03.01. The Significance of Immortality

CHAPTER I THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY

ONE of the most noticeable contrasts between this generation and those imme diately preceding it, is the relative unim portance of the future life in the thought of the present age. When our forefathers were at all religious, and often when they were not, they not only took for granted the fact of continued existence beyond the grave, but they regarded it as a matter of supreme concern. When in the eigh teenth century Butler constructed his im pressive argument for revealed religion, he used the soul s deathlessness, not as a conclusion to be established, but as a premise to be assumed. Even with rad ical thinkers outside the churches, faith in the future life could then be presupposed as a common point of agreement, while within the churches men s hopes and fears of immortality dominated their religious thought, and made this present life signifi cant largely because it was preparatory to the glories or the terrors of the life to come. . Our fathers; therefore, hardly could have understood the present generation s scep ticism about the truth of immortality ; much less could they have comprehended that modern nonchalance which speaks and acts as though it made but little dif ference whether or not men live beyond the grave. A recent writer tells us that in our unwillingness to die and have that the end of us, "We have not passed far beyond the attitude of peevish children who refuse to come in at nightfall after they have played outdoors all day." This cavalier belittling of the significance of life to come is prevalent to-day even among religious men. They do not so much dis believe in immortality ; their scepticism lies deeper ; they do not care. With some such phrase as "One world at a time," they commonly dismiss consideration of the future life, regarding immortality as indeed a possibility, but a possibility whose import is postponed until they die. To insist, therefore, that the persistence of personality beyond the grave involves tre mendous issues for our present life, is to day not by any means superfluous. . The reasons for this decline of emphasis upon the importance of the world to come are easily discernible. For one thing, the impact of new scientific information con cerning the evolutionary origin of man and the intricate relationship between the mind and brain has shattered confidence in the certainty of life to come. The manifold causes which in our day have unsettled old religious beliefs, and have cast doubt upon or utterly discredited supposed bases of faith that had gone unquestioned for two thousand years, have made unstable the hopes of immortality. With that ad mirable power of adaptation, therefore, which is one of the noblest elements in human character, men, finding their con fidence in a future life vanishing, have set themselves to make the best of the new situation, and have stoutly asserted that the change makes little difference. Even a Robinson Crusoe looks for compensations in his condition, when he finds himself upon a solitary island, and men, at their best, believing that this life is all they have, will resolutely make the most of that, and as an armor against the malice of their fate, will courageously affirm that they do not care, that one life is enough, and that the difference is inconsiderable after all. In addition to this initial cause for the decline of emphasis upon the importance of immortality, is an even nobler reason. Men have gathered new hopes of racial progress in our day, and, at their best, are increasingly inclined to sink their indi vidual prospects in their expectations for humanity. The social passion finds voice in pulpits as well as on secular platforms, and proclaims there what our fathers would not have thought of saying, that our mission is not to get men into heaven, but somehow to bring heaven to earth. What Narodny said of Russia, "I am nothing; personal success, happiness, they are nothing ; exile, Siberia, the Czar s bullet, they are nothing ; there is just one thing, that Russia must be free," men in a larger sense are saying of the human race. Hope of a future life, with its rewards and possibilities, has a mean look in the light of such self-forgetful passion, and as new discoveries open new hopes of progress for mankind, one hears scores of men wish that they could see America a hundred years from now, for one man who, after the old fashion, longs for heaven. What difference does it make whether another life awaits us after death, so long as here we play our part like men, and hand down the heritage of the past, so purified and furthered by our thought and sacrifice that our children will rise up to call us blessed ?

Another reason for the decline of emphasis upon the importance of the life to come is not so creditable as the other two. In the present age, this life has been made vivid and interesting in an unexampled way. Old isolations have been overcome, so that the whole world is now the province of any mind that chooses to be cosmopolitan, and rapidity of communication has made possible world-wide enterprises on such a scale as no previous age has ever known. New knowledge has consumed the thoughts of men, and new avenues of wealth have engaged their ambitions, until the contemplation of eternal destiny has paled before the immediate brilliance of this present world. For men are like auditoriums ; they can hold so many occupants and no more ; and when the seats are filled and even the Standing Room Only" sign has been removed, the next comer, though he be a prince, must cool his heels upon the curb. The minds of men have been pre empted by the immediate and fascinating interests of this vigorous, exciting age. The fact is not so much that they through reasoned disbelief have discarded faith in immortality, as that through preoccupation they have lost interest in anything beyond the grave.

Even a deeper reason, in the realm of serious thought, helps to explain the modern depreciation of immortality. Eternal life is a matter of quality and not of time, men say. Justice and goodness, beauty and truth exist eternally in God and may be incarnate in our transient human lives. Let the individual die ; the value of his spiritual quality, which alone is worth pre serving, is perpetuated in the life of God. From God came all the worth of our characters, to him it shall return and in him it shall never die. Not in our small individ ualities, but in his persistent Being, " All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist." The only Eternal is God; of him we are but broken lights ; and our flickering lives, luminous with his quality, may be eternal in this sense only, that we can mean what he means, we can incarnate in time the spiritual values that in him are absolute and timeless. Must every little candle burn forever, that so light may persist ? Must each separate breeze be perpetual in order that the air may still enswathe the earth ? Shall the special waves insist on perpetuity when they but represent the ocean that abides behind them, and in them and millions like them is expressed ? These are four outstanding reasons for the modern doubt, not only of the fact, but of the importance of personal immortality. There are other reasons, operative in all generations the pessimistic mood that does not want to live again, the worldling s hatred of the hopes and fears that would deprive him of comfort in self-indulgence but these four causes, not by any means dishonorable, lead even the best of men to-day to wonder how much difference it makes whether belief in immortality be accepted or denied. To be sure, one value for our present life which faith in immortality possesses is evident to all. It comforts men in the hour when bereavement comes, when human hearts discover that by as much as love is great, by so much must grief be deep. But men are not assured that they have any right to expect comfort from the universe. They do not propose to find solace in a lie. They do not want the opium of a dream to ease them of their heart s distress. If the only value for life which faith in immortality possesses is the value of comfort, folk for that very reason will mistrust their right to it, will fear lest their desire for consolation may drive them to seek it in a hope that is not true. Even though a man has cried with Tennyson :

"Ah, Christ ! if it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us Where and what they be," he has not drawn appreciably nearer to confidence about the future, nor has he even dimly seen the deepest issues which are implied in the acceptance or denial of immortality.

II The directest way by which we may perceive what difference to life is made when we believe or disbelieve in the con tinuance of personality beyond the grave, is to give free range to all our doubts and let them carry us into a frank and full denial of everlasting life. The affirmation that death ends all is a creed as clearly as is the assertion of immortality. Let that creed be asserted, and let all the implications of annihilation be followed to their logical results. In what sort of world do we then find ourselves? What difference to life does that assertion make ?

However superficial his first impression may prove to be, the ordinary man who, after believing in immortality, now turns to consider a world from which the hope of a future life has been obliterated, feels an unavoidable sense of injustice to the race.

What Professor Palmer of Harvard wrote, with fine restraint, when he recorded his wife s decease, we instinctively feel about the whole prospect of personality s annihila tion : "Though no regrets are proper for the manner of her death, who can contem plate the fact of it and not call the world irrational, if out of deference to a few par ticles of disordered matter it excludes so fair a spirit?" If death ends personality, the universe seems to be throwing away with utter heedlessness its most precious possessions. Whatever evaluations of the world may be questioned, no one doubts that personality, with its capacities for thought, for character, for love and for creative work is the crown of all existence. Out of what travail, age-long and full of agony, has personality been born ! By what vast struggles, admirable in their sacrificial heroism, has the moral life of man been attained and preserved ! A reasonable person does not build a violin, with infinite labor gathering the materials and shaping the body of it, until upon it he can play the compositions of the mas ters, and then in a whim of chance caprice smash it into bits. Yet just this the uni verse seems to be doing if immortality is false. Longer ages than our minds can con ceive she has been at work upon those forces which underlie our personalities, and now when Jesus and Augustine and Luther and Lincoln are possible, when at last a spiritual man can be the residence of poets dreams and martyrs consecrations, when the mind can think truth and the heart can love righteousness, are these supreme triumphs of the age-long, universal toil thrown utterly to ruin ?

Before a man, however, surrenders him self to this instinctive revolt against the unreasonableness and injustice of a world that creates personality only to destroy it, he must face the mitigating considera tions which have been suggested, the alter natives to personal immortality which have displaced in many minds the hope of individual continuance. Many take refuge from the malice of an obliterated life in the hope, already mentioned, that the worth of personality, in terms of its goodness, its justice and its love, is made perpetual in the life of God. What we lay down, he gathers up and makes eternal, and so the spiritual gains of our human struggle are perpetuated even though human individ uals do not persist. But just what does this mean? It is easy to speak of justice as a quality in God, of which we may be the temporary representatives and the value of which we, dying, may know to be perpetual in him, but does not this in the face of searching thought turn out to be merely a form of words? Justice cannot exist in a solitary being whether he be God or man ; justice is a quality impos sible except in social relationships ; and God himself cannot be just without being just to some one. So, all the moral values that we know, truth, goodness, love, are forms of personal activity that never would have existed without social life, and that have no meaning whatsoever apart from relationships between persons. To imag ine God, therefore, in some sublime and timeless solitude after the race is gone, hoarding within himself the values of the justice, truth and goodness, which have been wrought out in the experience of the race, is to conceive an absurdity. When this earth has come to its inevitable dis solution and the persons who lived upon it have vanished utterly, will God indeed pre serve within himself the spiritual gains of our human struggles, just without being just to any one, true yet true to no one, perpetuating all our love, yet loving no person save himself? Then the justice, truth and love which are eternal in God have no imaginable likeness to the quali ties which we mean by the words. The moral gains of the race are all social in their genesis and in their expression. What can altruism mean in a universe without sepa rate personalities ; or honor, or sincerity, or loyalty, or faithfulness ? These are all terms applicable only to individuals sus taining a mutual relationship. The obvious fact is that the only hope of preserving the moral gains of humanity lies in the per sistence of a community of human per sons. Love, righteousness, fidelity, in an absolute and unrelated Being, are incon ceivable.

Moreover, spiritual quality in the very nature of the case cannot be detached from a man to be appropriated and preserved by God. All spiritual quality is simply personality in action, and when the person ality perishes, the action ceases as well. The human mind has been able to con ceive this reabsorption into God, to whom in some mysterious way, we, with our dying gasp, hand over all our moral gains, only by translating it into physical terms. The ocean can reabsorb and merge its separate drops, that lose their identity and give their substance to the sea. So our bodies can commingle with the earth, and dissolving can give their elements to the common stock. But the essence of personality is self-conscious separateness. That men, on becoming extinct as persons, can hand over their qualities, abstracted from them, to swell the general sum of spirit in the universe, is inconceivable. A man s goodness is as inalienably his possession as greenness is the possession of the tree, and only when the greenness can persist after the tree is gone, can righteousness, ab stracted from the personality whose func tion it is, fly unattached to be assimilated by another. Such detached spiritual qual ities are as impossible as the grin of the Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland/ that stayed after the cat was gone. The philosophy of reabsorption offers no hope of preserving the values which humanity has attained ; it promises no future save endless cycles of recurrent existence, as the central Being sends out emanations and reabsorbs them in unintermittent and meaningless succession. If ever there shines a gleam of hope in a thinker of the pantheistic school, it is because in spite of all his words, he has kept at least the shadow of persistent personality, in whose endless increase the spiritual gains of experience can be preserved. The plain fact is that moral qualities are forms of personal energy, and cannot persevere apart from the persons whose attributes they are.

Another mitigating consideration that is often urged to defeat the malice of per sonality s annihilation, is that no good life can be in vain, because its influence goes on. But George Eliot s " Choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again, In minds made better by their presence," while it has a literary and emotional value, has little value for thought. One of our leading American astronomers has elabo rated in a stirring lecture seven ways, in one of which our present solar system must come to its final cataclysm. Whether or not he has canvassed all the possibilities, it is obvious that the earth on which we live is not a permanent affair. The influence, therefore, which follows in the train of a Christ or a Lincoln is essentially as tran sient as the personality that first created it, if death ends all. For on a planet which is but a temporary stage, as sure to dis appear in time as night is to follow day, we use a few years of dwindling influence as a blanket to cover the tragedy of an an nihilated life, when we plead that what Lincoln did will last after what Lincoln was has perished. Both what Lincoln was and what he did, in a world where death is the end, come at last to a like inglorious conclusion.

Moreover, the essential unreasonableness of the universe in carelessly destroying its most precious possessions, when with infi nite sacrifice they have been created, concerns not so much the influence of a man as it concerns the man himself. What Christ was is far more significant than what Christ did, and the latter, like a stream, gains all its quality from the spring of personal wealth and power out of which it flowed. Granted that the influence of Jesus for a few aeons will go on, what has become of the creative source of that influence ? Does the world build a character like that, which has held now sixty generations in its spirit ual mastership, and then throw it utterly away ? Is God blowing soap-bubbles ? Did he dip the pipe of his power in the suds of matter and blow the character of Jesus, that it might entertain him with its iridescence, burst to his satisfaction and be gone ? Then in the end the whole race is but a conglomerate bubble, such as children love, in which one lobe adds to the iridescent beauty of another, but in which each in time will break and all at last will disappear. This is the universe without immortality. The words reasonableness and purposefulness, in any connotation known to man, can hardly be applied to such a world.

If, therefore, neither by the perpetuation of our influence, which on a perishable planet is impossible, nor by the assimilation of our spiritual values by God, which is a form of words without conceivable content, can the moral gains of humanity be pre served, we face this consequence to the denial of immortality, that the universe has no way at all of perpetuating the moral gains which our race achieves. Men do not commonly feel that so great a consequence can be involved, when they believe their annihilation. But let a man give wings to his thought ; let him rise above all care for his individual destiny, and at an altitude where no selfish desire for hope, no eager ness for personal comfort can deflect his judgment, let him look down upon the earth, and with the creed of annihilation in his thought consider its origin and destiny. What summary of them is possible but this ? The planet forms itself gradually from mysteriously whirling star dust, cooling and condensing as it whirls ; on the earth so formed life appears, growing in plants, swimming in fish, crawling in reptiles, and at last walking erect in man ; in man life evolves into those mystic functions which we call mind and character, - - pre ferring, with Moses, service to ease, learning with Ruth to cry, "The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee and me," praising God in David, in Jesus dying on Calvary for men, and on innu merable altars giving itself in sacrifice for honor s sake and truth s. At last, the planet, its atmosphere devitalized, its heat and light all gone, having come from chaos to chaos must return. After that, not even the memory shall be left of any good that has been done under the sun, but with the death of the last man who falls in a world of graves, all the toil and sacrifice of the race come to their futile end. That is the world without immortality. The same process may be going on in Mars, but there too the race will work and pray, aspire and sacrifice, only at last to vanish, with not a vestige of memory to hand down and not a moral gain to be pre served. In a world without immortality it would seem that the only permanent forces are physical. They build themselves into solar systems and resolve themselves again, while life and character, knowledge and spiritual quality, the pride and glory of the race, are as transient as though like smoke rings they had been blown for a moment and had been dissolved. Without immortality physical force alone persists, the builder and destroyer of spirit, and at last the sole survivor and victor over all.

Ill

It has been customary to enlarge upon the blighting effects which such a concep tion of the world must have on character. Unquestionably this can be greatly over done. Huxley is clearly right when in his famous letter to Charles Kingsley, he speaks with restrained indignation of the collect which was read at his son s funeral. 11 As I stood beside the coffin of my little son the other day," he writes, "with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. I cannot tell you how inexpres sibly they shocked me. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from which it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek dis traction in a gorge." In many a hectic description of the ethical results of dis belief in immortality, preachers have run into danger of such condemnation. "If you believe in no future life," said Luther, "I would not give a mushroom for your God. Do, then, as you like ! For if no God, so no devil, no hell ; as with a fallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into lechery, rascality, robbery and mur der." Such a description of the conse quences of doubting life to come is folly. To be sure, a German philosopher, not a preacher, has pictured in its most des perate terms the meaning of a hopeless world. Men have entertained three kinds of hope, he tells us, and all of them have failed : first, that they might find happiness in the material comforts of life ; second, that they might dwell in bliss in a future heaven ; and, third, that they might be queath to their children a social state on earth where ultimate satisfaction could be found. And now that all these hopes have failed, nothing is left but a univer sal compact of suicide. That is absurd. Though we all believed that we were bodies only, with a spiritual aspect, and that we were working on a transient task that must come to its finale in a planet s ruin, we would not commit suicide. There are sanctions for right conduct that do not depend upon the outcome of the universe, and values in living, that inhere in every day s experience and do not ask ultimate questions about eternity. Nevertheless, when, believing in annihilation, one takes ac count of the long travail of the ages, weighs in his imagination all the agony of struggle and misfortune there, and perceives the inevitable end, when, like a burned-out cin der, the earth whirls back to its primeval chaos, he can understand the meaning of the philosopher who wrote: " Considering the immense and protracted sorrows of mankind, it would have been better if the earth had remained like the moon, a mass of slag, idle and without a tenant."

It is impossible to suppose that this view of the world, to which we are introduced by the denial of immortality, can be with out effect upon moral motives and ideals of character. To say that some special man has disbelieved all forms of personal permanence, and yet has lived a life notable for its loftiness of aim and its integrity, is not proof that belief in life to come has a negligible influence on the characters of men. For men everywhere and always have cherished beliefs in some kind of im mortality, however undesirable ; in Chris tianity especially, moral motives have ever been associated with affirmations of eternal issues to spiritual life ; so that an individual, in achieving his lofty character, may be a pensioner on the accumulated faith of the race, even while he himself denies the faith. Upon the other side, to imagine the sud den breakdown of all belief in immor tality, so that the characters of men are deprived of old sanctions and supports before new ones have been found to take their places, is no fair test of the moral con sequences of denying immortality. For all such sudden changes, whether in the end their influence will prove a benefit or bane, must cause an immediate disturbance, easily picturable in desperate terms. If fairly we are to test the moral results of affirming that death ends all, we must grant that affirmation to be true, and then we must conceive the race as gradually discovering the sort of world in which it lives, until at last all men have been convinced that this is the only world there is, that death means annihilation, that in the end the universe throws away its most priceless possessions, and has no way of preserving finally its moral gains. How will the characters of men be affected by such a conclusion, universally believed ?

Many a modern man, not altogether thoughtless in his nonchalance about immor tality, answers this question with an asser tion both familiar and full of noble meaning. "Virtue is its own reward," he says. "Our goodness at its best does not depend for inspiration on the pay it may receive.

Spiritual quality is its own recompense, and does not, like a Moslem beggar, with outstretched palms, ask God for bak sheesh." That this affirmation of the self- sufficiency of character is true and elevated is clear to a man in proportion as he is free from spiritual sordidness and is sensitive to the intrinsic worth of moral excellence. Even a little thought, however, reveals the fact that the assertion that virtue is its own reward is based upon a deeply spiritual idea of life s significance. Virtue is its own reward, but for whom ? If it be true of all of us, as Tennyson sang of the dead Wellington, "We doubt not that for one so true, There must be other nobler work to do Than when he fought at Waterloo," then it is plain that spiritual quality car ries with it its own recompense. For then character is eternally progressive, and what ever may be the reaction of the world upon us, whether in gratitude or gibes, in praise or malediction, spiritual life, growing, deepening, forever hopeful of climbing heights of quality yet unattained, of ren dering service hitherto beyond our reach, is a possession so intrinsically and superla tively valuable, that to him who has it no outward recompense is needed as a motive for the love of goodness. But when you take hope from character, when its pos sibility of progress is seen to end in a blind alley, how is virtue its own reward then ? When in some Cherry Hill mine disaster the rescuers leap into the lift and, with eyes wide open to their imminent danger, plunge down into the burning mine intent on saviourhood, and when they straight way are hauled up again, charred corpses every one, in just what sense, if death ends all, was virtue its own reward to them? The recompense of scholarship is the capac ity for increasing scholarship ; the reward of spiritual life is the hope of the good man to-day that to-morrow he may be better ; and without this hope the saying that virtue carries in its bosom its own remuneration has a vastly diminished significance. The pay of goodness is the opportunity to be come better.

When, therefore, a man of insight demands a life to come, it is not because he seeks outward recompense for a good life here ; it is because his goodness here, if it is to be passionate and earnest, must have the eternal chance of being better. His value lies in what he may become not in what he has or does or is, but in his possibilities and by as much as hope is stolen from him, until he clearly sees that his character is a seed which the frost of accident may nip to-day and which the winter of death will surely kill to-morrow, in so far the heart is taken from the saying that virtue is its own reward. Of course this does not mean that in a world without immortality an ethical life is impossible. To say that would be pre posterous. If the world, long looked upon as a ship whose captain knows the course and outcome of the journey and whose passengers have a destination worthy of the cruise, is now to be regarded as a raft, drifting aimlessly upon the high seas of ex istence, the temporary home of beings that are born to die, this changed conception will not do away either with the necessity or the possibility of morals. Upon the raft, the worst men will seize what they can for them selves ; but the best men, moved by pity for the plight of their fellows, will establish rules and regulations adapted to the wel fare of the whole, will punish offenders, and in many a beautiful self-sacrifice will prefer the good of others to their own. "Pity," says Schopenhauer, the pessi mist, "is the only source of unselfish actions and the true basis of morality." More over, on the raft, quite apart from ques tions of the future, fortitude, honor and friendliness may well be recognized as the most worthy attributes of character; scales of moral value may be accepted in which the noblest stoical virtues are made pre eminent ; and courage and kindliness may be admirably exhibited. From such motives an ethical life may result, hopeless, but under the circumstances far from ignoble. To be sure, when Haeckel, who counts God and immortality delusions, declares that a man has an "unquestioned right to put an end to his own sufferings by death" ; when he says, "We have a right, if not a duty, under such conditions to put an end to the sufferings of our fellow-men" ; when he admires the ancient Spartan habit of strangling new-born children if they are weakly, and urges its general adoption, he is making explicit the logical morality of the raft. When Nietsche rails upon all hos pitals, orphanages and every kind of saving agency by which we seek to help the unfortunate, and so perpetuate the weak, when the world is needed for the strong, he is clearly stating his vision of the moral ity of the raft. Tenderness, sympathy, self-sacrifice and love, doubtless would persist, but their tone would certainly be changed. They would be the old qualities which we have known, no longer motived by any eternal value in personality, by any endless possibility of development in char acter, by any conviction that the spiritual life has everlasting issues which make its failure or success man s chief concern. When one endeavors to picture to himself the noblest sentiments that could find resi dence in men, in a world where no one dreamed of immortality and all had seen the implications of their disbelief, he can rise no higher than the compassionate spirit which Whittier s sonnet shows :

"My heart was heavy, for its trust had been Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong :

So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men, One summer Sabbath-day, I strolled among The green mounds of the village burial place ; Where, pondering how all human love and hate Find one sad level, and how, soon or late, Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face, And cold hands folded over a still heart, Pass the green threshold of our common grave, Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart, Awed for myself and pitying my race, Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave, Swept all my pride away, and, trembling, I forgave." So on the raft, for pity s sake men could be kind and serviceable, and even could forgive their enemies. But it is to be remarked that when we seek an expression of this compassionate pity, we must look for it to a man like Whittier, who believes in God and immortality. No Haeckel or Nietsche, who really does think the world a raft and deeply sees the meaning of that creed, has ever left on record any expression of such compassionate regard for men.

IV The reason for the difference which the universal denial of immortality would make to the motives and ideals of character is not difficult to see. The attainment of an honorable and useful life costs sacrifice. Present pleasures must be foregone or subordinated for the sake of a central moral purpose, and this fact, which looks simple and unimpassioned in print, in life involves a sacrificial struggle whose depth and intensity the novelists and dramatists of the race have tried in vain adequately to describe. Now, man s willingness to sac rifice for anything depends on his evaluation of its worth. Theprincipal effectof Christian faith upon man s moral life is to be found neither in the scruples which it induces regarding certain sins, nor in the positive duties which it enjoins, but in the tran scendent value it places on personality. The New Testament is a treatise upon self- respect. The central theme around which all its harmonies are composed is the spirit ual nature, the permanent continuance, the infinite value, the boundless possibility of man. The great affirmations of the Chris tian Gospel that God created men and loves them, that they are immortal and that God needs them to perfect his work, merge their influence in raising man s evaluation of himself. In the New Testament men are sons of God, if sons, heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ ; all things are theirs, whether life or death, or things present or things to come ; neither life nor death, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature can separate them from the love of God ; and being now sons of God, they cannot imagine what they shall be, save that their destiny is exceeding abundantly above all they can ask or think. Men had never thought so highly of themselves before. Celsus, the great opponent of the Christians in the early centuries, goes to the heart of the matter when he says, "The root of Christianity is its excessive valuation of the human soul, and the absurd idea that God takes interest in man." Aristotle had said that some men are born savages, no more changeable than dogs; that artisans are living machines, incapable of virtue ; that women are nature s failures in the attempt to make men. The ancient laws had encouraged the slaying of infants as a measure of household economy and had looked upon slaves in the arena with the beasts as we look upon a hunt. Man kind had known benevolence in fraternal orders, public charity, and the beautiful meaning of sacrificial friendship, but phi lanthropy, the love of man as man, the conception of personality in child or slave or woman or king as a priceless spiritual treasure, this is peculiarly the outcome of those faiths in the Fatherhood of God and in eternal life which made Jesus say, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own self? " Emer son is authority for the statement that "Jesus alone in history estimated the greatness of man."

Even when this principal emphasis of the Christian faith has been poorly appre hended, even when it has been mangled by gloomy theology or despoiled of its effect by ecclesiastical folly, it has exercised an incalculable influence on the characters of men. It has made those who deeply understood it feel that no sacrifice can be too great for the preservation of spiritual quality and the service of the personalities of other men. Self-respect, that inward soul of the greatest motives for character, is by it raised to loftiest terms.

When, therefore, the opposite creed is asserted, how is it conceivable that motives and ideals of character shall not suffer a tremendous change ? The denial of immor tality leads a man by an inevitable drift toward the affirmation that we essentially are flesh, not spirit. When a man is asked if he has a soul, even though he is a Christian, he is likely to declare that he has one ; and if it be inquired whether he has a body, he will doubtless assert that he has a body too. Such is our habit of colloquial speech, but even to casual thought how palpably absurd it is ! Who is this third party, this holding corporation, this tertium quid, who on the one side owns a body and on the other side, a soul ? A man is not so divided into three parts, one of which is possessor of the other two. A man has two aspects. One aspect of him is physical; it can be seen and touched, weighed and measured ; its chem ical constituents can be analyzed and reduced to formulae. The other aspect of him is invisible, intangible ; it cannot be weighed or measured ; it is his world of loves, hates, thoughts, ambitions ; in it are resident his sense of duty and his aspirations after God, and at the centre is that mystical, self-conscious memory, which survives the passage of the years, outlasts the building and break-down of the flesh and gives con tinuity to all his personal experience.

Concerning this strangely divided nature of man, the body and the soul, the central question upon whose answer all interpreta tion of life s meaning waits is this : Are we bodies that have spirits, or are we spirits that have bodies ? Which is essen tially the man ? The Christian affirmation is not that we have souls, but that we are souls ; that we substantially are spirit, as invisible as God, since no one ever saw himself or saw another man. The affirma tion of the materialist is not that we have bodies, but that we are bodies ; that flesh is the essence of us, and that all our intellec tual and moral life, like the peal of a bell, is a transient result of physical vibrations, and ceases when the cause is stopped. Between these two affirmations the deci sion lies : either we are bodies that for a little time possess a spiritual aspect, or else we are spirits using an instrument of flesh.

Long ago in an Athenian death-cell, where Socrates awaited the poisoned hemlock, this question was discussed. Some there com pared man to a harp, and thought his intellectual and moral life the harmony that comes from the vibrating strings. Since, therefore, he essentially is the in strument, which gives being to the music, the music cannot outlast the destruction of the harp. But Socrates insisted that man is neither harp nor harmony ; that he is a harper who plays upon the physical strings, dependent upon them for the quality of music he produces, but inde pendent of them for his existence, since the player may leave one instrument and find another. So to-day the assertion of our immortality involves the faith that we are invisible, spiritual personalities ; but belief in annihilation is coupled with the thought that we are the physical instruments, which, perishing, bring to an end the harmony they caused.

If we are thus transient beings, funda mentally physical, shall we long make the great sacrifices which spiritual character demands ? Does Ictinus pick out a quick sand on which to build the Parthenon and lavish on it there the genius of his art, knowing that every stroke of his mallet is making a beauty that to-day is and to morrow will be gone ? Does Raphael choose cotton cloth, whose slender and loosely woven fibres will hardly bear the strokes of his brush, on which to paint a Sistine Madonna ? And will a man develop passionate moral enthusiasms and aspiring virtues on any other basis than spiritual permanence ? The value of the object of sacrifice always determines the willing ness of men to pay the cost, and immortality is that affirmation of the eternal worth of character which alone can make reasonable the devotion, aspiration and self-denial which great character requires. No man will work hard sewing diamonds on tissue paper.

If the devaluation of personality which inevitably follows the assertion that death ends all so affects the struggle for spiritual quality in the individual, it must neces sarily affect those enthusiasms for social service on which the future of philan thropy and democracy depends. Professor Hyslop can hardly be suspected of a prej udiced interest in evangelical theology; yet he affirms without qualification : The ideals of democracy will live or die with the belief in immortality." His meaning clearly is that only moral permanence can furnish the necessary basis for those devo tions which the perpetuation of democracy requires. If they are to be in earnest, men must feel when they invest their sacrifices in society that they are investing in a bank that will not fail. To such a statement the reply continually is made that though the individual does die, humanity goes on, and that personal im mortality has nothing to do with the con tinuance of those social causes which, persisting, may well come to their victory on earth, whether life beyond the grave be true or false. In May, 1865, a triumphal procession moved down Pennsylvania Ave nue in Washington. The victors of a great war were coming home amid the acclamations of their fellow-citizens. But their comrades who had marched with them to the front, who had borne with them the danger and adventure of the great cam paign, were lying buried under the sod at Antietam or at Gettysburg. So, say the men who cannot see the crucial import of immortality to social service, let us die, and some day the survivors of the war will celebrate a triumph for our cause and will gratefully remember our share in making the consummation possible. Noble as this exhortation is, it depends for its apparent validity upon a short look into the future. A long look negatives the force of its appeal. The polar ice-caps now hold undisputed sway over territory where, so scientists inform us, the most luxurious fauna and flora once were flourishing. Whether the planet tarries until the polar ice-caps seize it all, or whether some swifter cataclysm wrecks it, the earth is as temporary as any other sphere, that, slowly built out of spirals of revolving dust, in the end must dis appear. The race is not immortal if the individuals are not. A limited succession of transient men does not make a permanent society. A long look into the future does not show us a triumphant humanity, rejoic ing because the war is over. In the end some solitary survivor of mankind must hold alone his triumphal procession down the Pennsylvania Avenue of the earth, and, if he can, cry "Victory" when he dies.

Without immortality, therefore, the long struggle of humanity has no consummation in which harmony comes at last out of the present discord of inequity. Behind all the labor of saints and martyrs has been the hope, held in innumerable forms, that some worthy end would crown their toil, that when Paul planted and Apollos watered, God would give the increase. In the old poem on the Battle of Blenheim, where little Peterkin climbs on Caspar s knee to hear the thrilling tale of brave fighting and bloody sacrifice, the boy interrupts the narrative to ask, "What good came of it at last?" That has always been humanity s question about life s bat tle, and one of the distinctive ministries of religious faith to social service has been the affirmation of a coming Kingdom, "toward which the whole creation moves," and in which justice shall at last be done. Some such hope is fundamental to undis- courageable social sacrifice.

Emerson, indeed, in the seclusion of his academic study may inveigh against thus appealing to the future for justice, against trusting the arbitrament of eternity to level the scales of judgment on sin, and may insist that with indefectible exactitude justice is rendered every hour. He may even affirm that the thief who steals sil ver steals more from himself than from the man he robs, since from his victim he pilfers only material wealth, while from him self he takes character. But when from the quiet of philosophic study into the thick of life we carry the idea that justice is done every hour, the assertion grows less clear and certain. The problem is not solved by balancing the theft of silver spoons against the despoiling of the thief s own character. When, rather, some Phar isee robs widows houses and for a pre tence makes long prayers, or some human beast sells girls to shame while still so young that they cry for their dolls, and when at last the despoilers grow fat, revelling in their gain, while their victims starve in desolation or slay themselves to escape from their despair ; if that is the finale of the matter, to be left there an enigma of injustice, it is impossible by any smooth words to cover the fact of utter inequity. Striking and true though Emerson s fig ure be that we cannot have sin without immediate punishment, any more than we can have positive magnetism at one end of a needle without negative magnetism at the other, the analogy does not cover the case. When Roman soldiers take the loftiest soul that ever blessed the earth, and mock him, spit upon him, crown him with thorns and crucify him ; when the scene ends with a scribe wagging his head and calling, "Save thyself," while from the cross the cry comes down, "My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" and when we believe that to be the last of the matter, scribe and Christ alike annihilated, and in a few aeons their influence even, good or bad, brought inconsequentially to an end in the planet s dissolution, a profound injustice is there asserted which no glozing words can hide. The demand for justice is not a cry for vengeance, nor, as Emerson suggests, a desire that the oppressed shall share at some future time the sort of pleasure in which their oppressors revelled here. The demand for justice requires that a solution shall be reached, in which the oppressors, brought to their senses by the reforming influence of punishment or by the con quering power of love, shall join with the oppressed, redeemed from their disasters, and that together both shall bear a part in some universal consummation that is ade quate to explain and justify the strife and suffering of earth. Without that, reason ableness and justice, in any connotation known to man, cannot be affirmed of the world.

"Right forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," how all the vicarious servants of humanity bear witness to it ! Only of a universe that preserves its moral gains, and resolves to harmony the dissonance of its inequities, can justice be asserted "But that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above his own."

Without immortality all such hopeful outlook on the future becomes impossible. Society itself, then, has a limited existence. As another put it, the social task of humanity, with all its cost in blood and tears that righteousness may reign, is, from the standpoint of the everlasting ages, as unenduring as Michael Angelo s, when Pietro, the tyrant, commissioned him to scoop up snow in the Via Larga, and with painstaking art model a statue that before evening would melt in the Italian sun. That this thought of the consummation of the long, sacrificial struggle of humanity, when it is fully and universally believed and understood, will blight the deepest incentives for social service, has been the fear even of those who were convinced that such a consummation is the inevitable end. Professor Goldwin Smith in a nota ble essay, published in 1904 in the North American Review, speaks frankly of his apprehension that when all men believe, as he does, that immortality is false, the soul of public-mindedness will die and the great inspirations perish that have motived our social service and our passion for democracy. "A man of sense (disbeliev ing in immortality)," he concludes, "will probably be satisfied to let reforms alone, and to consider how he may best go through the journey of life with comfort and, if possible, with enjoyment to himself." Such is the testimony of a great man to the con sequences of his own creed.

If it be asserted that the truth of immor tality does not prevent a lamentable end to humanity s long, sacrificial toil, the answer is evident at once. The purpose of all social service is man s progress in character. The horrors of the white slave traffic, of tenements in city slums, and of corruption in city government, the evils of war and drunkenness and tyranny, all lie in this, that they debase, demoralize and in the end utterly ruin the characters of men. The exhaustless motive for philanthropy is not that we are toning down life s worst iniquities until our ultimate dissolution comes, but that we are altering the environ ments that are inimical to personal charac ter, and that personal character is an eternal matter, the one means by which the uni verse can preserve its moral gains. The infinite value of personality, which immor tality asserts, makes any fight for social justice worth while. When the modern man, therefore, is nonchalant about the affirmation or denial of a future life, he is nonchalant about all the deepest problems of humanity. The denial of immortality introduces us into a world where men are flesh with a transient spiritual aspect; where there are no per manent elements save the physical forces which build solar systems and destroy them; where earth throws away with utter carelessness its most precious treas ures, never resolves to harmony the dis sonance of its inequities and has no way of preserving its moral gains; where no eternal value in personality motives sacri fice for spiritual quality in the individual or furnishes basis for passionate and hope ful service to the race. If life eternal is not true, that is our world, and sooner or later men will find it out. To such a world we must accommodate ourselves as best we can, if immortality is false. This plain issue to the creed of annihila tion induces many a thoughtful man, who has traced to their last blind alley the hopes of humanity in a world where death ends all, to assert the truth of immortality, not because he can prove it, as he can the multiplication table or the expanding power of heat, but because he finds it necessary, as an adventure of faith, to make the uni verse reasonable.