Many people advance into religion out of indifference through some suddenly aroused curiosity or concern about death, the question of survival, and the almost daily evidence of our precarious plight in the world. A calamity in their domestic experience may prove a gateway into a mental and spiritual sphere of which previously they knew next to nothing and only at second-hand or by hearsay.
If anxiety and attention proceed further than the egoist query “What about me when my body is buried, as it will be before long?” such an initial shock and ferment are salutary. If solicitude stops at that, the result can hardly be called genuine saving religion; it remains–what the cynics and enemies of faith would like to call all religion–camouflaged fear, a soothing draught, an insurance policy, or an opiate. Before religion deserving the great name is properly ours, it must be far more selfless, objective, and God-regarding.
But we will assume that as a very frequent starting-point for moderns. Undoubtedly it fascinates millions, whether treated unskillfully and sentimentally in the popular papers, or skeptically by some anthropologist, or in occult ways in a seance of spiritists, or in more or less orthodox sermons. Most men and women, in short, whose yearnings and faculties have not been stunted by “this ignorant present,”and whose souls are not subdued to what they work in, will listen intently to clear statements on this subject. It is for such that these lines are written.
We can dispense even with the great philosophic proofs of the immateriality and indestructibility of the soul, sound as those are for their purpose. These only establish the persistence of the human spirit: They are silent as to the quality of that continuance, silent upon the weal or woe of the posthumous being. Now it is precisely this question of quality, character, progress, and blessedness which interests the thoughtful. It is not enough to know that personality is imperishable except by a definite act of annihilation by the same Creator who caused its being; that annihilation would be just as much an act of power as creation is, and we have no reason in the world to suppose that he would exert power to that end. Mere continuance, to some human entities, will be no boon in itself. What kind of futurity and what kind of soul is to experience it are the questions that really concern us as sensitive, moral beings. We want not the pagan hades nor the early Hebrew sheol, nor limbo, nor the dreary prolongation of this secular present: We look surely to unfolding faculty, emergent powers, and fresh discovery in the wonders of God.
So natural and innate and strong is the urge toward more and fuller life, so oppressive is the evidence outside of us for our frail tenure and our swift oblivion in the world’s eye, that even non-believers in God have to extemporize some kind of substitute to calm them or to offset against the apparent not-worthwhileness of things.
So we get the strenuously cheerful theory that though you and I will before long be food for worms, nevertheless our memory survives, and our transmitted blood runs in our children’s veins, and possibly some pictures or books we have made will outlast us a few years. We shall live “in the soul of the race.”
Sometimes it is put that way, flatly. But sometimes it is accompanied by defiance and rhetoric. “I don’t want immortality! I would get tired of myself. Besides, unlike some people, I don’t fear to make an end. I’ve had my swing, and isn’t it selfish to want to go on and on? Is anybody important or interesting enough to preserve? Think of the race, not of self. Moreover, I don’t see what I could be doing an eon hence; I’m interested in my present and in the immediately practical future. And–“
I could go on indefinitely thus, giving the negative side of the matter. But let us untie the few strings we already have.
Not once, please notice, has the typical objector to immortality for the soul raised the issue of its objective truth or falsity. He has been airing his preferences and tastes. This lordly indifference to survival, in those who proclaim it, is more or less genuine in some cases and less genuine in the rest. It is fashionable, for one thing, and that should make it suspect. The sentiment fairly sure of applause will be uttered oftener than it need be.
Extinction is a bitter pill to most normal, vital, and moderately reflective people; therefore, if possible, such people have to be persuaded that they are of better steel than those who cling to the belief in spiritual continuance of the individual. It is not easy, though, to see why indifference to life, personality, and the continuity of a spiritual history should be a special mark of superiority; the contrary would seem to be likelier.
Such disputants should be reminded that they, and we, and all individuals are rapidly forgotten after death. Our children, but hardly our grandchildren, recall us from time to time. Our work is incorporated mostly anonymously, with the general sum of work. In the case only of one in a million does it endure, for identification, as long as the carving on the tombstone. It is marvelous, in view of these facts, what rhetoric will accomplish for some sanguine imaginations.
The theory of earthly survival need not be taken seriously. When Mr. J. B. S. Haldane says, “I shall last out my time and then finish–this prospect does not worry me, because some of my works will not die when I do,” he convinces no discriminative mind that the loss and evil of extinction are mitigated merely because a few day-tasks (a pale and fragmentary shadow of personality at best) survive his real self by a few years. Not to fear death is a different and finer thing altogether. But, as has been pointed out, death is not the same idea as obliteration, and the man who does not fear death may well and should dread extinction.
Much of this brave talk comes of a muddled imagination. Many of those who utter it are curiously enthusiasts for earthly longevity and health. Mr. H. G. Wells has been pertinently asked why, if he would welcome the prospect of playing an active part in the adventure of life in 1980, he should reject as ignoble the prospect of walking on in a great spiritual drama staged elsewhere in 2960 and afterwards. There is no lucid reply to such a puncturing inquiry.
It is odd. To these eugenists and this-world zealots it is of great importance that X and Y shall exist for sixty years rather than fifty (life is so good), but don’t you know, it is of no importance if they cease to exist entirely at sixty, instead of continuing to develop in all eternity (life is so indifferent). As in other sleight-of-hand, the quickness of the wrist deceives the eye. But deception is not intended–or at least it is shared by the speaker. He means it for thought.
Some frequently strive to establish inconsistently a doctrine of reverence for the rights, dignity, and liberty of the individual and toil to suggest that the universe or God is blankly indifferent to individuality. This only shows that men’s thoughts often walk in Indian file, without context, or that men may be excellent biologists and excellent novelists yet not be excellent thinkers.
Science again discourages hopes of earthly paradises; so does experience of human nature in the present as in the past. Any human evolution that is just or is worthwhile (to ourselves living now, to the men of the past, or the men to be born in the next few centuries) will have to be a spiritual one and be in the individual. No mundane utopia will arrive in time for them; the earth’s limit of existence puts a term to any such utopia, if indeed it doesn’t precede such utopia; and thirdly, the over-men of this mythical novelist’s future, for whom we (and Plato and Paul) are supposed to be the humble preparatory manure, will be poor things when they do hatch if they are earth-bound, non-spiritual, and without devotional windows into the Unseen. Super-men ar e only a large variety of ant. Let us keep them for boys’ stories.
Then why does the output of this thin stuff persist? Why such arguments, the second clauses of which parody the first? From personal knowledge of certain of the speakers, I should say the reason is that they are affected somewhat by an obscure emotional condition which has been diagnosed as Theophobia. Yet as education spreads, more and more people become capable each year of seeing that pictures of a perpetually receding earthly millennium do not answer but only dodge the prior and more important question of the destiny of the individual and the conservation of spiritual values. That is your business and mine, not some problematical Hygienic Age in the year 3800 or beyond, in which, if they are still dodgers of spiritual issues, men will be still a dull lot, as significant as bees, beavers, or robots.
There are sometimes also heard–not often, indeed, because it is a cheerless theory and therefore not popular–theorists who suggest that these souls of ours at death are “reabsorbed” into the divine. Let us explore the thick, unpromising fog of this remark.
“Re”-absorbed begs the whole question of our creation and origin. Philosophy and theology nowhere state that, to begin with, we were ever absorbed in the divine Being. Indeed, theology denies it as grotesque irreverence, and lucid philosophy merely looks at the confused phrase to pass on to real issues.
Next, these absorption notions betray an astonishing misapprehension of the very nature of self-conscious mind or spirit. They slur over the quintessential point, that it is individuality. There is indeed no such thing as “spirit” in general, “mind” at large, or “life” undifferentiated. There are only separate spirits. There are only distinct, individuated minds and persons. There are only specific living entities. People who talk otherwise have but been imposed upon by the shorthand abstract terms of the classroom.
We live in a blizzard of such misleading terms and unrealities. They are all very well for brevity’s sake and convenience, but when we solemnly mistake our own conceptual abbreviations for outlying reality, we are soon in the city of beautiful nonsense. When persons, no matter whether professors, or esoteric Buddhists, or materialists, or just guessers talk portentiously about these divinely-separated and deliberately-willed spirits of ours being immersed, absorbed, or mixed into Deity, they must be assured firmly but politely that they have mistaken their subject and probably their vocation and should use these rude materialistic images and corporeal analogies in a chemical works or a drainage area, for they are pitiably inappropriate in the realm of spiritual entities with moral accountability and responsible relations (both ways) with our intelligent Creator.
The soul of a rational person can no more be said to be swallowed up at death in the vastly different and superior nature and personality of God than the soul of your child at its death is assimilated by you its parent. Even if the image were intelligible, as it is not, it would be sub-moral, sub-personal, zoomorphic and therefore revolting to that which makes us men. Such an odd fancy (asserted glibly by the way, without a tittle or shred of evidence) would depress our idea of the power and distinctiveness of the Godhead to something less than our experience of human personality; it would equate it with those humbler forms of zoological life which consume their offspring. Yet cloudy generalizations like that have passed for thinking.
People, looking at the speaker’s reputation rather than testing what he is offering, have been disturbed by his words, all of which would have been obviated had they seen that the mere word “absorption” gave him away as one who does not know the first thing about his subject, either on its psychological side or its theological. No trained thinker could make such a gaffe as to import clumsy quantitativ e measurements into an inexpressibly opposite order of reality, the ethical, metaphysical, and vital.
It is, first, completely unintelligible why divine wisdom should create vividly real selves, articulate them, endow them with amazing faculties, discipline and temper them, enter into complex personal and intelligent relations with them, and encourage their hopes, merely to lead up to an insensate gesture of destruction or digestion. The notion is a gratuitous reflection upon divine foresight and nobility.
Secondly, this confusion of thought ignores the grave fact that such absorption is a dead loss of value to the universe. It takes two at least to love or know. If all are swallowed into some primal unitary essence, then no love, knowledge, or reciprocal intelligence plays over the lightless deeps at all.
“Union,” yes, but union with God or aught else demands separateness and distinction. It is a dignified relationship of conscious spirits respecting each other’s frontiers and autonomy. Mere gross fusion is a brutal violation of the sacredness of a spiritual entity. It is a deliberate blurring of the page which the mind of God has carefully articulated. Let there be no muddled claim that a confusion of distinctness is somehow or other more “unselfish” than the Christian doctrine of living on as centers conscious to God and giving him exterior glory.
The denial of selfhood is a vastly different thing from self-denial and renders true self-denial or self-expression or anything else impossible. It is as wanton as would be upsetting the draughts-board as a “solution.” If we want anything it is to take God’s world to our hearts, not to become that world. We should hate to “lose” ourselves even in God; what he and we wish is to find ourselves in him.
Other theories are often fallacies (probably verbal errors in argument, aided by popular corruptions) from the East and still further travestied by novices here. Out of the East have come homeless, wandering, nomadic tribes, shapeless and destructive as water–and, like that, vanishing. Thence come vague theories, picturing man as fluid, dissipated into formlessness.
Hence poor languid thinking. It is non-moral–Christianity has redeemed our intellect from such daydreaming.
As Baron von Hugel said: “When we believe in creation, and in each single soul’s free will, we profess the belief that somehow God has given each a relative independence of its own, that he has set up (relative but still real) obstacles, limits, friction, as it were, against himself. This barrier is absolutely necessary for us, for though God was and could ever be without us, God is no more God for us if we cease to be relatively distinct from him. Let the drop be put in the ocean, and for the drop there is neither any more ocean nor drop. And pray note, that the difference is not by any means simply one of size, of quantity, or relative degree of worth; it is essentially quite as much one of quality, of nature altogether. It can never become identity, and it can never simply correspond or supplement. . . . In the Incarnation he gave our relative independence a quite absolute worth, he took as it were sides with his own handiwork against himself and gave us the rampart of his tender, strong humanity against the crushing opposition of the pure time- and space-less eternal and absolute of himself.”
Thus, many secular comments nowadays on God and man and their relation are vitiated by the poverty or non-existence of the speaker’s idea of the niceness of the divine nature in kind, its holiness. They do not see that the wholeness of the divine Being could gain naught from such incorporation of his moral creatures; that by it they would lose their all; that morally he could not so dispose of responsible moral centers, begotten by his thought and love, ” words ” framed by his social intelligence, since by the fact of giving them to their own recognizing consciousness and holding di vine colloqu y with them, his responsibility to them is absolute, transcending in kind and degree any responsibility we have toward others.
Remember, too, as said above, that at the wanton blotting out of each selfhood, a mental universe and a personal relationship are obliterated; conceive such acts of annihilating fusion multiplied, and a whole moral and spiritual universe is wiped out–a result very considerably worse than if it had never been.
This pseudo-idea, then, surely succeeds only in picturing a world-process self-consuming, self-stultified, and anti-rational, the foe of personality and distinctions. It has appealed to some tired races, it accords with some abstracted tempers addicted to dreams and trance states, but it is more pathological than logical, more temperamental than mental, more phantasmal than ethical. It is the child of the lotus, not of the Logos.
Then there is the vague, uncriticized assumption of many ordinary people that, when we die, the body returns to its elements and the conscious soul just continues exactly as it was here in the body, but discarnate forever. How they reconcile this with the resurrection they may not even try to make clear to themselves. What positive faculties render a soul eligible for heaven is not closely inquired nor whether there is a hell–many hope not–nor what is the function of a purifying middle state. Millions of English-speaking people at this hour have a notion of it as sketchy as primitive races, yet their curiosity is profound, their lack of outline pathetic. The afterlife is thought of, if at all, as simply everlastingness. That Christianity denies these assumptions they do not suspect; they are under the impression that these derive from Christianity. Yet the unique Christian doctrine of eternal life utterly transcends all that. Its heaven is profoundly antipathetic also to the dusky picture of the Spiritualists; its motivation is entirely different.
Its clue to the triumph over death and darkness is stupendous. It is this: “This is life eternal–that they might know thee, the true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.” To know, to love–to commune with the divine–that and nothing less is the secret of immortality in the distinct Christian sense–not passivity, not wishing, not peering into the abyss for dubious ghosts that peep and mutter, not “doing nobody any harm,” not ideas of “making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before,” not Nirvana, nor absorption, nor outward conformity with observances– these are really beside the main point to Christianity which, like an eagle to the sun, goes straight to the Source of life. Life eternal is to know God by love, faith, and possession (not in intellectual formulae, which is beyond us).
The eternal life is not merely to live, to exist. It is this–to know, to perform spiritual functions, of prayer and communion, desire and love. It is a happy, full work and career. It is dynamic and active, and it is meant to begin in the soul here and now while we are in the body. Indeed it must if it is to germinate and establish itself at all.
This teaching is absolutely sui generis among all religions and is sufficient to strike every attentive observer with awe and wonder. We will return to it, with some graphic quotations, after we have glanced at one modern and dangerous error which distracts simple or perversely inquisitive people from their sole saving course. I mean Spiritualism (not psychic research as a science, but the cult of spirits as a quasi-religion).
Spiritualism is based on illusions which are anti-scientific and anti-philosophic. Let us look at several.
Loose popular phraseology, which may pass muster at the fireside or on a bus stop, is sheer mischief often when taken literally in important matters of belief and definition. It imposes on untrained and unwary minds. To talk, for instance, of the soul “leaving the body” is primitively pictorial, and, as it suggests a sort of local moti on on th e part of the soul, it is bad philosophy and flies in the face of the fact that the soul is non-spatial; terms having a smack of materiality, position, and distance are utterly inapplicable and misleading here.
It is “difficult” to conceive of spirit or soul as a reality transcending or independent of the categories of mass and visibility. No doubt. But it is correct.
To talk of the soul “leaving” the body may also suggest a sort of journey through space to God, who is thus conceived as being at some distance from it. That is just passable poetically, but it is bad philosophy. A necessary warning: These coarse figures of speech, taken for truth, afford shelter for the most bizarre theories, cults, and mental pictures, as we shall see.
True, we cannot perform “pure” image-less thinking altogether nor all the time, but frequently analogies can do disservice as well as service and remain in the mind as tyrants when they were invited only as brief guests, supplanting the truth they were intended to illustrate.
Now I speak from a considerable practical knowledge of spiritists as an observer at their seances and a listener at their lyceums when I say that they are unconscious, uncritical victims of the most na<o>ve and unexamined sort of image-thinking. Their allegations about the discarnate spirits could be plausible only if those entities were not discarnate but embodied among bodies and things– modernish folk-lore as that there are spirit cigars, spirit whisky and sodas, spirit hats and trousers, spirit appliances for the continued study of chemistry or whatever those who have “passed on” were engaged upon in their mundane existence. It is here that a popular sense of the ridiculous–much resented by the spiritists with their vehement wish to believe–steps in and keeps many people critical and aloof. But, more to the point, it is here that the mind should be educated in philosophic distinctions, in the knowledge of the attributes of mind and those of body, in the amazing difference of condition which there must inevitably be between living in the flesh and senses, in space and time, and living ineffably “to God,” as our Lord said discarnate souls did until at the resurrection a heavenly body is given as an invulnerable instrument in which to praise and serve the Almighty in that mode and with that scope which he wills.
Popular spiritism, recruited from quite ordinary, unspecialist people (with one physicist added–and he steers clear of its broader crudities), is amazingly incurious about all that. The mysterious lacunae which even revelation and the subtlest philosophy must leave are filled in hurriedly with the rubble of improvised guesswork and proletarian mythology, to the end of persuading the bereaved, puzzled, and fearful that it will be all right; their pet dogs will be “there,” and the baby, untimely dead, with its cradle, if it has not graduated to semi-corporal skipping ropes or rarefied hoops. It is because the cultus attempts to obtain communication, and because it reads such locally familiar detail into its version of the beyond, that it is so enticing to the credulous and unanalytic. Everybody can mourn and yearn, but not everyone can think.
In seeking for this sort of rapport, spiritualism is groping for the one thing which it is impossible to attain. The thing we cannot do, in the nature of things, is to bring that state into concrete imaginative relation with this and for the reasons which follow.
A child (for example) can only have communication with a grown-up in those things where experience and knowledge are shared between them, but not in unshared matters –not in a scientific investigation, not in certain philosophic moods and investigation, not in the detached wisdom peculiar to the matured mind, or a complicated business responsibility, or in the score of affections which only years bring.
We are roughly in a position toward disembodied souls analogous to the position of th e child to t he sage adult. The departed soul has advanced to a new state of being and development. It has experienced something which nobody now on earth has ever experienced, something which, if it returned to us in the body, it could not express to us for lack of appropriate symbols because it had not merely reached a further state of development in a linear way, but entered into a new mode of being. A Lazarus restored has nothing relevant to say to his brethren. Paul– “whether in the body or out of the body” he does not determine–is equally unable to convey in mortal image that which he experienced, merely that “it was not lawful for man to utter.” Hence, the Christian classic cautions us that “eye hath not seen, ear heard, nor can the heart conceive” what is prepared. Our imagination can do so as little as the embryo in the womb can picture to itself the world of air, trees, skies, and waters. Hence our Lord, directly challenged by Sadducees on the very subject of post-mortem conditions, repulsed the blunt, unspiritual curiosity in words that exclusively and negativelystressed their unlikeness to anything here: He said souls “live to God,” and with them there is no “marrying or giving in marriage,” no property in each other, no pull of the earth.
Christianity indeed does not start from the mood or viewpoint of the sore, bereaved denizen of earth resenting the dissolving of a mundane relationship or a blood-tie. It sets itself to discount and transcend that natural tumult of emotion. It deals with facts in the eternal, not only with shocks and losses in time which the finite sufferer tends in his natural egocentric grief to put in the very center and foreground. It conditionally promises you and your friend’s reunion with God, and, through that and secondarily, heavenly union with each other and all other holy souls. But its mighty emphasis is always upon the Godward relation. Because it is the one divine religion, it puts God at the center always. Therein is an austere mark of its scientific truth and finality. Therein is its grand superiority to any emotional human quest after particular selfish ties or opiates. It is a doctrine of God and of all our lives in God, not a weak, possibly self-deceptive placebo or device for John X continuing a personal conversation with Henry Y.
So Christianity does all that spiritist or rival human theories claim to do and infinitely more. They stress the particular, local, and incidental; the religion of life, on the contrary, emphasizes the whole, proclaims the Source and Conditioner of all spiritual existences, and takes all the lesser consolations majestically in its stride as the details which they are. It is spiritual; they are “fond.” It declares the Love; they are held up in preoccupation with a love or a few loves–and very insecure and invalid these are when insulated from the great love of God which is their only sanction, soul, and beauty.
“Our loves in higher Love endure”–or do not properly endure at all. Let us be realists in this matter of losing our loved ones and hoping to see them again; let us recognize frankly that if this wish were granted, eternal reunion with them could not be salutary, safe, or happy unless it were enclosed and governed throughout by the freshening, holier love of God for us and of us for him. He is the only principle of life and permanence in the world of spirits. Apart from grace, they must soon cease to be significant or desirable or worth much to each other. Things would repeat the experience of earth and become tired, stale, and tedious. Those men-made, soothing, “all-too-human” theories make a disastrous bargain when they leave God out, and the sole way not to leave the essential out is to affirm him first, last, and all the time. The rest takes its proper place within him.
Isn’t it very singular, too, that spiritualists, if they genuinely want experience of the hereafter, do not try to disembody themselves? Why should they leave al l the action, th e materialization, to the alleged spirits? Is it not a highly suspicious circumstance? If they desire knowledge of that world, if it is all they variously represent it to be, why not project themselves more into it by trance, ecstasy, voluntary projection and disembodiment, terrifying as these sound?
Many of the saints had visionary states and believed they were temporarily disembodied. But then they were not motivated by mere curiosity which they were on guard against as sin. They attained these states only incidentally to lifting up the heart and mind to God. And more than that what they discerned then was incommunicable on their return to the body, so that spiritist claims are shaken, not endorsed, by them.
No, the people at the seances put the entire onus on the spirits, which have to manifest and “materialize,” rather than make the borderline excursion with their own souls.
Can they give any tenable explanation of this curiously one-sided arrangement? I have asked them and had no replies which are not either unintelligent or contradictory. Surely they cannot suppose that “this dim spot that men call earth” is a fascinating preoccupation of those spirits in bliss. Surely the attraction ought to be on our side toward that state?
If I am told, “Ah, but it is their pity for us that brings them to the speaking-trumpet or the planchette,” I can only reply that a more effectual method of showing such solidarity of feeling would be for them to induce experimenters their way and make the visits reciprocal. It all impresses one as a very ambiguous and disingenuous proceeding. I say little about the quality of many of the suppostitious communications: the trivial, banal, or uncultured words which are issued under the shelter of names which in earthly life were guarantees of good sense, interest, and refinement.
So many of the “voices” produced appear to have borrowed hints from an auctioneer’s or estate agent’s handbook in the eager desire to suggest to the listeners-in of Clapham or Manchester that there are lots and lots of Claphams and Manchesters “over there,” which is a gospel or not according to whether you believe or not that Claphams and Manchesters, whiskies and cigars and spirit-movies for the “kiddies,” are part of the cosmic plan which God and we would wish everlastingly perpetuated, that they will be ornaments of the heavenly city and that such places and occupations subserve the enjoyment of God and the Beatific Vision. Alas, there is far too much of the persuasiveness of the estate-builder offering lots.
A still more damning feature is the gross–one can only call it gross –silence of most of the “spirits” (and of the demonstrations I have heard) about Christ. When anything is said of the Savior, it is of a feebleness and ineptitude which would risk censure in the meanest of earth’s Theophilanthropic chapels. They come, apparently, from far states to talk to us in the terms of a stammering and watered unitarianism, with an occasional souvenir of Buddhism or some other ‘ism. This, if it were taken seriously, would suggest that the study of divine things were in a more backward condition beyond than here.
Our Lord is never referred to, even by visitants represented as defunct Christians, as the Lord of the spiritual world, which is the first thing that such souls would do. Why? The most probable explanation is that such an idea has never entered the medium’s head and that it lies outside the creed of the average frequenter of seances. Also such a declaration would give offense to the vague humanitarianism and synthetic creed of most followers of spiritualism. Hence it does not happen.
My suspicion is confirmed by the other fact that the spirits do not deny it either and by remembering that such out-and-out denial would precipitate a large part of public opinion still against a pursuit which is not yet strong enough to pick a quarrel with church or orthodoxy. The ” ;testimonies&qu otat seances may change in this respect when the current beliefs modify; it is remarkable how sensitive to typical earth-opinion these testimonies are.
Then their ideas of the nature of spirit, the nature of matter, and the relation between them fly in the face of science, philosophy, and theology. At the seances where I have been an observer, “ectoplasm” was not produced. But I agree with J. P. Murphy, writing in the Dublin Review, that “astral bodies and ectoplasm are cosmologically impossible stuff, and we suspect that they are invoked by spiritualists as a sort of missing link between matter and spirit. There is not nor can there be any such missing link. Matter is that which is extended in space and occupies place. Since we are in a mode of being of attachment to matter, we cannot positively imagine spirit, and therefore we describe it by the negative word immaterial. It is, therefore, if one just considers the terms in their duplicity, a contradiction to speak of a sort of spirito-materialistic link between the two.
“Nor is the suggestion that an astral body is rather vaguer in outline and less tangible than an earth-body of any avail. That suggestion is based on the most rudimentary error in philosophy. It is based on the notion that because one material thing eludes the senses more than another, it is therefore somehow spiritual. If it comes to that, the air we breathe has astral bodies beaten all ends up for sheer tenuity, for it can be neither seen, nor heard, nor (if it is fresh) tasted or smelled. It impresses one sense only, the sense of touch. Yet it is none the less matter. It is of that portion of God’s creation that is extended and occupies space.”
After these physical and metaphysical errors, it is not surprising that spiritualists have their moral and theological errors. In theology, properly so called, they show a minimum of interest, and this suits the book of many people in a time of short-cuts and religion made easy. Never mind whys and wherefores and first principles, the mood runs; can we get some “results” tonight, and what about my Cissie who “went over” a month ago? Or (in the spirit of the crystal-gazer or the fortune-teller) can I get a hint about such and such a step I am going to take? There is far too much ego in their cosmos. It is anthropocentric, not theocentric.
The prophet, moreover, is too smooth-tongued, keeps saying the acceptable and pleasant thing to the average natural man–for instance, that death makes no more difference morally (it is said) than a dip on the pavement alters a man’s soul and its potentialities. Unfortunately, this also is false. Apart from inciting people to easy-going procrastination it misinterprets, it fails even to see, the soul’s totally different set of conditions once it is bereft of sense-organs, intellectual considerations from without, reminders, means of grace, and a field for effort. The will therefore, it would seem, remains polarized in the direction it had at death. Hence to the instructed Christian the absolute importance of being at death in a state of grace. Hence the extreme folly of giving bromides to the soul in this life.
The discarnate soul is in the presence of an infinite holy God, and its own weal or woe is decided by its own possession or lack of ” charity toward him,” of grace, of faith and good works. Its awareness is of him, its ideas are from him, are such as he impresses. It is more than ever directly his creature and pensioner on his bounty and exposed to the direct operation of Law and conscience.
Spiritism, then, is an extreme case of popular, cheerio-thinking, projecting its reaction to this life into its speculation about the next. Our atmosphere today is lush with these all-too-easy summary wish-solutions, that “save labor”and try to evade tension, soften contrasts, and dilute outlines. They come of a mundane frame of mind–of a mind in which happiness can only be conceived in terms of the plea sures of this life. Spiritualists have often admitted to me and to others many incidental deceptions and frauds. What they do not perceive are the treacherous premises on which all of it rests.
Turn again now to the unique logical and biological glory of the Catholic evangel of eternal life, which does not speak of existence in a dusk nor a tedious linear continuance of worldly futility, but of intenser modes of living, ” the life that is life indeed.”
Note first, please, that these souls of ours–with their plasticity, the delicacy and variety of their moods, their lightning-swift susceptibility to impressions, their illimitable potentialities of growth, their endless capacities for loyalty and devoted service, their thirst for perpetual knowledge, their hopes–are great enough to demand and bear continual development, yet are little enough to need it.
Not one of us has looked within and seen an end to his own soul. The deeps of personality elude even introspection. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be” so obvious is it to the thoughtful that we are in the chrysalis stage as regards our noblest powers and promise. You know more of “the Beyond that is within you” in 1934 [the year this essay was distributed] than you did in 1920; you will know more of it in 1950 than you do now. It will always be so. It will take an infinite search to show us all that we are and may become. (This is true despite human weaknesses and defects, which are on the comparative surface; at its core, any soul has the promise and strange marks of possible glory.)
Nothing in nature is so unlike the rest of nature as this strange faculty the soul, so prophetic of what is beyond it, so indicative of a besetting God, so “super-natural.” At its awakened best, it is an infinite thirst for knowing, a capacity for God, and born for “admiration, hope, and love”: Such a dynamic principle as that was not organized for a squalid ending, was not born for death. Yet, at the same glance, how impotent by itself! It cannot feed on the air, nor be fobbed off finally with other dependent natures like itself. It has a passion for the ultimate.
Our wise Bacon said man absolutely needs a “Melior Natura, God.” Not ersatz fancies like “the race” not home-made synthetic substitutes like the nation, patriotism, my family; not protean abstractions such as “the future” not neutral activities such as “science” or adventure, all of which may be vulgarian, dangerous or not, according to who uses them, and for what ends, and in Whose service–not these biological inadequacies and spiritual broken reeds; but God, our only possible home, the sole genuine world-ground, “our native country,” as St. Augustine beautifully put it, or as the Eucharistic hymn says, our life without term in patria.
Any halts short of this are mere ramshackle quarter-way houses, open to the weather, sure to collapse over us. Man may be foolish, needy, a mere sketch of what he ought to be, but he presses the inquiry ruthlessly, he discovers that nothing less than the eternal meets his case. “Man’s true end and home,” concludes Words-worth’s tremendous argument in The Prelude, “is with infinity and only there.” That need, he adds, is his distinction and his possible beatitude and glory.
At this point, there steps in Christianity with the absolute answer. It finds multitudes of souls eligible for immortality, candidates for a further and mightier progression, but not able to initiate the new evolution themselves. It is supremely a case for the Author of the process himself to enter with the necessary powers. This is what he does. He very strangely condescends indeed in inaugurating a new life, assuming the form of a man that we at our poor natural level may better see him. It is our opportunity.
He introduces a new and original factor, a divine life, which is the power that is to bridge the grave. “This is th e testimony, that God hat h given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life, and the generation of God preserveth him. . . . For the eternal life who was with the Father was manifested. . . . Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called and should be the sons of God. Beloved, now are we sons of God,” adds St. John in what is both a hymn of adoption and a rigorous biological definition. “And we know that the Son of God is come and hath given us an understanding that we may know the true God and may be in his true Son. This,” he ends, “is the true God and life eternal.”
That is immortality. That is the only life beyond the grave that you or I at least need ever wish to know or that will be worthwhile. Anything is possible rather than that souls which have been in this filial relation to him can perish. For them indeed, Mors janua vitae.
Notice, it is God’s doing, his initiative and creative bounty, which, when you think of it, is only fitting. For the great years of vision and service beyond, and for “the full-grown energies of heaven,” obviously special powers and endowments are needed; the static, unregenerate mind could not perform the supernal activities alone, any more than a plant could perform functions peculiar to the animal kingdom or than an animal could discharge the intelligent activities of human convocation or parliament. The appropriate life, faculties, and interests have to be infused first, then nurtured and organized. Exactly what the Spirit of God does: He “changes” the soul into the diviner Image “from glory to glory,” superintends the great process of education and preparation. When the heart of a man is seized upon by the quickening Spirit, no violence is done to natural law; it is precisely analogous to the inorganic being taken up by the organic and woven into the plant-life, or the plant-life being adopted and raised by the animal life, or the animal elements being taken into the intellectual.
The New Testament and the Church were declaring this wonderfully scientific doctrine of life 1,800 years before biological science was organized and retrospectively endorsed the Christian doctrine.
Such a process may well strike us dumb with wonder. Not only its generosity, nor its timeliness, nor its more than adequacy to our dire needs, but its wisdom of proportioned means to ends must inspire awe and gratitude. It is like nothing else that man has heard of or could dream. It marks of our tremendous religion as for ever in a different universe of reality from all mundane systems. There is no question at all of “comparative religion,” once that is descried.
It is not “a” religion; it is the life, and the life is the light of men; it shines into a great darkness, and if parts of the darkness “comprehend it not,” that is sad for the darkness, but abates nothing from the blaze of the light. There are indeed no words to express even feebly the grandeur and finality of the religion of Jesus Christ: the portal into new worlds, the path to them, the power to tread the path, and the Exemplar to follow; it is everything, it is final, it says and does all that needs saying and doing. Because it is God himself seen in the perpetual act of rescue, retrieval, renovation, sometimes despite human resistance, but mainly in proportion to human correspondence. That higher creation, of which we hope to be a living part, will be the crown and fruit of this secular one that we see. Quietly always, invisibly mostly, the divine reclamation goes forward amid us.
“In Christ”: He is the matrix in whom the new creation is formed. Those who are to partake in the greater life are prepared for it within his Mystical Body, which he called his “ecclesia” or Church. It is no solitary, private, or unsocial process; love and mutuality are a vital mark of it. “By this we know that we have passed from death to life, t hat we love the brethr en.”
Merely on that account we should know at once that the Church was an integral portion of the plan. But we know it in other ways. Only the Church can or does administer this new life, which is held in the sacraments as vitality is implicit in food or sunshine in coal. Only by being in and of the Church can the individual soul supplement and enrich its angle of experience and its partial view and find comradeship and scope for service and love and discipline. She is “the household of God.” But more: She is the lantern-bearer, the entrusted guided teacher, “the pillar and ground of the truth,” “the habitation of God the Spirit.”
You see, the Church was bound to come in. She is a vital phase of the ineffable design, which cannot be mutilated nor humanly adapted. Neglect her, and the soul is sick and languid. A “lonely” Christian is in extreme peril; a solitary religion is a contradiction in terms.