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survival begins in the Maccabean period to assume distinct shape, its form is not consonant with our ideas. Immortality is not thought of as a quality inherent in the soul, but as a reward reserved for a faithful remnant. Thus the Old Testament does not give us, either in its earlier or its later sections, any great assistance when we attempt to give concrete shape to our hopes of future life. It either tends to dissuade us from such attempts or it offers us what to our ideas are impossible realisations.

Our present interpretation of the New Testament has the effect of substituting earth for heaven as the centre of human interest. The immortality anticipated in its pages is a participation in the Divine kingdom, whose earthly appearance the infant Church impatiently expected. Immortal life was life in this divinely governed society. Sometimes the kingdom was thought of as lasting for a limited although a prolonged interval; and sometimes its duration was pictured as stretching on into a limitless future. In either case 'everlasting life' was only a feature or property of the situation of its citizens. The exact results of biblical research are of course only known to a few scholars. Information on these subjects is, however, now being rapidly diffused. The actual result seems to be a widespread popular belief that what is promised in the Gospel is an ideal society, like the perfectly ordered community of Socialist thinkers, in which there shall be neither poverty nor disease. The vital differences between such conceptions and those of primitive Christianity are ignored, and the points of likeness are alone heeded. The mass of men disdain qualifications and reserves and have a passion for simple formulas. Thus the glad tidings of the Gospel are identified with the hopes of the social reformer, and regarded as a Divine summons to labour for the regeneration of the earth. The consequence is the displacement of the traditional hope of immortality by a vision which, however noble, is yet of the earth.

The Resurrection of Christ still conveys its confident assurance to the soul of the believer. The figure of his deathless Lord is the one luminous point in what might otherwise be an oppressive obscurity. He asks for nothing better than to follow his Master up to death and beyond it. The assurance, however, is only for him. It leaves

the doubting world incredulous. No one not already possessed by the hope of immortality would be convinced by the Church's Easter message. If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.'

Such are some of the particular reasons why men should show greater hesitation than they once did when they are questioned upon their beliefs or hopes regarding a future life. The traditional scenery of such a life has been uprooted. We find ourselves encompassed by negations. There is, moreover, the undoubted fact of the increased value which this present life acquires, as education and the opportunities it confers become more evenly and widely distributed. No doubt there are many like F. Myers' acquaintance, who supposed he would enter into eternal bliss after death, but found the prospect none the less depressing. He was quite content to go on as he was. Even worry is better than vacancy. So we are not surprised to be told that if, in an address to working men, the speaker throws scorn on the other world, and bids them refuse to sacrifice substance for shadow, they applaud at once, but as soon as ever he begins to speak of immortality their interest flags and their approval is chilled. I do not interpret these signs of the times to mean that the human heart has ceased to be in the 20th century what it was in the first century. I regard them as indications that the traditional moulds have been found wanting and that new ones are imperatively needed. We need to be released from the humiliating position of offering men a heaven which no one desires, and threatening them with the penalties of a hell which every one believes to be reserved for people a great deal worse than himself.' †

A situation such as this may well excite alarm in religious minds. The central citadel of religion may appear to have fallen to the enemy. Thus Frederick Myers tells us that the educated world-that part of it, at least, which science leads-is waking up to find that no mere trifles or traditions only, but the great hope

* True and False Ideals of Progress,' by the Dean of St Paul's.
+ Quoted by Schiller, Humanism,' p. 325.

which inspired their fathers aforetime, is insensibly vanishing away.' Such prophecies, however, lose their impressiveness when we remember how often we have heard their like before. We cannot see how we are worse off in our hold upon this hope than what are called the ages of faith. We analyse our feelings more closely than they did, and we are not afraid, as they were, of the reproach of heresy. Indeed orthodoxy, among large sections of the laity, has become almost a term of reproach. Authority, too, counts for less with us than it did with them. They gave credit to extravagant stories to which we pay no heed, because we know how easily such stories originate. Still, the pains and pleasures held before them as deterrents or inducements cannot have weighed upon them very persistently, or they would not have been as reckless transgressors as we know many of them actually were. We do not trifle in this way with prospects which we deliberately regard as serious. At all times men must have been conscious of the defective light in which we pursue our journey, and of the thick wrappings we must strip off before we can reach reality.

The writer I have quoted thought that the question of human immortality admitted of scientific proof. He believed that doubt must cease if it could be conclusively shown that the dead were in a position to communicate with the living. Many eminent men, worthy of the highest respect, have shared this opinion. They would, however, themselves admit that they have been unable so far to convert any considerable number of their countrymen. An influential member of the Society for Psychical Research informed us a few years ago that the membership of the society after twenty years of strenuous and not unfruitful labour remained stationary at something less than 1500. He drew the conclusion that there were only 1500 persons in the whole wide world who took an annual guinea's worth of scientific interest in finding out whether they had anything to look forward to after death, and if so, what.† Surely, however, the fact may mean, not that the abstaining

*Science and a Future Life,' p. 2.
† Schiller, Humanism,' p. 318.

multitude lacked interest, but that they believed the particular avenue proposed to them to be fallacious.

For my own part I cannot identify 'immortality' with any such life as these researches have disclosed or indicated. When I affirm my belief in immortality it is not of such a survival I am thinking. On the other hand, I could imagine myself believing in such a survival while yet I did not believe in immortality. The life we desire is not our present existence under other conditions, but a better life, a life changed not in duration but in quality; and of such a transformation these researches have hitherto brought us no evidence.

My own belief-and when we speak of hope we must needs be personal--is not the result of any reasoning process. Nor can I find that the belief historically considered has originated in the conscious reason. It precedes the action of the conscious reason. We find it in some shape in the infancy of the world. It makes its appearance almost at the dawn of history. Nor does it to-day seem to rest upon arguments or the operations of the logical faculty. People who already hold it, or whom it holds, bring arguments, sometimes powerful ones, in its support. But it is not the arguments which have brought it to them. Perhaps no one whom it did not already possess was ever reasoned into it. No one whom it did possess was ever shaken in his assurance by reasonings. The belief is a craving of the whole soul, of which the reason is only a part. We justify it but we do not create it by reasonings.

If I now turn from the belief itself to the expression given to it in different times and places I find myself amidst infinite variety. Question the nations of the earth as to what they mean by this their faith, and they give us answers marked by every degree of childishness or sublimity. We are in the presence of the changing pictures of the kaleidoscope. Each nation may indeed have its authoritative creed. But the creeds do not keep pace with the movements of the living soul. They come in time to be left behind, and to appear as monuments representing what was rather than what is.

Look, e.g., at the people of whose early religious experience we know most, the Jews. It is customary to

say that the hope of immortality is absent in the earlier of the two sections of the Christian Bible and present in the later. We think we see it clearly in the New Testament, while we miss it in the greater part of the Old. This summary distinction can hardly satisfy any reflecting reader of the book. The ordinary inscription upon Jewish tombstones is the prayer that the soul of the dead man may be bound up in the same bundle of life with the Lord his God. Could there be any clearer expression of the hope of immortality than this simple quotation from the Old Testament (1 Sam. xxv. 29)? The early Hebrew believed that his nation's survival embraced and assured his own. It was not that he was content to perish if only it endured. He thought that he and it were bound up in the same bundle of life. Beneath the whole company, and enfolding the great aggregate and each of its constituent units, were the Everlasting Arms. Within this sheltering embrace he rested in security, asking, with no note of self-pity, that God might show him His work, and reserve His glory for future generations. No doubt the most fervent piety did not, then any more than now, overcome the shrinking from death or light up the unimaginable future with assuring radiance :

'While earnest thou gazest,
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error,
Perplexes the bravest

With doubt and misgiving.'

We should, however, be doing the holders of a hope such as is revealed in the 90th Psalm a grievous injustice if we were to say that they had no anticipations of immortality, and place them in consequence upon a lower religious level than their descendants who looked forward to an individual resurrection. The difference was one rather of expression than of vital belief. The hopes were essentially the same although they assumed different forms. Indeed, many Christian conceptions of immortality may well seem inferior to some of the Hebrew hopes to which we refuse the name.

In truth, wherever we follow the hope of future life, we are confronted by wavering images and pictures that

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