THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. 450.-JANUARY, 1917.

Art. 1.-IMMORTALITY AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF. THE Religion of Christ has in all ages been bound up with the belief in the power of the human soul to survive death. Whether we consider the substance of this faith or its history, the connexion appears to be intimate and indissoluble. If the belief in personal survival were to vanish, Christianity would have broken with its history, and lost its original likeness.

The Gospel in its earliest form was the proclamation of the speedy advent among men of a Kingdom of God. The acceptance of the hope thus raised involved a belief in survival as soon as it became clear that the hope would not be realised within the lifetime of the existing generation. Christians, no doubt, like other men, formed various and conflicting conceptions of the future existence they desired. Where knowledge is not possible, hope must assume the varying and elusive colours of the rainbow. The soul projects itself outwards and finds its own strength or weakness in the unknown world of its dreams. The powerlessness of the imagination, however, did not weaken the hope. No early disciple of Christ, we may be convinced, thought of the extinction of his personal being at death or its absorption in some larger whole as a possibility. He had no doubt that he would survive death, just as a swimmer may plunge beneath the waters and reappear upon the shore beyond.

When the preachers of the faith began to appeal to listeners other than Jews, their teaching about death was, perhaps, the strongest weapon in their armoury. They came to a world longing for a personal deliverance from the power of death, and they offered what was Vol. 227.-No. 450.

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universally sought. They were more successful than the priests of Isis or the soldiers of Mithra, because they invited discipleship to one who had actually shared the human lot, tasted the full bitterness of death, and risen in literal truth from the grave. The hope of immortality seemed thus to be placed by the Gospel upon a far surer and simpler foundation than that assigned to it by these other eastern faiths, in which the object of worship was not a human being but a mythological figure or a philosophical abstraction. Thus the religion of Christ unquestionably asked the unbelieving world for its allegiance, and received what it asked, largely on the ground of the unearthly hopes which it offered. It opened a way of escape through the gate of death from a hardly tolerable present into a world where existing conditions would no longer prevail, and where life would be a joy instead of a burden.

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To these simple hopes all the familiar words of the Christian vocabulary bear witness. Judgment,' 'salvation,' 'heaven,' 'hell,' may indeed be understood of experiences within our present reach, but it will not be contended that this was their primitive meaning. Originally they pointed to occurrences or states of being in a world other than the one we know. No early believer, we may be sure, thought that any present judgment of men would replace the final reckoning, or believed that any happiness now known to him was anything more than a foretaste of that awaiting him beyond the tomb.

No doubt the present life began to awaken greater interest when the Church settled into the slow and deliberate stride characteristic of every long march, and it became clear that she was destined to take her place among the permanent institutions of this world. She was thus called upon to provide for her own stability, and to formulate rules of life for her children. Thus the faith of Christ gradually but inevitably lost the unworldliness which had at first been stamped upon it, and assumed the appearance of a law governing men's present conduct. The hopes and fears it had originally awakened lost something of their early distinctness and potency; and the conditions of salvation began to be more thought of than salvation itself. The future life was regarded as something about which there was universal agreement

and which was beyond the reach of discussion and controversy. The way to the goal obscured the goal itself.

The transcendental hopes and fears, however, were not suppressed nor abandoned. They still remained as the sanctions of the Church's law. They formed her weightiest arguments by which to convince the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. The instability of life, the nearness and certainty of death, the folly of sacrificing an immeasurable happiness for a few moments of illusive pleasure, the terrors of penalties to which no limits could be set-these were always the motives of the Church's appeals, arguments whose force no one questioned.

Thus the present life was rated from the first at the low value which has ever since been assigned to it in Christian teaching. The Church's great teachers have never thought this life desirable for its own sake. If they weighed its joys against its sorrows, it was to bring out the heavy balance on the side of pain. If their vision had been confined within our present horizons, they would have pronounced 'human life to be a poor thing at the best.' The Christian view of life is only redeemed from pessimism by the fact that it refuses to regard our actual existence as anything but a probation or a prelude. No doubt particular teachers may be pointed to who have tried to relieve the sombreness of the traditional picture and have dwelt much upon the joy of living. They stand apart, however, from the general company of their fellow-labourers. We miss the pathos of the distinctively Christian note in teaching which invites us to find our satisfaction in our present good things, to count up our joys and rejoice that they are so many. We feel instinctively that such teaching has departed from the Church's great tradition,' and fallen away from the heroism which spurned the joys of this world in comparison with those to be hereafter revealed. The value of life to the Christian has ever lain in its promise. He prizes it because it points upwards like the spire to a more glorious world out of sight.

These hopes have indeed repeatedly assumed forms so perverted or misleading that the Church was compelled to disavow them. There were periods when selfdestruction ran the risk of being mistaken for martyrdom.

Death was not merely accepted with joy; it was courted. The present was not only valued at a low price in comparison with the future; it became quite valueless, and was regarded as a mere obstruction to be removed at the earliest opportunity. These tendencies, of course, compelled the Church to assert the claims of the present life, to insist upon the value of its discipline, and to mark as impious the desire to hasten its close.

Another and less noble perversion was that known as otherworldliness. The present life was depreciated, not because its pleasures failed to satisfy the soul, but because they were precarious and shortlived. An hereafter was pictured where they could be enjoyed without fear of their loss or danger of satiety. The future was conceived as a reproduction of the present without its disturbing features. Here was another dangerous distortion. The Church had to declare that this was not what she meant by a future life; that this life was not, for her, the present stamped with perpetuity, but the present transformed and ennobled. In making this disavowal her teachers elaborated the doctrine of what they called a 'present salvation.' By this was meant, not a blessedness coextensive and conterminous with our present existence, but a foretaste, here and now, of the joys which after death were to be in full measure the portion of the soul. For a time this doctrine was ardently preached; and no doubt some of its upholders occasionally used language which might suggest indifference to any pains or pleasures outside our present experience.

These, however, were but the overstatements of the controversialist. What was intended was to assert the moral continuousness of present and future. It is obviously this which can alone make the hope of survival religious. I am not necessarily cherishing a religious hope when I trust that my days may be indefinitely prolonged, no matter where the scene of such prolongation may be. It is not my desire for life which is in itself religious, but my craving for some ampler and nobler existence than I at present know. Thus to repudiate the teaching that the future was only an infinite prolongation of the present, but without its pains and dangers, it was necessary to show that the future salvation presupposed a present moral health.

These exaggerations and corrections cannot hide the persistent association of the belief in personal survival with Christianity. It has been the silent assumption of every Christian creed. No great Christian teacher can be pointed to who has ever successfully preached the faith of Christ without it. The very suggestion that this faith could survive its denial would sound as the most startling of paradoxes. Yet various forces seem to be at work around us to extinguish the belief, or at least to reduce it to impotence.

The attempt to decide how many of our countrymen at present believe in a future life, or to gauge the strength of such a belief where it is professed, is beset by almost insuperable difficulties. The great majority would beyond doubt avow themselves believers. A number, larger perhaps than most of us suppose, would hesitate, while a small but weighty minority would profess positive disbelief. It is plain, however, that mere profession is a very insufficient evidence either of the existence or non-existence of such a hope as this. A variety of reasons readily occur to us why men should be reluctant to make an avowal which might well seem to them impious even if they had reached a negative conclusion. The question is obviously not what they would say, but what they think in the recesses of their hearts, and allow to influence their conduct.

Ruskin, in his Preface to the Crown of Wild Olive,' expressed himself at a loss to know with which of the two opposite opinions he should credit the mass of his countrymen.

'If you address any average modern English company as believing in an eternal life, and endeavour to draw any conclusions from this assumed belief as to their present business, they will forthwith tell you that "What you say is very beautiful, but it is not practical." If, on the contrary, you frankly address them as unbelievers in eternal life, and try to draw any consequences from that unbelief, they immediately hold you for an accursed person, and shake off the dust from their feet at you.'

Perhaps this great writer, however, did not sufficiently consider that the perverseness of his listeners might.