal continu- 
 ance after death, in some vague and shadowy 
 form. But Christ does not preach to us Immor- 
 tality, He does not promise us merely an eterni- 
 ty of individual existence ; He gives us now the 
 life w^hich cannot die. He gives it to us in the 
 body, that the body may be consecrated to God. 
 Nay more, God has not only come to tabernacle 
 with us in human flesh, but He dwells in 7is, He 
 is one with us, His Life is ours. Our souls and 
 our bodies are His, filled and pervaded with His 
 Life, and therefore can never perish. 
 
 What was the hope of the Jew "^ Kindling 
 with triumph and ecstasy, as it rose above the 
 world and time and death, and laid its hand upon 
 God, it won for itself the conviction, that He 
 who was the Life of His children and the Rock 
 of their hearts, would also be their portion for 
 ever. But the Jew had still the horror of Death 
 unvanquished, of the grave from which none had 
 ever returned. Whereas the Christian believer 
 
122 nniORTALITT. 
 
 is partaker of a life which he not only knows to 
 be the Life of God, but the Life of God which iji 
 human flesh has overcome death, and therefore 
 the sure pledge that he himself also shall over- 
 come death. It is the same Life ; it must there- 
 fore win the same victory. Not only is it true, 
 " He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, 
 yet shall he live," but it is also true — and of this 
 he has the witness in himself — " Whosoever 
 liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die." 
 Death is abolished. The Life of which he has 
 been made partaker is one over which Death has 
 no power, for it is the Life of Him who says : 
 " Because I live, ye shall live also." 
 
 But again, the Christian doctrine of the Re- 
 surrection of the Body is not only self-consistent, 
 it commends itself to us as in perfect harmony 
 with the observed facts of our nature. For all 
 experience shows us how close and intimate is 
 the union between the soul and the body. It is 
 quite true that, so far as our observation extends, 
 the material organism is destroyed by death. It 
 may be very difficult to frame any probable hy- 
 pothesis for the reconstitution of the body, after 
 it has turned to corruption. And yet as by an 
 imperious necessity, the body enters into all our 
 conceptions of another life : we would not " be 
 unclothed but clothed upon." And this is not 
 exclusively a Christian sentiment. In spite of 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN. I 23 
 
 the famous saying of Plotinus, who thanked God 
 ' that he was not tied to an immortal body ' — a 
 saying which doubtless is expressive of a widely 
 prevailing phase of ancient philosophic thought 
 — a natural instinct is on the side of the Chris- 
 tian revelation. Is it not difficult even to con- 
 ceive of the spirit, as not merely continuing to 
 exist apart from the body, — that is a conception 
 which is certainly possible — but as continuing 
 to live, and continuing to act, in the true sense 
 of the word, apart from all organism whatever ? 
 Have we not seen, how in every attempt to pic- 
 ture to himself a future world, and the employ- 
 ments of the future world, man involuntarily 
 gives some shape, some form, in a word some 
 body, to the disembodied spirit ? And is not 
 this necessary ? Does not all thought become 
 action only through the instrumentality of the 
 body ? Does not the body act upon the mind, 
 as v^^ell as the mind upon the body ? Does not 
 the body express, in its very outlines, the har- 
 mony or the disharmony, the beauty or the ugli- 
 ness, of the unseen dweller within ? Are not 
 the features stamped with the expression of the 
 care and the sorrow, the passion and the unrest, 
 the fierceness and the hate that are working 
 within, or with the peace, the serenity, the deep 
 calm, as of the infinite depth of heaven itself, 
 which the soul thus reflects as in a mirror? 
 
124 nniORTALITY. 
 
 How vivid, how startling often is the expression ! 
 What a revelation there of the inner man ! 
 How often even after the soul has fled, there re- 
 mains upon the cold features of the corpse, the 
 living impress of that soul, as if it disputed the 
 empire of death. Is it not almost as if the soul 
 had but taken flight for a moment, and the body 
 were waiting for the return of its tenant ? 
 'Never can one who has witnessed this forget it. 
 In circumstances favorable to the preservation 
 of the body, Death has no power to rob it of this 
 witness to its immortality. Who that has ever 
 seen that wonderful death-group in the dead- 
 house of the Hospice of the St. Bernard has iiot 
 felt fascinated and appalled by this triumph of 
 life in death .'* In a corner of that dark chamber 
 are to be seen a mother and her child. Her eye 
 is turned to Heaven in supplication, and agony 
 is written in every feature as she strains her 
 child to her bosom, and prays to God for mercy 
 and succor. It v/as thus she sank in the blind- 
 ing snow, it was thus she died. Years have 
 passed since then ; yet the thought, the agony, 
 the prayer of that last moment, are written on 
 her face, never to be obliterated till the form 
 shall crumble, and return to its dust, and perish. 
 Such a spectacle gives us a vivid conception of 
 the imperishable connection between rriind and 
 body. It helps us to understand how. possible it 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN. 125 
 
 is— may we not say how natural it is? — that in 
 the world to come, the soul should resume its 
 ancient fellowship with the body. Would not 
 this indeed be almost a logical inference from the 
 belief, that in the other world we our proper 
 selves shall still continue ? Human beings con- 
 sist of body as well as soul. The continuance 
 of human beings implies the continuance of body 
 as well as of soul. Only as we anticipate the 
 enlargement and perfection of the powers of the 
 soul, so we may reasonably anticipate the per- 
 fecting and the exaltation of the body. In the 
 language of the Apostle, " It is sown in corrup- 
 tion, it is raised in incorruption ; it is sown in 
 weakness, it is raised in power ; it is sown a na- 
 tural body, it is raised a spiritual body." 
 
 The Christian Doctrine of a Future Life, then, 
 it may be said, is in conformity with our nature, 
 and meets and satisfies those yearnings which 
 are in themselves a witness to our immortality. 
 It regards the whole of man's compound nature. 
 It introduces no dissonance, it does not honor 
 one part of our being, to the neglect or degrada- 
 tion of the other. The Life of which it speaks 
 is a life of the body as well as of the spirit, a life 
 the form and pledge of which are given in the 
 Resurrection of Christ, a life which is actually 
 communicated to us, by a true and vital union 
 with Him ' *^ ]Pecause I live, ye shall live also." 
 
126 niMORTALITT. 
 
 I must pass by many topics of interest which 
 rightfully belong to my subject ; for time presses. 
 In particular I can say nothing now of future re- 
 wards and punishments. 
 
 But hastening on I must still glance briefly, 
 before I conclude, at some of tLose speculative 
 difficulties which beset the doctrine of the Re- 
 surrection of the body. And I do so, because I 
 know from experience, what a real stumbling- 
 block they are to minds by no means dull or un- 
 instructed. 
 
 " Some man may say, How are the dead raised 
 up, and with what body do they come r The 
 question put in St. Paul's day is still frequently 
 repeated in our own. Hdw can the same body 
 which falls into dust be raised again, to become 
 anew the tabernacle of the immortal spirit } 
 The particles of which it is composed may be 
 scattered to the four winds, they may assume 
 new forms, they may be made to contribute to 
 the formation of other beings — of plants, of ani- 
 mals, of men. How can each several particle be 
 disentangled, how shall each be brought together 
 again to constitute the same body which was dis- 
 solved at death "^ Now we presume to put no 
 limits upon the Almighty power of God. We do 
 not doubt that amid all the ceaseless infinite 
 fluctuations of the material particles His eye 
 could trace each grain of dust, and His hand col- 
 
TUB HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN. 1 27 
 
 lect it, and bring it back to reconstitute the body. 
 But we contend that any such process is as un- 
 necessary as it is improbable. We maintain 
 that the same body which has been laid in the 
 grave may be raised at the last day ; though not 
 one single material particle, which went to con- 
 stitute the one body, shall be found in the other. 
 For what is it that is necessary to the identity 
 of the body .'* The identity of the body does not 
 depend on the identity of the material particles 
 of which it is composed. These are in a state 
 of perpetual flux. The body of our childhood is 
 not the body of our youth, nor the body of our 
 youth that of our manhood, nor the body of our 
 manhood that of our old age. Every particle 
 has changed, and yet it is the same body : the 
 person to whom it belongs still continues the same 
 person. If you insist upon it that every particle 
 of matter of which my body is built must be 
 brought together to form my new resurrection- 
 body, then I ask, What body during this present 
 life is my true body } Is it the body of my child- 
 hood, or of my youth, or of my old age .^ The 
 body in which I die is no more truly mine, than 
 the body with which I came into 'the world. 
 Both are mine, both are in some sense the same/ 
 and yet they have not a single material particle 
 in common. What possible reason is there then 
 for contending, that the body which is laid in 
 
128 UniORTALITT. 
 
 the grave, must be brought together again, par- 
 ticle for particle, at the resurrection ; when it is 
 no more essentially a part of myself, than my 
 body at any other stage of my existence ? The 
 only thing of which we need to be assured is, 
 that the principle of identity which governs the 
 formation of the body in this life, shall -govern its 
 formation at the resurrection. In the ever-flow- 
 ing torrent of life, as wave after wave passes 
 through our bodily frame, bringing with it 
 growth and variety in the structure, there is 
 some principle, or law, or specific form, call it 
 what you will, which remains ever the same. 
 The organism is essentially one, despite the 
 modifications of size, of form, of inward constitu- 
 tion. This holds in every region of nature, 
 where there is life. From the acorn buried in 
 the earth, there springs first the little slender 
 stalk, the germinant shoot hidden between its 
 two cotyledons, then the sapling, then the mon- 
 arch of the forest. But the oak and the germi- 
 nant shoot, and the acorn, unlike as they are in 
 appearance, are one and the same vegetable ex- 
 istence. The butterfly which unfolds its wings 
 of purple and gold in the summer's sun, is the 
 same creature which was but lately a chrysalis, 
 and before that a crawling worm, and before that 
 an embryo in a tiny Qgg. And is it not the 
 same with man } Is not the human embr3^o the 
 
THE HOVE OF THE CHUISTIAX. 1 29 
 
 same individual when it becomes child, youth, 
 old man ? And yet does there remain in the 
 oak, in the butterfly, in the man, a single one of 
 the ponderable molecules which existed in the 
 germ, the o^ggy the embryo ? What physiologist 
 would venture to affirm there is ? And still we 
 repeat, it is the same vegetable, the same insect? 
 the same man. 
 
 What then is this thing which remains ever 
 the same, the same in the vegetable in all its 
 developments/ the same in the insect in all its 
 metamorphoses, the same in the human- body 
 in every phase of its existence ? What is this, 
 which never perishes, is never destroyed, in all 
 the changes and fluctuations of the material 
 organism ? It escapes all our investigations ; 
 we see it only in its manifestations, in the phe- 
 nomena of life ; but that it is a reality all obser- 
 vation goes to show : and if through all the 
 changes of the body during this life, this princi- 
 ple continues in all its force, why may it not sur- 
 vive the shock of death ? Why may not this 
 specific form, as Gregory of Nyssa terms it, re- 
 main united to the soul, as he conjectured (and 
 as other thinkers like Leibnitz have supposed), 
 after its separation from the body, and thus be- 
 come at length the agent in the resurrection, by 
 reconstituting, though in a new and transfigured 
 condition, the body which was dissolved at 
 
130 nniORTALlTY. 
 
 death ? Why may not . the same body, which 
 was sown in corruption, be raised in incorrup- 
 tion, and that which was sown a natural body, 
 be raised a spiritual body ? There is at least 
 nothing improbable in such a supposition ; there 
 is everything in the analogies of Nature to con- 
 firm it ; and when Revelation is silent, we may 
 ■be thankful for such glimpses of probability as 
 come to us in aid of our Faith. 
 
 Lastly, this deliverance, this perfection, this 
 glorifying of the human body, is in the Christian 
 scheme, intimately connected with the deliver- 
 ance, the perfection, the glorifying of the whole 
 visible creation. -As they who are one with 
 their risen Lord, ransomed by Him from the 
 power of Death, and raised with Him even here 
 to newness of life, still wait for the adoption, to 
 wit, the redemption of their body ; so when that 
 redemption shall be accomplished, the creation 
 itself shall be delivered from the bondage of cor- 
 ruption into the glorious liberty of the children 
 of God. There shall be new heavens and a new 
 earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. This is 
 the great consummation, to which all is tending. 
 The universal curse shall be changed into uni- 
 versal blessing. The signature of Sin and 
 Death, and the serpent's trail, shall be for ever 
 effaced, and the signature of God, unblotted and 
 undefiled, shall be seen on every portion of the 
 
TUE HOPE OF THE CHEISTIAN. 131 
 
 works of His hands. All things shall reach that 
 perfection, that ideal which now as it were with 
 sighs and groans of travail, they seem ever to be 
 seeking, never to attain. For there is nothing 
 created so mean, or sq trifling, that it is not a 
 thought of God, and therefore it must be realized, 
 it must be perfected. " All that is transitory," 
 says the great German poet, " is only a para- 
 ble," * a parable of that which in truth it ought 
 to be, of that v/hich finally it shall be. " That 
 which falls short of its end," he continues, '' shall 
 attain to its end." It shall be seen that not one 
 of the creative thoughts of God, not one of His 
 works has only a transitory purpose, that noth- 
 ing has been made only to be destroyed, but 
 that all has been made to be perfected, trans- 
 figured, glorified. " Behold I make all things 
 new ;" these are the words of glorious hope, of 
 boundless promise, which the seer of the New 
 Testament hears issuing from the Everlasting 
 Throne. The veil which hides the inner glory 
 of the world, the covering spread over all nations, 
 the symbol of transitoriness and corruption, 
 shall be taken away, and coming forth as by a 
 resurrection, in new s lendor and beauty, shall, 
 be perfectly disclosed the hidden meaning, the 
 eternal idea, of its Creator and Redeemer, God. 
 
 * Alles Vergangliche is': nur ein Parabel.' — Goethe. 
 
132 iJiJioirrALiTr. 
 
 But meanwhile, tied and bound as we are with 
 the chain of earthly things, busied with the poor 
 and fleeting aims of this life, buried in its cares, 
 its pleasures, its distractions, can we for a mo- 
 ment rise above them and make full proof of our 
 eternal hopes ? Can we grasp Eternity in the 
 midst of time ? Can we without being led astray 
 by the false lights of the imagination, obtain 
 some foretaste of the future glory ? 
 
 " More than fourteen centuries ago,* on the 
 shores of the Italian sea, that Eternal life of 
 which I have been speaking was the subject of 
 discourse between a woman who was drawing 
 near to the end of life, and a man, still in the 
 prime of his years, who had just consecrated 
 himself to the work of Christ. We may have 
 seen the engraving from a picture by Ary Schef- 
 fer, at the bottom of which are inscribed the 
 words, ' St. Augustine and his mother Monica.' 
 We may have noticed those two faces turned to- 
 wards the same heaven, where one seems to be 
 seeking some foretaste of an approaching felicity, 
 and the other, the strength and the courage 
 which should fit him for his arduous task, as the 
 future champion of the Faith. In the page 
 which inspired the painter, Augustine thus 
 speaks : 
 
 * See E. Naville, La Vie Eiernclle. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN. 1 33 
 
 ' When the day drew near on which my mo- 
 ther was to leave this life, it chanced that we 
 found ourselves alone, she and I, leaning upon 
 the sill of a window which looked on the garden 
 of the house where we had stopped at the port 
 of Ostia. There, far from the crowd, after the 
 fatigue of a long journey, we were waiting for the 
 moment when we must set sail. We were alone, 
 conversing with indescribable sweetness ; and 
 forgetting the past, and stretching forward to- 
 wards the future, we asked ourselves, what shall 
 be for the saints that eternal life, " which eye 
 hath not seen, nor ear heard, and which hath not 
 entered into the heart of man " ? And borne 
 aloft on the wing of Love towards Him who is, 
 we climbed, as it were, up through those celes- 
 tial regions, whence the stars, the moon and the 
 sun, send us their light. And rising still higher 
 in our thoughts, in our words, in our admiration 
 of Thy works, O Lord, w^e sought in our own 
 souls to attain to that uncreated wisdom, which 
 is that which it hath been, that which it shall be 
 always, or rather, in which there is no hath been, 
 or shall be, but only is, because it is eternal. 
 And as we thus spake, in our ardent aspirations 
 towards that life, we touched it for a moment 
 with a bound of the heart, and sighed as we left 
 there captive the first-fruits of the Spirit, and 
 
134 niMORTALITT. 
 
 came back again to the sound of the voice, to 
 the word which begins and ends. 
 
 ' Then we said : Let there be a soul in which 
 every earthly passion is hushed, and the soul it- 
 self, hushed into silence and forgetfulness of it- 
 self; let there be no voice heard in it, but the 
 voice of Him alone speaking not by His crea- 
 tures, but by Himself; let Him speak only 
 whom we love in all ; and speak in the absence 
 of all ; let our thought rest only in Him, and in- 
 sensible to every lower object, ravish, lead us 
 captive, absorb us, in that great joy ; in short, let 
 the eternal life be but like that fugitive ecstasy, 
 the remembrance of which makes us still sigh — 
 is not this the promise of that word : " Enter 
 thou into the joy of thy Lord ?" Such were our 
 thoughts in this conversation ; and that same 
 day my mother said to me, " My son, so far as I 
 am concerned, there is nothing more to bind me 
 to life. What should I do in it } There was 
 one thing for which I desired to continue in life, 
 and that was to see you a Christian, before I 
 died. My God has granted me that, and more 
 than that ; why should I tarry here any lon- 
 ger .? '" * 
 
 In this* page, " in which the faith of a Christian 
 
 * Augustine, Confess. Lib. ix. I have omitted some portions 
 of the passage and freely paraphrased others. 
 
THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN. 135 
 
 is expressed in the language of a Plato," St. Au- 
 gustine declares that he obtained, for a brief 
 passing momen:, a sight of the heavenly glory, 
 surpassing thought and all power of human ut- 
 terance. Such a vision may not be vouchsafed 
 to us. It is not given to all men to see, with a 
 Stephen, heaven open and Jesus standing on the 
 right hand of God, or with a Paul, to be rapt into 
 the third heavens, or with a John a tPatmos, to 
 gaze on the temple aoove, and the golden city, 
 and saints and angels, striking their harps and 
 raising their triumphant songs to the Lamb who 
 died ; but it is given to every servant of God to 
 know in whom he has believed. The humblest 
 and the weakest need not fear death, because 
 Jesus has died. The humblest and the weakest 
 may lie down in the grave, in sure hope of a joy- 
 ful Resurrection. For each one may say, with 
 meek yet rejoic-ng faith. He loved me ; He gave 
 Himself for me ; He rose from the dead. What 
 shall separate me from the love of Christ .^ In 
 ^//things I am more than conqueror through 
 Him that loves me, " P'or I am persuaded that 
 neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principali- 
 ties, nor powers, nor things present, nor things 
 to come, nor height," nor depth, nor any other 
 creature, shall be able to separate me from the 
 love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 
 " Because He lives I shall live also." 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Lecture I. p. 15. Note A. 
 
 Since writing this Lecture, I have read Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall's Address dehvered by him as 
 President of the Mathematical and Physical 
 Science Section of the British Association at 
 their Meeting in Norwich last year. A passage 
 in that address, which amply confirms all that I 
 have said on the relation of the brain to thought, 
 I here subjoin : 
 
 " Associated with this wonderful mechanism 
 of the animal body, we have phenomena no less 
 certain than those of physics, but between 
 which and the mechanism we discern no neces- 
 sary connection. A man, for example, can say, 
 I feel, I tJiink, I love ; but how does conscioitsiiess 
 infuse itself into the problem ? The human brain 
 is said to be the organ of thought and feeling : 
 when we are hurt, the brain feels it ; when we 
 ponder, it is the brain that thinks ; when our 
 
APPENDIX, 137 
 
 passions or affections are excited, it is through 
 the instrumentahty of the brain. Let us en- 
 deavor to be a Httle more precise here. I 
 hardly imagine that any profound scientific 
 thinker, who has reflected upon the subject, ex- 
 ists, who would not admit the extreme probabili- 
 ty of the hypothesis, that for every fact of con- 
 sciousness, whether in the domain of sense, of 
 thought, or of emotion, a certain definite molecu- 
 lar condition is set up in the bidhi ; that this re- 
 lation of physics to consciousness is invariable ; 
 so that given the state of the brain, the corre- 
 sponding thought or feeling might be inferred ; 
 or given the thought or feeling, the correspond- 
 in;^ state of the brain might be inferred .'' But 
 hov inferred ? It is at bottom not a case of 
 log" al inference at all, but of empirical associa- 
 tion. You may reply that many of the inferen- 
 ces of science are of this character, the inference 
 for example that an electric current of a given 
 direction will deflect a magnetic needle in a defi- 
 nite way ; but the cases differ in this, that the 
 passage from the current to the needle, if not 
 demonstrable, is thinkable, and that we enter- 
 tain no doubt as to the final mechanicah solution 
 of the problem ; but the passage from the phy- 
 sics of the brain to the corresponding facts of 
 consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a 
 definite thought and a definite molecular action 
 
1 38 APPEXDIX. 
 
 in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not 
 possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently 
 any rudiment of the organ, which would enable 
 us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the 
 one phenomenon to the other. They appear to- 
 gether, but we do not know why. Were our 
 minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and 
 illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the 
 very molecules of the brain ; were we capable of 
 following all their motions, all their grouping, all 
 their electric discharges, if such there be ; and 
 were we intimately acquainted with the corre- 
 sponding states of thought and feeling, we should 
 probably be as far as ever from the solution of 
 the problem. How are these physical processes 
 connected with the facts of consciousness } The 
 chasm between the two class'fes of phenome- 
 na would still remain intellectually impassable. 
 Let the consciousness of love, for example, be 
 associated with a right-handed spiral motion of 
 the molecules of the brain, and the conscious- 
 ness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. 
 We should then know when we love that the 
 motion is in one direction, and when we hate 
 that the motion is in the other, but the ' Why 1 ' 
 would still remain unanswered. In affirming 
 that the growth of the body is mechanical, and 
 that thought, as exercised by us, has its correla- 
 tive in the physics of the brain, I think the posi- 
 
AFPEXDIX. 139 
 
 tion of the ^ materialist ' is stated as far as that 
 position is a tenable one. I think the materialist 
 will be able finally to maintain this position 
 against all attacks ; but I do not think as the 
 human mind is at present constituted, that he 
 can pass beyond it. I do not think he is entitled 
 to say that his molecular grouping and his mo- 
 lecular motions explain everything. In reality 
 they explain nothing. The utmost he can affirm 
 is the association of two classes of phenomena, 
 of whose real bond of union he is in absolute 
 ignorance. The problem of the connexion of 
 body and soul is as insoluble in its modern form 
 as it was in the pre-scientific ages. Phosphorus 
 is known to enter into the composition of the 
 human brain, and a courageous writer has ex- 
 claimed in his trenchant German, * Ohne Phos- 
 phor kein Gedanke.' That may or may not be 
 the case ; but even if we knew it to be the case, 
 the knowledge would not lighten our darkness. 
 On both sides of the zone here assigned to the 
 materialist he is equally helpless. If you ask 
 him whence is this ' matter,' of which we have 
 been discoursing, who or what divided it into 
 molecules, who or what impressed upon them 
 this necessity of running into organic forms, he 
 has no answer. Science also is mute in reply to 
 these questions. But if the materialist is con- 
 founded and science is dumb, who else is entitled 
 
140 APrEXDIX. 
 
 to answer ? To whom has the secret been re- 
 vealed ? Let us lower our heads and acknow- 
 ledge our ignorance one and all. Perhaps the 
 mystery may resolve itself into knowledge at 
 some future day." 
 
 From the Athenmim for Aug. 29, 1868. 
 
 Lecture III. p. 92. 
 
 After all that has been written on this cele- 
 brated passage (Job xix. 24 — 26), the rendering 
 still remains doubtful, as well as the interpreta- 
 tion. 
 
 Ewald renders : 
 
 O dass doch aufgeschrieben melne Worte, 
 
 ins Buch — o dass sie wiirden eingezeichnet ; 
 mit Eisengriffel und mit Blei 
 
 auf ewig wiirden in den Fels gehauen ! 
 Aber ich weiss es, m'ein Erloser lebt, 
 
 ein Nachmann auf dem Staube wird erstehen ; 
 nach meiner Haut, die man abgeschlagen, dieser, 
 
 und frei vom Leibe werd' ich schauen — Gott : 
 ihn den ich schauen werde inir, 
 
 gesehn von vieinen Augen und nicht fremden ! 
 — es schwinden die Nieren in Busen mir ! 
 
 Renan : 
 
 Oh ! qui me donnera que mes paroles soient ^crites, 
 Qu'elles soient ^crites dans un livre, qu'elles soient 
 gravees 
 
APPEXniX. 141 
 
 Avec un stylet de fer et avec clu plomb, 
 Ou'a jamais elles soient sculptdes siir le roc ; 
 
 Car je le sais, mon vengeur existe, 
 Et il apparaitra enfin sur la terre. 
 
 Ouand cette peau sera tombee en lambeaux, 
 Prive de ma chair, je verrai Dieu. 
 
 Je le verrai pour moi-meme ; 
 
 Mes yeux le coiitempleront, non ceux d'un autre ; 
 
 Mes reins se consument d'attente au-dedans de moi. 
 
 Renan explains this hope on the part of Job 
 that he " shall see God," by saying : " Job s'a- 
 bandonne a I'esperance de voir Dieu descendre 
 im jour sur la terre, quand il sera reduit a I'etat 
 de squelette, pour le venger de ses adversaires." 
 Both he and Ewald, as I have remarked, render, 
 'I'li^S)? " ivithotit my fiQ?,^,'' thus conceding to Job 
 the hope of Immortality, but not conceding to 
 him the hope of a Resurrection. But although 
 "^ is certainly sometimes used in a negative 
 sense, I believe that in all cases where it is so 
 used, there is something in the context to guide 
 us as to its signification. Used as it is here, 
 merely dependent on such a verb as nms*., I con- 
 fess it seems to me that the preposition can only 
 have its usual meaning " from." So far I entire- 
 ly agree with Dr. Pusey's criticism when he says 
 {Daniely p. 505 note) : " The rendering of "^"l'^"?^. 
 
142 APFAWniX. 
 
 * without my flesh,' adopted by Davidson, ii. 22/, 
 from Ewald, is unidiomatic and unnatural. V? 
 can no more, of itself, mean ' without ' than our 
 
 * from.' " But I must part company from him, 
 when he asserts, that " no doubtful meaning of 
 any words can efface from the passage the doc- 
 trine of the resurrection of the flesh," and I 
 must demur to his rendering of the line : 
 
 And after my skin, they have destroyed this dodj/, 
 as being to the full as objectionable, as the ren- 
 dering of the line following by Ewald, Renan, 
 and others. What possible pretext can there be 
 for supplying the noun " body " with the femi- 
 nine pronoun nyJT ? The word " body " is not in 
 the original, nor is it suggested by the context, 
 any more than the word ." worms," which has 
 been introduced by our Authorized Version. I 
 believe myself it is better to take the pronoun 
 adverbially, with Havernick, or as a kind of 
 further predicate, said SstK-uiGJg,^' and I would 
 render the passage as follows : 
 
 " I, even I, know that my Redeemer liveth, 
 And that at the last, He shall stand upon the earth 
 
 (Ht. dust) ; 
 And after my skin has been thus pierced through, f 
 
 * And so it is also taken in H. H. Bernard's Book of yob, 
 edited by Mr, Chance, p. 171, where the whole passage is ex- 
 plained as having only a reference to this life. 
 
 t In allusion to the ghastly disease, probably elephantiasis, 
 from which he v/as suffering. 
 
APPEXDIX. 143 
 
 Yet from my flesh, I shall behold God, 
 Whom / shall behold/(7r myself, 
 And mine eyes shall behold and not a stranger's. 
 My rein-s are consumed within me." 
 
 The last line probably alludes to Job's longing 
 for the time when God shall appear to maintain 
 his cause against his friends, and to make his 
 innocence clear. Having mentioned the name 
 of Havernick, I may say, that in his Voidesungeii 
 iiber die TJieologie des Alteii Testaments, p. 203, 
 he discusses the passage critically, and denies 
 all reference in it to a future life, though he also 
 renders "^^^^^ " und von Fleisch entblosst," con- 
 necting this, however, with what precedes, and 
 explaining it to mean, " in spite of all I have 
 suffered, though I am but like a skeleton with- 
 out flesh, still I shall see God, i.e. be conscious 
 of and enjoy His immediate manifested presence 
 in this life." It is painful to think that the in- 
 terpretation of such a passage should be made 
 a test of orthodoxy, and that a critic may incur 
 the charge of " rationalism " who dares to say 
 honestly, that he cannot accept the current in- 
 terpretation, that he believes the Hebrew has 
 another meaning. It is therefore some relief, to 
 find a critic of such unquestionable orthodoxy as 
 Havernick taking the same view. Surely it is 
 high time, as I have already said in my Preface, 
 that we should agree to settle the meaning of 
 
144 APT END IX. 
 
 words, ill accordance with the rules of grammar, 
 and with reference to the general scope of a wri- 
 ter's argument ; and that we should abstain 
 from calling one another hard names, when we 
 happen to differ in our conclusions. 
 
 I cannot but think, that the more carefully 
 the Book of Job is studied, as a whole, the less 
 probable will it appear that he is here uttering 
 any distinc thope either of Immortality or of 
 a Resurrection. On what grounds Mr. Liddon 
 (University Sermons, p. 99) can speak of the 
 Book as " throughout a very hymn of immor- 
 tality," I am at a loss to conceive. A recent 
 writer, M. Godet, in his review of Renan's Job, 
 has taken, as it seems to me, a far juster view 
 both of the general scope of the Poem, and also 
 of the particular passage under consideration. 
 His article appeared first in the Revue Chre- 
 tienne for i860, and subsequently, translated 
 into German, in the Studien nnd Kritikeii for i Z6^. 
 
 At the risk of lengthening this note somewhat 
 unduly I give the following extract : 
 
 " The problem [of the Book of Job] is this, 
 How far suffering is a proof of guilt } Is the 
 punishment always in proportion to the sin } 
 Does the epithet ' merited ' necessarily attach 
 to the word * misfortune ' } 
 
 " The love of our neighbor seeks anxiously 
 for an escape from such a conclusion. The 
 
APPENDIX. 145 
 
 Book of Job shows us how to escape from it. 
 In this Book, God Himself initiates us into one 
 of the deepest mysteries of His government. 
 He teaches us that there are cases in which He 
 chastens men, neither for their transgression, 
 nor to purify them, but only for His own glory. 
 Blessed is the man, who suffers for so high an 
 end ! That he can do so is his glory ; that he 
 will do so is God's glory." 
 
 " No one, I think, will deny the loftiness of 
 such a Theodicaea. 
 
 " We must however draw attention to the re- 
 markable circumstance, that the Book of Job 
 succeeds in solving the problem without intro- 
 ducing the doctrine of future retribution, a doc- 
 trine which has always been regarded as abso- 
 lutely necessary to its solution. 
 
 " Have not all thinkers from Plato to Kant 
 had recourse to the dogma of the immortality of 
 the soul, when they have attempted to explain 
 the apparently unequal distribution of human 
 suffering ? The Book of Job is a solitary excep- 
 tion : the Poet ventures to handle the problem 
 without any such assistance. Was it perchance, 
 as some critics have conjectured, that the dogma 
 of immortality was unknown to him .-* Granted 
 that it were so, it would redound the more to his 
 honor, that he should have succeeded in solving 
 the problem, under circumstances so unfavora- 
 
146 APPENDIX. 
 
 ble to success. To say nothing, however, of ex- 
 amples like those of Enoch and Elijah, the Book 
 of Genesis hints, in more than one passage, at a 
 belief in personal continuance after death. For 
 instance, a distinction is made between the 
 burial of Abraham and his being " gathered to 
 his fathers " (xxv. 9). Moreover it is well 
 known, that the doctrine of immortality and fu- 
 ture retribution were fundamental articles of the 
 Egyptian creed. How could such truths be un- 
 known to the Hebrews, who had lived in Egypt 
 for 400 years 1 The rudest tribes have had 
 some conception of this truth ; how impossible 
 to suppose that the nation, v/hich in point of re- 
 ligious education was the most advanced, should 
 alone have remained ignorant of it ? Historical- 
 ly such a view is absolutely without foundation. 
 How comes it to pass then, that the Book of 
 Job, which ought to have laid particular stress 
 on this truth, as being according to our modes 
 of thought decisive of the question, makes no 
 use of it at all } 
 
 " Revelation amongst the Jewish nation has, 
 as we might expect, always kept pace with the 
 history. It has developed, extended, taken its 
 shape, in the same degree as the destiny of the 
 people. It Was the destiny of Israel to prepare 
 the way for the setting up of the kingdom of 
 God, not in heaven but ttpo?i earth, by means of 
 
APPENDIX. 147 
 
 the Messiah. Consequently all questions bear- 
 ing on personal continuity of existence had, in 
 the strictest sense, nothing to do with the posi- 
 tive mission of this people. Express revelations 
 on this point would have turned away their eyes 
 from the goal set before them, instead of fixing 
 them upon it. With the Christian Church the 
 case is very different. This has a destiny which 
 embraces both, heaven and earth. In this way 
 is very naturally explained the silence of the Old 
 Testament, and the fulness of revelation in the 
 New respecting the future life. But the author 
 of the Book of Job who came forward, not as 
 a philosopher but as the organ of Revelation, 
 could not step beyond the limits of the Revela- 
 tion then vouchsafed. 
 
 " If, however, he is silent with regard to the 
 doctrine of future recompense, he nevertheless 
 lays the foundation stone, on which it is after- 
 wards built. Do we not see at the close of the 
 Poem, the stream of the divine blessings pour- 
 ing itself forth in all its fulness, when the hero's 
 time of trial is at an end ? The divine mercy 
 descends upon him all the more richly in pro- 
 portion to his sufferings for God. Does not the 
 author thus point to a law, which includes the 
 principle of retribution } Whether this law 
 comes into operation in this life or in the next, 
 is a matter of indifference to him. The Singer 
 
14S APPENDIX. 
 
 boldly places himself above this alternative. 
 The law itself engages his attention more than 
 its application. 
 
 " But I shall perhaps be found fault with for 
 ascribing to him a strain of thought to which he 
 was a stranger. Uninfluenced by all the con- 
 tradictory explanations which have been given 
 of it, I appeal simply to the well-known passage 
 in which Job rises to the summit of his hope, 
 chap. xix. v. 25 (following De Wette's transla- 
 tion) : 
 
 " ' I know that my Redeemer liveth, and at the 
 last He remaineth upon the earth ; and after 
 this my skin is pierced through, even without 
 my flesh shall I see God ; yea, I myself shall 
 behold Him, mine eyes shall see Him, and not 
 a stranger.' 
 
 " Does Job utter in these words his belief in 
 the Resurrection, as the majority of orthodox in- 
 terpreters assume, or is he thinking merely of 
 his recovery from his malady } I venture (omit- 
 ting all philological disquisition) to maintain, that 
 the answer to this question would perhaps have 
 occasioned as much perplexity to Job, as to his 
 commentators. Does he know himself what 
 will become of that body of his, withered to a 
 skeleton .? Can he say whether the eating 
 leprosy will finish its work of destruction, or 
 whether God will arrest this devouring fire ? 
 
APPEXDIX. 149 
 
 He cannot ; and consequently he cannot say 
 positively beforehand what will be the method 
 of his redemption. One thing only he knows, 
 that whether it be by the way of healing or by 
 means of the Resurrection, he shall live again. 
 For his Redeemer lives ; he knows Him ; it is 
 his God. Yes, Job shall live, for his God, hke 
 the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, is 
 not a God of the dead but of the living. 
 
 " Job's assurance has reference neither to the 
 method, nor to the place, nor to the hour, but 
 merely to the thing itself. It makes no attempt, 
 after having uttered itself, to discover the means 
 and ways by which God will bring this to pass. 
 
 " This glorious conviction is certainly not the 
 same thing as the dogma of personal perpetuity 
 of existence ; but who will deny that it is the 
 pith and substance of all living belief in this 
 truth .-* It may be left to later revelations to de- 
 velop further the thought which lies at the bot- 
 tom of these words and to give it clearer expres- 
 sion, but they can add nothing to the shout of 
 victory with which Job bids defiance to the lep- 
 rosy or to death. 
 
 " It must be acknowledged, then, that the 
 author kept strictly within the limits of the 
 revelation vouchsafed to his own age, and yet 
 nevertheless fully met all the requirements of the 
 problem. He has succeeded in throwing a clear 
 
150 APPEXDIX. 
 
 light on the mystery of suffering- Innocence, 
 without on the one side avaiUng himself of the 
 fact of sin committed, or the dogma of a future 
 life, and without on the other side doing the 
 smallest violence to the righteousness of God. 
 Tlie glance into the Sanctuary of God, which 
 the Prologue gives, has fully satisfied him. If we 
 were here in the field of speculation, this solu- 
 tion would appear to us a masterpiece." 
 
 Lecture III. p. 10 r. 
 
 It is perhaps liardly correct to say that 
 Chrysostom has attempted a solution of the pro- 
 blem. He goes so far as to assert that the Jews 
 before our Lord did not know the very name of 
 Gehenna, or the resurrection, that till then they 
 had never heard, either from their prophets, or 
 from any one else, of the resurrection, or of the 
 kingdom of heaven. In particular he denies 
 that Job had any knowledge of these truths. 
 { Homilies on St. MattJiezv, x. p. 142 a) ; xxxiii. 
 (al. xxxiv.) p. 386 D ; xxxvi. (al. xxxvii.) p. 412 A 
 (ed. Bened,). Comp. x. p. 145 d, and xvi. p. 210 
 A. However, in another place {Serin, on Genesis, 
 torn. IV. p. 194), he admits that, though the 
 promises of the Old Testament were earthly, 
 still the saints under that dispensation hoped 
 
APrEXDix. 151 
 
 for heavenly blessedness. Augustine, on the 
 other hand, maintahis that there was a prepara- 
 tion made by Moses, and -others of the sacred 
 writers, for the revelation of these truths, but 
 that in them the doctrine of a future life is but 
 darkly and enigmatically expressed. {Dc Gcstis 
 Pclagii, c. V. § 14, 15 ; contra Faitstitni lib. xv. 
 and Epist. 140 ; De Civ. Dei, x. 24, 25). So also 
 Theodoret {In Dcuteronom) Quccst. 34 ; and Ber- 
 nard {Scnn. XXX. in Cant). These Fathers find 
 a reason for the reticence of the Old Testament 
 in the fact that the Jewish nation was too rude 
 and ignorant, to be capable of receiving truths 
 so lofty ; and they maintain that the veil was 
 raised little by little, till at last it was wholly 
 taken away by the Gospel. Leibnitz {Preface 
 to his Theodicee) takes the same view. 
 
 Bossuet writes {Diss, de P salmis, i. 8) : Sane 
 confitemur futuri saeculi felicitatem non per- 
 spicuis disertisque verbis, sed sub figurarum 
 involucris, pro Veteris Testamenti ratione, a 
 sancto Davide, fuisse adumbratam." And later 
 he suggests an explanation {lb. 10) : " Quin 
 igitur, inquies, sanctus David haec futuri sa^cu- 
 li bona exponebat planis disertisque verbis "i 
 Nempe quia hoec parce commemoranda erant, 
 quae crassioribus ingeniis risui, aut etiam often- 
 diculo futura essent : quippe cum in mortuorum 
 animabus, more gentilium, nihil nisi impios 
 
152' . APPEXDIX. 
 
 cultus, falsos deos scilicet ex hominibus con- 
 secrates, aut placandis manibus inferias, ac 
 divinationes umbrarumque citationes, sive, lit 
 vocant, necromantias, aliaque perinde inania, imo 
 etiam noxia et infanda, cogitarent. Itaque ani- 
 marum ac futuri saeculi arcana crasso adhuc 
 populo tecta sub figuris, quibus et perfect! doceri, 
 nee rudiores gravari possent." So again in his 
 Discours sitr VHistoire Universelle, (Part ii. ch. 
 19) : *' Diirant les temps qui ont jDrecede Jesus- 
 Christ, ce que I'ame connaissait de sa dignite et 
 de son immortahte I'induisait le plus souvent a 
 erreur. Le culte des hommes morts faisait 
 presque tout le fond de I'idolatrie. . . . C'est 
 pourquoi la loi de Moise ne donnait a I'homme 
 qu'une premiere notion de la nature de I'ame et 
 de sa felicite. . .C'est un des caracteres du peuple 
 nouveau, de poser pour fondement de la religion 
 la foi de la vie future, et ce devait etre le fruit 
 de la venue du Messie." 
 
 Lecture IV. pp. no and 129. 
 
 NiTzscH takes substantially the same view of 
 the Christian scheme : 
 
 "Die blosse Fortdauer und Unsterblichkeit 
 der Seele, oder die blosse Befreiung von der 
 irdischen Behausung erfiillt die christliche Hoff- 
 nung nicht ; denn die Vollendung des Einzelnen 
 
APPENDIX. 153 
 
 ist selbst in keiner Weise voUkommcn, solange 
 das Ganze der Schopfung iind der Kirche nicht 
 mit ihm und er mit dem Ganzen vollendet ist 
 Der Christ wartet einer Erlosiuig dcs Lcibcs. 
 Rom. viii. 23. Demnach hoffen die Christen 
 Auferstehung der Todten, und Christi Aiiferste- 
 hung ist das geschichtliche, die Gabe des heihgen 
 Geistes, des Geistes der Herrlichkeit, das innere 
 Unterpfand derselben. i Cor. xv. 20, Rom. viii. 
 1 1, der Leib aber der Auferstandnen nicht der 
 verwesete, noch der verwesliche. Natur und 
 Leib hegen ein grosses, tiefes Geheimniss. Die 
 Natur selbst soil frei werden von der Eitelkeit 
 und Verganglichkeit, der sie unterworfen ist. 
 Das Hervorgehen aus dem Grabe ist nur das 
 Bild oder die theilweise Erscheinung einer ver- 
 klarenden Wiedergeburt oder Verwandlung un- 
 sers Einzellebens, in welcher wir dem verklarten 
 Leibe des Erlosers ahnlich werden, nachdem 
 wir in der Zeit das Bild des irdischen Adams 
 getragen haben. Phil. iii. 21, i Cor. xv. 35 — 
 
 50." 
 
 System der Christlichen Lehre, p. 372 (4te 
 Ausgabe). 
 
 Mr. Westcott's admirable essay on " The Gos- 
 pel of the Resurrection " should be consulted by 
 all who wish to see the whole argument for our 
 Christian hope clearly and satisfactorily stated. 
 
Princeton Theolo< 
 
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