Part 22

Noble and spotless lives have grown out of Christianity, as out of other systems of religion, as beautiful lilies grow out of the slime; but they grew in defiance of its teachings, which make this life of no value compared with the next. As all religions rest on the foundation of belief in a future life, so all the religious wars which have cursed mankind are referable to it; all persecutions; all the unutterable sufferings, physical and spiritual, which have made the centuries one long night of agony. It has blotted the star of hope from the heavens, and filled the vaulted darkness with the bitter wails of despair.

Humanity rolling onward in a vast river, to plunge over the crags of death into a bottomless pit of eternal agony, and the best that Christianity has offered, or can offer, is eternal psalm-singing to golden harps. "Saving souls" has been the theme of the Christian world for nearly two thousand years, and various have been the means employed. Dungeon, rack, the flames, social ostracism--how shall I find space to catalogue the endless names of methods which curdle the blood at bare mention! The cannibal, feasting on his foe, is engaged in the honorable effort of saving a soul, and the priestly torturer is doing the same. The Brunos were chained amid the fagots' flame, to save their souls and the souls of others led astray by their doctrines. Go down into the dimly lighted tribunal hall, where God's vicegerents sit in judgment. Before them stands one gone astray in belief. There is no argument of words. On the table is a little thimble with a screw at one side. The heretic places his fingers therein, and the judges turn the screws down into the tender nails. The compressed lips grow white, the veins knot on the temples, beaded sweat gathers on the brow, as slowly down pierces the relentless steel, until at last, human endurance yields, and the trembling lips gasp, "Dear Christ, I believe!" Then turn back the screws, ring the bells, and rejoice with great joy; for a soul is saved!

From that hall, go down a flight of stone steps to another in the bowels of the earth, where the walls are reeking with mold, and the lamp darkens in the foul vapor. Tread with care on the slippery floors, for the slime of years has gathered; and now we have reached a great stone, which we can turn back like a trap-door, and reach an opening. Lower your lamp, feebly burning in the fetid atmosphere. There are walls of stone, there is stone for a floor. It is like a jug without an outlet, except at the top. At the bottom is something moving, living! Hush! It moans and has speech! An iron ring wears the bleeding ankle to the bone, to the ring is a chain, and the other end of the chain is fastened to the floor. What monstrous crime has this man committed that he should thus suffer? Nothing, except he has thought for himself--is lost; and his judges are making the desperate attempt to save his soul!

Saving souls, not the life here, but that which is to come, has been the blight and curse of mankind. The doctrine of "one world at a time," and the present supreme, is a reaction against this essentially vicious dogma. Neither extreme may be true; for the truth is the "golden mean," which makes the future life a continuity of this, carrying forward all its ideals to full realization, and making the spiritual realm held in abeyance to as fixed and unchangeable laws as the material world.

By knowledge, man has been led out of the fogs to the highlands of free thought, and aroused from the nightmare of theology, which for ages held him in thraldom. Those were the ages when God and Christ were inwrought into the Constitution of the State, and the Holy Bible was the foundation of the law. Those were the ages of St. Bartholomew massacres, of autos-da-fé, of the rack and the fagot. Those were the ages when the day was darkened by the smoke of burning cities, and the fair fields gleamed white with the bones of the slain. Those were the ages when the whole Christian world engaged itself in saving souls!

A Jesus may suffer on the cross; not only one, but ten thousand may die, admirable in self-sacrifice and examples of firm adhesion to their sense of duty; but, for saving souls, their sacrifice is lost; for they suffer for a misconception of the plan of the world. Man has never been lost, and can not be lost, and hence can not be saved by the blood of one or ten thousand sacrifices.

If the future life is a continuity of this, then the perfection of religion is the making of this life perfect. Not by crucifixion of the body, not by suffering or disappointment, but by complete and harmonious culture, can this be accomplished.

THE NEW METHOD.--To solve the problem of immortality by the methods of Science, to bring it up from the marshlands of conjecture to the region of absolute knowledge, belongs to the present age and generation. It is a task they can and must accomplish. It has for so many ages been the fertile field of superstition, that it seems impossible to disentangle it from its unsatisfactory wrappings. The investigation must commence with the physical man as the basis of the spiritual, as through and by means of the body he is related to the physical world. He is the superlative being; the last, greatest and yet incomplete effort of creative energy. All departments of science gather around him as a center, and to have perfect knowledge of him is to comprehend the universe.

In the earliest ages; in the very childhood of the race, the momentous question was asked: What am I? The solution was felt to be fraught with momentous consequences not only in this life but the interminable future which was vaguely shadowed in the mind of savage man. The answers given became the foundations of the great religious systems of the world. The conjecture of untutored minds was received as the true system of causation, and growing hoary with age arrogated to itself infallible authority, and required implicit faith, and the exercise of reason, only, in making palatable the requirements of that faith. Conceived in an age when nature was an unknown realm, when science opened her mysteries to the understanding, and one by one, dogmas claiming infallibility were shown to be false, there of necessity was antagonism and conflict. I do not propose to enlarge on the theological aspect of this subject more than incidentally. That treatment has grown "stale, flat and unprofitable," for every drop of vital juice it contained has been extracted long ago. The interminable sects, wrangling over the dogmatic solution of this vital question of man's origin and destiny, arriving at nothing determinate, wrangling with each other and themselves, are not incentives to beguile the earnest truth-seeker to follow their paths. If metaphysical theology contained the germ of a truthful solution, satisfaction would have resulted ages ago, and the mind, reposing contented with the answer, would have employed its energies in other directions. Instead, there is restlessness, turmoil, conflict and indecision, and never has been an answer so broad and deep in Catholicity of truth as to meet the demand. If science fails also, it can not retrieve its failure by assumed infallibility. Its teachings are ever tentative and prophecies of final triumph, as the grandest study of mankind is man, the crowning work of science is the solution of this vexed question.

PHYSICAL MAN.--First, as most tangible and obvious in this investigation, is the physical man, the body, the temple of the psyche. The student, even when imbued with the doctrine of materialism, arises from the study of the physical machine with wonder and surprise akin to awe, declaring man to be fearfully and wonderfully made.

It is not surprising that we die, but that we live. The rupture of a nerve fiber, the obstruction of a valve, the momentary cessation of breath, the introduction of a mote at some vital point, brings this most complex structure to eternal rest. By what constant oversight, by what persistency of reparation is it preserved from ruin!

This physical man is an animal, amenable to the laws of animal growth. His body is the type of which theirs are imperfect copies. From two or three mineral substances his bones are crystalized, and articulated as the bones of all vertebrate animals, and over them the muscles are extended. From the amphioxus, too low in the scale of being to be called a fish; a being without organs, without a brain; little more than an elongated sack of gelatinous substance, through which a white line marks the position of the spinal cord and the future spinal axis; there is a slow and steady evolution to the perfected skeleton of man. His osseous structure is the type of all. The fin of the fish, the huge paddle of the whale, the cruel paw of the tiger, the hoof of the horse, the wing of the bird, and the wonderfully flexible hand of man, so exquisite in adaptations to be taken as an unqualified evidence of design, are all fashioned out of the same elementary bones, after one model. The change of form to meet the wants of their possessors, results from the relative enlargement or atrophy of one or more of these elements. When the fleshy envelope is stripped away, it is astonishing how alike these apparently divergent forms really are. In the whale the flesh unites the huge bones of the fingers and produces a broad, oar-like fin; in the tiger the nails become retractile talons; in the bird some of the fingers are atrophied, while others are elongated to support the feathers which are to offer resistance to the air in flight; in the horse the bones of the fingers are consolidated, and the united nails appear in the hoof.

If there exists such perfect similarity in the bony structure of man to the animal world, the muscular system for which it furnishes support offers the same likeness. Trace any muscle in the human body from its origin to its termination, mark the points where it seizes the bones, the function it performs, and then dissect the most obscure or disreputable member of the vertebrate kingdom, and you will find the same muscle performing the same function. The talons of the tiger are extended and flexed by muscles, similar to those which give flexibility to the human hand, and the same elements are traceable in the ponderous paddle of the whale.

More vital than the bony framework, or the muscles to which it gives support, is the nervous system, seemingly not only the central source of vital power, but the means of union and sympathetic relation of every cell and fiber of the entire body.

The brain has been aptly compared to a central telegraphic office, and the nerves to the extended wires, which hold in communication and direct relation all the organs, and from which the functions of each are directed.

The nervous system is the bridge which spans the chasm between matter and spirit, and the battle between Materialism and Spiritualism must be fought not only with brain, but in the province of brain. However we may regard the spiritual being as an independent entity, when we study this subject from the physical side, we are compelled to accept the intricate blending of the influence of the brain on the expression of that being, during its connection therewith. The issue directly stated is this: Does the brain yield mind as a result of organic changes in its cells and fibers, or is mind a manifestation through and by means of the brain of something beyond and superior?

It is admitted by profound thinkers that the brain and its functions is an unfathomed mystery, and that investigators must be content with what may be called secondary causes and effects. Phosphorus and sulphur may be essential for the activity of brain tissue, yet it is absurd to claim that a super-abundance of these elements wrote an Iliad, or solved the problem of gravitation. It is not phosphorus, or carbon, or nitrogen, however vigorously oxidized, which pulsates in the emotions of friendship or love; that feels and thinks and knows; that recollects the past, anticipates the future, and reaches out in infinite aspirations for perfection.

The actions of thought on the brain, the effort compelling the body to serve the bidding of the spirit, may consume this element and many others, as the movement of an engine consumes the coal and wastes the steam; but the coal and the steam are only the means whereby mind impresses itself on matter.

The physicist studies the brain as one wholly unacquainted with an engine would study that machine, and mistaking it for a living being, might be supposed to do. He would observe its motion, and, weighing the coal consumed and the products of combustion, would say that they appeared in steam, which after propelling the piston was waste. The design of the engine, the effect of these combinations and this waste, this observer would claim to be the guiding intelligence. And he would further argue that so much coal in the grate, so much water in the boiler and there appears an equivalent of intelligence, and the waste may be predetermined by chemical formulæ.

Until the threshold of the functional activity of the brain and the nervous system have been passed, conclusions should be modestly expressed.

If it be claimed that man is a natural being, originated and sustained by natural laws, that he came without miracle, then do we unite the margins of the human and animal kingdoms, and are satisfied with placing man at the head of the animal world? An interminable and unbroken series of beings extends in a gradual gradation downwards, until the organs by which the phenomena of life are manifested are lost one by one, the senses disappear, until we arrive at what has been aptly termed "protoplasm," not an organized form, but simply organizable matter, or matter from which organic forms can be produced.

If, in reviewing this chain of beings, slowly arising by constant evolution, we closely examine several of its consecutive links, we shall find that while each ascending link is apparently complete, yet it is only the germ out of which the next is evolved in superior forms. Each link is prophecy of future superiority. The fulfillment of one age can be traced until man appears as the last term in the physical series.

They who teach this doctrine of evolution, which is to life what the law of gravitation is to worlds, also teach that united with the doctrine of "conservation of force," the hope of immortality becomes a dream.

What a sham they make of creation! What a turmoil for no result! Infinite ages of progress and evolution, during which elemental matter, by force of inherent laws, sought to individualize itself and incarnate its forces in living beings; ages of struggle upwards from low to high, from sensitive to sentient, from sentient to intellectual, from zoöphyte to man! And now, having accomplished this, and given man exquisite susceptibility of thought, of love, of affection; making him the last factor in the series, he is doomed to perish! What is gained by this travail of the ages? Would it not have been as well had the series stopped with the huge saurians of the primeval slime, or the mastodon and mammoth of the pre-historic times, as with the man. As each factor in the series prophecies future forms, so does man read in the same light, prophecy-forms beyond. They can not be in the line of greater physical perfection, for in the days of Greece and Rome, man was as perfect physically, as is seen by their sculptures, as to-day. Ages ago, this exceeding beauty was attained. It cannot be in the evolution of a being superior to man, for as in each lower animal imperfect organs or structures, or partially employed functions, are improvable and perfected by succeeding forms, in man the archetype is complete, and no partially developed organ indicates the possibility of future change.

Progress having arrived at its limits with the body, changes its direction, and appears in the advancement of mind. Death closes the career of individuality, and we live only in thoughts--our selfhood is absorbed in the ocean of being. Mankind perfects as a whole, and the sighed-for millenium is coming bye-and-bye.

Of what avail is it to us if future generations are wise and noble, if we pass into nonentity? Of what avail to them to be wise and noble, if life is only the fleeting hour? Not yet can we believe Nature to be such a sham--such a cruel failure. The spirit rebels against the supposition of its mortality. The body is its habiliment. Shall the coat be claimed to be the entire man? Shall the garments ignore the wearer?

This is the animal side of man. Physically composed of the same elements, and having passed through these innumerable changes, he is an epitome of the universe. As man was foreshadowed in remotest ages as the crowning type in the series of organic life, so man foreshadows superior excellence. Springing out of his physical perfectibility, arises a new world of spiritual wants and aspirations, unanswered and unanswerable in mortal life.

MAN A DUAL BEING.--While Theology, Brahminical, Buddhistical or Christian, teaches that man is an incarnate spirit, independent of the physical body, created by miracle, supported by a succession of miracles, and saved by a miracle from eternal death, material science, as at present taught by its leading exponents, wholly ignores his spiritual life, and declares him to be a physical being only. It is not my purpose to reconcile these conflicting views. Truths never require reconciliation. They never conflict; and if the results of two different methods of investigation are at variance, one or the other is in error, or both, perchance, and the only reconciliation is the elimination of that error. The egotisms of theology and the pride of science array their votaries in opposition, while the truth remains unquestioned in the unexplored middle ground. Man is neither a spirit nor a body; he is the intimate union of both. In and through his physical being, the spiritual nature is evolved from the forces of the elements and is expressed. There is somewhat more enduring than the resultants of chemical unions, action and reactions in his physical body. Beneath this organic construction is that which remains, to which it is the scaffolding which assists, while it conceals the development of the real edifice.