EVIDENCES OF MAN'S IMMORTALITY.
UNLESS you accept the testimony of the Bible as
conclusive, what evidence have you of God's existence
and man's immortality?—GLADSTONE.
The same evidence that we would have of
the existence of the ocean were one drop of water
withdrawn, of the life of a forest, were a single leaf to
fall. The Bible did not create man's belief in God's
existence and his own immortality, but of this belief, old
as Zoroaster, antedating Babylon, was the Bible born. It
is simply an outward evidence of man's inward grace. I
do accept the testimony of the Bible, but only as one of a
cloud of witnesses. In questions of such grave import,
we cannot have too much evidence; hence it is strange
indeed that anyone should make the Bible the sole
foundation of his faith, should take his stand upon an
infinitesimal portion of what the world knew in ages past.
The Bible is but one of many sacred books in which man
has borne witness that he is the favored creature of an
Almighty Being, but one voice in a multitude singing
hosannas to the Most High, a single note in the mighty
diapason of the universe.
A hundred men are shipwrecked upon an
island in the Arctic Ocean. By day and night they dream
of absent friends, of mother, wife and child, the pleasant
meadows or the sunny hills of their distant homes.
Hourly they scan the horizon with eager eyes. Daily they
ask each other, “Is there hope?” All former
animosities are forgotten, for they are brothers in
misfortune. One declares that the island lies in the
pathway of a regular line of steamers, and that they must
soon be rescued. This view is approved by many, and
their hearts beat high with hope. Their sufferings are
borne with cheerfulness, their
hardships appear trivial, for their probation is soon to
pass and they will be at home. Another avers that they
are too far north to be reached by the ocean liners, but
that a whaler will soon be due in that vicinity, and all will
be well. This view is approved by some, and thus there
are two parties confidently expecting succor, but from
different sources. A third studies the map, notes the
advanced season, inspects the food supply and shakes
his head. “We shall be lost,” he says;
“desire has misled your judgment; you do but
dream.” Do the two parties that entertain hope
strive, each to disprove the theory of the other, and unite
in persecuting the dissenter? No; they reason together,
each anxious to ascertain the truth, knowing that it will
profit him nothing to believe a lie. Suddenly a cry is
heard, “A sail!” Do those who put their trust in
the whaler turn their backs to the sea and say, “Oh,
H—l! that's only one of those regular steamship heretics!
no rag of canvas will he discover!” Do those who
were destitute of hope decline to look? No; all rush to
the shore, and strain their eyes to penetrate the mist,
little caring whether it be whaler or steamer, so they do
but see a ship. When one makes out the vessel, he is
not content until the eyes of others confirm his vision,
and all look, not with the jealous hope that he may be
wrong, but with an earnest prayer that he may be right.
That island is this little earth, its shipwrecked mariners all
sons of men; yet how different we set about determining
whether, from out the everlasting sea that encircles us,
there comes indeed a Ship of Zion to succor and to save!
What one man believes or disbelieves is a
matter of little moment; for belief will not put gods on
High Olympus, nor unbelief extinguish the fires of Hell.
Man can neither create nor uncreate the actual by a
mental emanation. If Deity exists, he would continue to
exist did a universe
deny him; if he exists not, then all the faith and prayers
and sacrifices of a thousand centuries will not evolve him
from the night of nothingness. There is or there is not a
life beyond the grave, regardless of the denial of every
atheist and the affirmation of every prophet. Then what
boots it whether we believe or disbelieve in God's
existence or man's immortality? Nothing, in so far as it
concerns the factual; much, in that upon our hopes and
fears is based our terrestrial bane or blessing. Banish all
belief in God, eliminate the idea of man's responsibility to
a higher power, make him the sole lord of his life and
earthly good his greatest guerdon, and you destroy the
dynamics of progress, the genius of civilization. Man has
a tendency to become what he believes himself to be.
Consciously or unconsciously, he strives with less or
greater strength toward his ideal; hence it is all-important
that he consider himself an immortal rather than the
pitiful sport of Time and Space; a child of Omniscience,
rather than the ephemeral emanation of unclean ooze.
Had man always considered himself simply an animal, his
tendencies would have been ever earthward; believing
himself half divine, he has striven to mount above the
stars. True, many great men have been Atheists; but
they were formed by ancestry and environment
permeated by worship of Divine power. Without a belief
in his own semi-divinity to lead the race onward and
upward, the conditions which produce a Voltaire or
Ingersoll were impossible. Civilization is further advanced
than ever before, and Atheism more general; but those
who employ this fact as argument against religious faith
forget that a body thrown upward will continue to
ascend for a time after it has parted from the propelling
power. Atheism is in nowise responsible for human
progress, for Atheism is nothing—a mere negation—and
“out of nothing nothing comes.” A belief in
God affords man
a basis upon which to build; it is an acknowledgment of
authority, the chief prerequisite of order; but in Atheism
there is no constructive element. While it may be no
more immoral to deny the existence of Deity than to
question the Wondrous Tale of Troy, history teaches us
that, considered from a purely utilitarian standpoint, the
most absurd faith is better for a nation than none; that
the civic virtues do not long survive the sacrifice; that
when a people desert their altars their glories soon decay.
The civilization of the world has been time and again
imperiled by the spirit of Denial. When Rome began to
mock her gods, she found the barbarians thundering at
her gates. When France insulted her priesthood and
crowned a courtesan as Goddess of Reason in Notre
Dame, Paris was a maelstrom and the nation a chaos in
which Murder raged and Discord shrieked. To-day we
are boasting of our progress, but 'tis the onward march
of Jaganath, beneath whose iron wheels patriotism,
honesty, purity and the manly spirit of independence are
crushed into the mire. We have drifted into an
Atheistical age, and its concomitants are selfishness,
sensationalism and sham. The old heartiness and
healthiness have gone out of life, have been supplanted
by the artificial. Everything is now show and seeming—
“leather and prunella”—the body social become
merely a galvanic machine or electric motor. In our
gran'sire's day “the great man helped the poor, and
the poor man loved the great”; now the great man
systematically despoils the poor and the poor man
regards the great with a feeling of envy and hatred akin
to that of which the French Revolution was born.
Character no longer counts for aught unless reinforced by
a bank account. Men who have despoiled the widow of
her mite and the orphan of his patrimony are hailed with
the acclaim due to conquering heroes. Our most
successful books and periodicals would pollute a
Parisian sewer or disgrace a Portuguese bagnio. The
suffrages of the people are bought and sold like sheep. The
national policy is dictated by Dives. Men are sent to
Congress whom God intended for the gallows, while
those he ticketed for the penitentiary spout inanities in
fashionable pulpits. The merchant who pays his debts in
full when he might settle for ten cents on the dollar is
considered deficient in common sense. The grandsons of
Revolutionary soldiers, who considered themselves the
equal of kings and the superior of wear the livery of
lackeys to obtain an easy living. Presidents save seven-figure fortunes on five-figure salaries and are applauded
by people who profess to be respectable. Governors
waste the public revenues in suppressing pugilistic
enterprises, begotten of their own encouragement, only
to be reëlected by fools and slobbered over by
pharisees. Bradley-Martin balls are given while half a
million better people go hungry to bed. Friendship has
become a farce, the preface of fraud. Revolting crimes
increase and sexuality is tinged with the infamy of the
Orient. Men who were too proud to borrow leave sons
who are not ashamed to beg. In man great riches are
preferable to a good name, and in woman a silken gown
covers a multitude of sins. The homely virtues of the old
mothers in Israel are mocked, while strumpets fouler than
Sycorax are received in society boasting itself select.
Why is this? It is because the old religious spirit is
dormant if not dead; it is because when people consider
themselves but as the beasts that perish, they can make
no spiritual progress, but imitate their supposed
ancestors. Religion is becoming little more than a luxury,
the temple a sumptuous palace wherein people ennuied
with themselves may parade their costly clothes, have
their jaded passions soothed by sensuous music, their
greed for the bizarre satiated by sensational sermons.
This being true, the question of evidence of
God's existence and man's immortality becomes the
most important ever propounded. The devout worshiper
points to his Sacred Book; but we have had Sacred
Books in abundance so far back as we can trace human
history, yet the wave of Atheism, of Unbelief, rises ever
higher and higher—threatens to engulf the world. After
nearly nineteen centuries of earnest proselyting less than
a third of the world has accepted Christianity, and in
those countries professedly Christian, Atheism flourishes
as it does nowhere else. Of more than seventy million
Americans, less than twenty-four million are church
communicants, and it is doubtful if half of these really
believe the Bible. Beecher criticized it almost as freely as
does Ingersoll, while a number of prominent preachers of
the Briggs-Abbott brand are even now explaining, in the
pulpit and the press, that it is little more than a collection
of myths. The people are drifting ever further from the
Book of Books, and the pulpit appears ambitious to lead
the procession. It is idle to urge that man should believe
the Bible; for man should believe nothing, man can
believe nothing but what receives the sanction of his
reason. He is no more responsible for what he believes
or disbelieves than for the color of his eyes or the place
of birth. He may deceive the world with a false
profession of faith, but can deceive neither God nor
himself. The mind of even the worst of men is a court in
which every cause is tried with rigid impartiality, with
absolute honesty. A fool may mislead it, a child may
convince it, but not even its possessor can coerce it;
hence to command one to “believe,” without
first providing him with a satisfactory basis for his faith,
were an idle waste of breath. A man is no more
blamable for doubting the existence of Deity than for
doubting aught else that may seem to him absurd. He
doubts
because the evidence submitted is unsatisfactory, or his
mind is incapable of properly analyzing it. Probably none
of the Sacred Books ever yet convinced an intelligent
human being that there is aught in the universe greater
than himself. I do not mean by this that the Bible and
the Koran, the Zend-Avesta and the Vedas are all false,
but that there is lack of sufficient evidence that they are
true. Those who accept them do so because they
harmonize with their own half-conscious religious
conceptions, because their truth is established by
esoteric rather than by exoteric evidence. All attempts to
supplant Buddhism and Mohammedanism by Christianity
have proven futile, and that because the former do while
Christianity does not voice the religious sentiment of the
Orient, a sentiment which exists regardless of their
Sacred Books, and of which the latter are but indications.
You can no more demonstrate the truth of the Bible to a
Hindu than you can demonstrate the truth of the Vedas
to a Christian, for in either case outward evidence is
wanting and the subject is not
en rapport with
the new doctrine. It is not infrequently urged that
evidence sufficient to convince Mr. Gladstone should
likewise convince Col. Ingersoll. And so it doubtless
would in a court of law; but in matters spiritual what may
appear “confirmation strong as proofs of Holy
Writ” to the one may seem an absurdity absolute to
the other. Neither had the pleasure of Moses'
acquaintance. All witnesses of his miracles have been
dead so long that their very graves are forgotten. There
is nothing in the accounts, however, violative of Mr.
Gladstone's conception of Deity, hence he finds no
difficulty in accepting them. To Col. Ingersoll, however,
there is something ridiculous in the idea of the Creator of
the Cosmos become a bonfire and holding a private
confab with the stuttering Hebrew. He demands
undisputable evidence, it is not forthcoming,
and he brands the story as a fraud. For the same reason
that Mr. Gladstone accepts the miracles of Moses he
accepts Christ as the Savior; for the same reason that he
denies the burning bush, Col. Ingersoll denies Christ's
divinity. The story of a suffering Savior appeals directly
to Mr. Gladstone's heart, but it gets no further than Col.
Ingersoll's head. The one tries it by his sympathies, the
other by the rules of evidence that obtain in a court of
law. In summing up, Col. Ingersoll might say: It has not
been demonstrated to the satisfaction of this court that
Jesus ever claimed to be “the only begotten Son of
God.” The testimony to the effect that he raised the
dead, walked upon the waves, came forth from the grave
and ascended bodily into Heaven, appears to be all
hearsay, and by witnesses of unknown credibility. If we
consider the impression made upon his contemporaries,
we find that his miracles and resurrection failed to
convince those best qualified to analyze evidence. He
seems to have been regarded as nothing more than a
popular religious reformer or schismatic. From the New
Testament we learn that he did not found a new faith,
but lived and died in that of his fathers—that it is
impossible to follow the instruction of Jesus without
becoming in religion a Jew. As he was the sixteenth
savior the world has crucified, his tragic death does not
prove him divine. As immaculate conceptions were quite
common among the Greeks and Romans, with whom
both he and his immediate following came much in
contact, I incline to the view that he entered the world in
the good old way.
Granting the correctness of such a
conclusion, it does not necessarily follow that Jesus was
not heaven-sent, or that he was in any way unworthy the
love and veneration of the world. The proposition of the
eloquent Father Brannan that Jesus was either in very
truth the only
begotten Son of the Father, or an impious fraud
deserving execration, is only tenable on the supposition
that the language attributed to him by New Testament
writers is properly authenticated. When we remember
that the art of printing had not then been invented; that
Christ wrote nothing himself; that the record of his life
was probably not composed until he had been long dead;
that the besetting sin of the East is exaggeration; that it
was the custom of the Greeks, in whose language the
New Testament was first written, to assign a heavenly
origin to popular heroes, we must concede that there is
some reason for doubt whether Jesus ever claimed to be
other than the son of Joseph the carpenter. Granting
that his life and language are correctly reported, that he
was indeed Divinity: The fact remains that a vast
majority of mankind decline to accept him as such; that
while the church is striving with so little success to raise
his standard in Paynim lands, Atheism is striking its roots
ever deeper into our own. The church should recognize
the fact that no man is an Atheist from choice. Deep in
the heart of every human being is implanted a horror of
annihilation. A man may become reconciled to the idea,
just as he may become resigned to the necessity of being
hanged; but he strives as desperately to escape the one
as he does to avoid the other. Does the church owe any
duty to the honest doubter, further than the reiteration of
a dogma which his reason rejects? When he asks for
evidence of God's existence, Judaism points him to the
miracles of Moses, Christianity to those of Jesus,
Mohammedanism to the revelations of its prophet; and if
he find these beyond his comprehension or violative of
his reason, they dismiss him with a gentle reminder that
“the fool hath said in his heart there is no
God.” He retorts by accusing his critics either of
superstitious ignorance or rank dishonesty, so honors are
easy.
He is told that if he doesn't perform the impossible—work
a miracle by altering the construction of his own mind—he
will be damned, and is touched up semi-occasionally by
the pulpiteers as an emissary of the devil. Being thus put
on the defensive, he undertakes to demonstrate that all
revealed religions are a fraud deliberately perpetrated by
the various priesthoods. He searches through their
Sacred Books for contradictions and absurdities, and not
without success; proves that their God knew little about
astronomy and less about geography; then sits him down
“over against” the church, like Jonah squatting
under his miraculous gourd-vine in the suburbs of
Nineveh, and confidently expects to see it collapse. He
imagines that in pointing out a number of evident errors
and inconsistencies in “revealed religion” he
has hit Theism in its stronghold; but he hasn't. He has
but torn and trampled the ragged vestments of religion,
struck at non-essentials, called attention to the clumsy
manner in which finite man has bodied forth his idea of
Infinity—has made the unskillful laugh and the judicious
grieve. In an ignorant age the supernatural appeals most
powerfully to the people; hence it is not strange that
revealed religion, so-called, should have been grounded
upon the miraculous; but the passage of the Red Sea, the
raising of Lazarus and kindred wonders are not readily
accepted in an enlightened era, and are utilized by
scoffers to bring all religion into contempt. We can
scarce conceive of God being reduced to the necessity of
violating his own laws to demonstrate his presence and
power. While it were presumption to ask any church to
abate one jot or tittle of its dogma, it seems to me that
all would gain by relying less upon the “evidential
value of the miracles”; that a broader, nobler basis
can be found for religious faith, one more in accord with
the wisdom and dignity of the great All-Father than
tradition of signs and
wonders in a foreign land in the long ago. Had God
desired to personally manifest himself unto man, to deliver
a code of laws, to establish a particular form of worship,
it is reasonable to suppose that he would have done so in
a manner that would have left no doubt in the mind of
any man, of any age or clime, anent either his divinity or
his desires. That he has not done this, argues that all
“revealed religions” are but the voices of the
godlike within man, rather than direct revelations from
without. All religions are fundamentally the same, and
each is the highest spiritual concept of its devotees.
Whence came the gods of the ancient Greek and
Egyptian, of the Mede and Persian? If they were made
known by direct revelation, how came they to be false
gods? If they were the result of a spirit of worship
inherent in all men, who implanted that spirit? If God, he
must have done so for a purpose, and what purpose
other than to enable man to work out his own salvation?
Would we not expect him to operate through this spirit
for universal guidance, rather than leave the world in
darkness while he retired to an obscure corner thereof
and practiced legerdemain for the edification of a few
half-civilized people? If we adopt the internal instead of
the external view of the origin of Judaism and
Christianity, all the other Sacred Books range themselves
about the Bible and with it bear witness that man is the
creature of Design and not a freak of Chance. We bring
to confirm the teachings of Moses and Christ and the
wise Zoroaster, the loving Gautama, the patient Mahomet,
the priests and prophets of every clime, the altars
of every age, the countless millions, who, since man's
advent on the earth, have worshiped the All-in-All. If this
be not basis broad enough for man's belief, add thereto
the story of God's wisdom written in the stars and the
never-ceasing anthem of the sea; the history of every
consecrated
man who has died for man, whether his name
be Christ or Damien; the song of every bird and the
gleam of every beauty; the eternal truth that shines in a
mother's eyes, the laughter of little children and the
leonine courage of creation's lord; every burning tear that
has fallen on the face of the dead, and every cry of
anguish that has gone up from the open grave to the
throne of the Living God. Were not this
“revelation” enough? Yet 'tis but the binding
of humanity's Sacred Book, of that Universal Bible in
which God speaks from the age and from hour to hour to
all who have ears to hear.
The fact that man desires immortality is proof
enough that he was not born to perish. 'Tis a
“direct revelation” to the individual, if he will
but heed it—will get out of the grime of the man-created
city, with its artificialities, into the God-created country,
where he may hear the “still small voice”
speaking to that subtler sense, which in animals is
instinct, in man is inspiration. There is no error in the
ordering of the universe. It was not jumbled together by
self-created “force,” operating in accordance
with “laws” self-evolved from chaos, on matter
which, like Mrs. Stowe's juvenile nigger, “jis
growed.” It is the work of a Master who
“ordereth all things well.” Beauty might be
born of Chance, but only Omniscience could have
decreed the adoration it inspires. Hate might spring from
the womb of Chaos, but Love must be the child of Order.
Pain might be begotten of monsters, but only Infinite
wisdom could have invented Sorrow. Nature does not
put feathers on fishes, fins on birds, nor give aught that
lives an impossible desire or an objectless instinct. Then
why should man desire immortality, why should he fear
annihilation more than the fires of Hell? During a third of
his life he is unconscious, and annihilation is but an ever—
dreamless sleep. Whether he sleeps the sleep of health
or that of death, an hour and an eternity are the same to
him; yet he desires the one and dreads the other. If
man's fierce longing for immortal life is not to be
gratified, then is the whole universe a cruel lie; its
wonderful arrangement from star to flower, its careful
adaptation of means to ends, the provision for the
satisfaction of every sense, an arrant fraud, a colossal
falsehood. If there be no God, then is creation a
calamity; if there be a God and no immortality for man,
then it is a crime.
God does not reveal himself to beasts, nor to
men of brutish minds. How can those who have no ear
for music, no eye for beauty, hear the melody of the
universe or comprehend the symmetry of the All? What
need have those for immortality to whom love is only
lust, charity a pander to pride, a full stomach the greatest
good and gold a god? It is these who become
“motive grinders,” dig genius out of the earth
like spuds and goobers, and achieve perpetual motion by
making the universe a self-operative machine needing
neither key nor steam generator to “make it
go.” They pride themselves, sometimes justly, on
their reasoning powers; but the product of their logic-mill
is like artificial flowers, as unprofitable as the icy kiss of
the Venus de Medici. Of that knowledge gleaned in the
Vale of Sorrow they know nothing; of that wisdom which
cannot be demonstrated by the laws of logic they have
no more conception than has a mole of the glories of the
morning. They are of the earth earthy. To make them
understand a message God would have to typewrite it,
add the seal of a notary public and deliver it in person.
They hear not the silver tones of Memnon, heed not the
wondrous messages that come from the dumb lips of the
dead. They search through musty tomes and explore
long-forgotten languages to prove the rhapsodies of some
old prophet false, while the grave of the babe that was
buried
yesterday is more than a prophecy—is an Ark of the
Covenant.
