arise from their inability to express what they really felt. The fact that I am not able to formulate my belief on a subject such as this is no evidence that I have ceased to believe. I cannot, it may be, describe my belief, or I may reject a description of it offered to me, yet it may none the less move within me, and impel me to actions for which, without it, I could find no justification. Still, there are reasons why the belief in immortality may now especially appear to be threatened with extinction. Hope of any kind leans heavily for its support upon the imagination. If we are quite unable to realise some desired contingency, we are apt to dismiss it from our minds and to place it outside the range of our present interests. Now, it cannot escape us that we have been engaged for many years past in removing one after another of the supports upon which, in the popular imagination, this belief had hitherto rested. If we persist in closing, one by one, the avenues by which a man seeks to reach his destination, he will at last give up the attempt and turn in some other direction. So, if men are nursing a hope, and we continue to tell them that its realisation cannot possibly take any of the forms which they have hitherto thought it must take, they will at length turn round and pronounce the hope itself to be visionary. Such seems the actual consequence of our demolition of the scenery of a future life, the majestic drapery which hung round it. In removing these accessories we have left little except vacancy behind. Let it be fully granted that the removal was imperative. The scenery was incongruous; the imagery used to bring a future life more near tended in the long run to make it more remote and incredible. When the destructive artillery of the critical reason began to play upon the structure raised by the imagination it was soon, bit by bit, reduced to a shapeless ruin. It may not be superfluous to observe how far the work of demolition has actually proceeded. It is now some thirty years since our religious world was stirred by the controversy regarding the eternity of future punishment. We may feel reasonably certain that this controversy could not now be revived. The interval has emptied it of its actuality. Sermons may, indeed, still occasionally be heard protesting against the old conceptions; but a note of unreality seems for the most part audible through the protest. The preacher appears to consider his task superfluous, and to feel that he is warring with the dead. He knows that few, if any, of his listeners are any longer visited by such fears. Discussion has almost ceased as to the meaning of the word 'eternal,' or the fewness of the elect, or even as to the possibility of a future state of purgation. It is, indeed, true that death remains, as it has ever been, the most moving word in the preacher's vocabulary. It continues, as it always will, to be a subject of universal and pathetic interest. We strain our eyes to catch if it only be a glimpse of what it hides or reveals. No disappointment wearies our curiosity, no failure arrests our search. While death, however, thus keeps its fascination, the authoritative, or at least the traditional, explanation of its mysteries finds us almost at every point incredulous. Consider, e.g., what a breach is made in our defences by the disappearance of the sharp division of mankind into good and bad. We cannot tell where goodness ends or badness begins, nor do we find the division any longer maintained by the trusted exponents of religious thought. Its disappearance, however, leaves us face to face with many bewildering questions. If we refuse to make but one division of men, we must make as many divisions as there are individuals. It is, however, the greater solidarity of men in a future state which has formed one of its most attractive prospects. This solidarity seems consistent with the old conception than with the new one. We can suppose a multitude of men, each preserving his own individuality, united by a common purpose and uplifted by a common hope. Such was the traditional conception of the future life of the blessed. In our love of individuality we have made such solidarity less thinkable. Each separate individual seeks his own heaven, and declares that one acceptable to his neighbour would have no attractions for himself. Another silent dissolvent lies in our changed views of punishment. As long as we could look with any confidence upon punishment as necessarily, or even generally, remedial, belief in purgatory or even hell was easy. The character of the punishment to be inflicted might gradually lose its early grossness. Spiritual anguish might replace bodily torment. Still, the belief in the efficacy of punishment would remain unshaken. It is this belief the modern world is gradually losing. Punishment, in the case of mature men, has almost ceased to be regarded as anything but a deterrent. We do not expect the criminal to come out of prison a reformed man; we know that such transformations are very exceptional. The normal effect of any punishment hitherto tried is an increasing hatred on the criminal's part towards a social order which he regards as tyrannical and vindictive. These experiences add greatly to the difficulty of any conception we can form of future retribution. It is not the duration of future punishment which engages our thoughts, nor is it the forms such punishment may assume. Such things we are quite ready to leave in suspense. It is the justice and consequently the possibility of retribution in any form or of any length that we are driven to call in question. The punishments we know appear to be of the earth, earthy; thus they serve to discredit the whole conception and drive the mind back when it attempts to find a way of access, by the moral sense, into an eternal world. It is not, indeed, suggested that iniquity awakens less abhorrence now than it formerly did. We may look with more indulgence upon some sins, but others awaken greater detestation. Cruelty and oppression would probably meet with less mercy from a modern than from a mediæval tribunal. It will not, however, be questioned that our modern habits of accounting for things and tracing them back to their sources, possibly remote ones, tend to dissuade us from punishment except as a deterrent. We have learned the futility of blame. Instead of denouncing sinners we pity or call them mad. So the only penal fires we can think of are those which utterly consume their prey so that it loses its identity and ceases to be recognisable. Our present-day views of the Bible and its inspiration tend towards a similar result. We find our traditional notions broken up, and there are no very stable moulds left in which thought can shape itself. Throughout the greater part of the period covered by the Old Testament the individual merges his life in that of the nation. In its eternity he finds his own. When the hope of personal 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. |