Immortality BY THE REV. J. G. H. BARRY, D.D. Immortality: An Essay in Discovery. Co-ordinating Scientific, Psychical and Biblical Research. By B. H. Streeter, C. W. Emmet, J. A. Hadfield, A. Clutton-Brock and the Author of "Pro Christo et Ecclesia." New York, The Macmillan Co., 1917. Canon Streeter has the faculty of gathering about him colaborers whose work is always interesting and rarely orthodox. Indeed, they seem to take as their motto, "Whatever is orthodox is wrong." It has always been the obsession of a certain class of minds that to be different is to be right; but often they are not so different as they think that they are. That seems to be the case with the group of writers who have produced this set of essays under the title of Immortality. They are not half so heretical as they appear to hope that they are. It is at first sight an astonishing fact that after so many centuries of the Christian Religion there should still be need to argue the question of immortality, not in China or Japan, but in countries which call themselves Christian. This would seem to be the measure of the slight hold that Christianity has so far gained on human life. We are always tempted to overestimate the number of those who have been actually influenced by the Gospel, because of the figures presented to us by the census of those who are willing to be called by the Christian name; and by current talk about Christian nations, Christian civilization, Christian society. There has never been a Christian nation, and Western civilization is very far indeed from being Christian. In any nation the hold of Christianity on the national life is very slight, and it has no control whatever over the national policy. The effort of Christianity to spiritualize the race is still in its infancy. It is true that Christianity had no need to create a belief in immortality. What it had to do was to sustain an existing belief and to throw new light upon it. This is what it has done successfully in its teaching-but it has not succeeded in getting its teaching as widely accepted as one would have supposed was the case. Belief in immortality is found pretty generally existing among primitive folk. Their graves are witnesses of this: the graves of kings with their slaves sacrificed upon them that they may have attendants in the other world; the graves of warriors with horse and arms provided for the future hunt; the pathetic graves of children with favorite toys laid upon them; all these testify to a belief in a future life. And whatever is the ultimate account of that belief it is not the mere reflex of desire the desire of immortality is not nearly so wide-spread as we assume. As soon as men began to think out systems of belief they dropped, over wide areas, the belief in immortality, which they would hardly have done if they had been passionately attached to the belief. The East felt existence a burden and took refuge in Nirvana which, whatever else it may mean, means the extinction of conscious personality. Elsewhere we have pantheism with the same result. Multitudes today simply do not want to survive death and are wholly uninterested in immortality. They can conceive of no life which is so attractive as the cessation of consciousness. To such Swinburne has given ideal utterance: "From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, That no life lives forever; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.' The aim of our authors is to cover the whole ground of possible evidence. Dr. Hadfield's discussion of immortality from the standpoint of science is extremely interesting as an indication of the direction in which science is moving, but from the nature of the case the inferences he draws are not of a sort to bear much weight. He argues that the tendency of "the mind towards independence and autonomy suggests the possibility of its becoming entirely liberated from the body, and continuing to live disembodied and free." p. 21.) We can watch the pro cess by which the organism passes from merely reflex action, to conscious willed action, which implies the development of personality. In the will we have a new element, "a force which can dominate brain processes... ...The body then appears to have produced, what it can no longer control, nor even understand; and evolution has brought forth the flower and glory of its age-long development." (69-70.) His interesting conclusion is that "before our lives began we were each parts of the 'world soul' without separate consciousness, and without distinct individuality, that our lives were the offspring of the universal life and that by interaction with other lives, with material things, and with God, we are capable of developing souls free and undetermined, and capable of immortal life. Our destiny is, that from the undeveloped soul with which we started we shall become ever more differentiated and more spiritual, in touch with the Infinite, knowing and loving God. The world soul from which we are derived came from God, and we go to God who is our Eternal Home." (73) The most important essays in the book fall to Canon Streeter himself: those on "the Resurrection of the Dead" and "The Life of the World to Come." There is much that is satisfying in his treatment of these subjects. We find belief in immortality rested finally where it can only be rested, on the revealed character of God. "Belief in individual immortality depends on our conception of the character of God. If God is at all what Christ supposed Him to be, personal immortality is completely proved." (85) This is the only position for a Christian. One is glad, too, to find the modern mind inclining to a belief in the resurrection of the body. "To our Lord, then, and to S. Paul, the real meaning and value of the idea of the resurrection of the body does not consist in an affirmation of a material and flesh and blood existence in the future-that they both repudiate. It stands mainly for two things, that the life of the future will be richer not poorer than this life, and that individuality, personal distinctions, and the results of the moral and emotional as well as of the intellectual activities of this life will be preserved in the next. More than that, it means that the capacity for such activity will still endure.... The future will be no Nirvana of passionless contemplation, but a full activity of the whole personality in conscious harmony with other souls." (95) Canon Streeter is hardly as successful in dealing with the life of the world to come. He recognizes the weakness of present religion in this matter in that it assigns no content to the notion of the future life, or assigns a merely trivial content "the Heaven of Sunday School teaching or popular hymnology is a place which the plain man does not believe to exist, and which he would not want to go to if it did." But neither Canon Streeter nor his fellow-essayists have much that is satisfactory to offer in the place of the popular conception. The trouble with Canon Streeter seems to be that he has never grasped the teaching of Catholic theology on the Last Things. He has not realized that beside the future taught in popular Roman Catholic books and in popular Protestant books, there is a Catholic teaching which affords all that he and his friends are groping for. "What is really wanted," he says, "is a conception of progress in the next life in which the leading idea shall be that of addition rather than subtraction, and which will emphasize the need of enriching that which is good in character rather than merely the purging away of that which is evil. We are often misled by our metaphors: moral evil is not a stain that can be removed by a negative and external process like washing or burning. It is rather a disease of the will which can only be cured by a restoration to health, and which is a process akin to growth. (140) Precisely: but that is no new and strange doctrine to one who has grasped the teaching of the universal Church. But the thought of progress in the future must be limited to those who are capable of progress. Canon Streeter and his fellow-workers are quite unagreed as to the fate of the lost. That they are lost it is, in the face of the New Testament, impossible to deny; but the only thing that seems, in the minds of the authors of Immortality, certain about them is that they will not be lost forever. They vibrate between theories of annihilation, second probation and final restoration. Again, one has to point out that the despised teachings of orthodoxy do not raise the difficulties that Mr. Emmet feels. He says, "By 'hell' in this connection I would be understood to mean any state of punishment, whether bodily or spiritual, from which there is no longer any prospect of the soul deriving any benefit, and in which it suffers without hope for itself or profit for others." (170) I wonder who does believe in that sort of a hell? Hardly Catholic theologians. A good deal of the trouble is centered in the word punishment. It brings to the mind the notion of an arbitrary infliction which might as well be something else, or not be at all. And not only is it arbitrarily inflicted, but it is arbitrarily continued forever to no one's profit. I should quite agree that any such conception is fundamentally immoral. But I do not understand that to be the teaching of the Christian Religion. Punishment, in the Christian sense, is not something inflicted by another, but is a state in which one has voluntarily placed oneself by one's own act. Judgment is the statement of the thing that is: it is the truth about a man. If a man is a sinner, then to state that is his judgment. The punishment of sin is to be a sinner. As such he must be excluded from the Vision of God, for the medium of the divine Vision is purity. It cannot be too much insisted on that the formal teaching of the Catholic Religion about hell is confined to two statements; that there is a hell, and that those who are in that state are in it forever. But it does not include in the notion of hell any more (surely that is enough!) than exclusion from the Beatific Vision. It includes no inflicted pain, no "torture," no pain beyond what is necessarily implied in the sense of our own failure. And as hell implies no punishment in the sense of inflicted pain, neither, I think, does it imply eternal opposition to the will of God. I see no reason for assuming that those who are excluded from the divine Presence by their own fault, should not come to acquiesce in that fact and accept the will of God for them. Why should we think of them, as some pictures of hell have portrayed them, as constantly blaspheming God? It is much more in accord with what we know to believe that they |