Theological Essays/VIII

In the last Essay I spoke of the Death of Christ as it is connected with the Christian idea of Sacrifice and Atonement. But all people who know the tendencies of this age, and who know themselves, are aware how much more easy it is to contemplate this or any event recorded in the Scripture, as an idea, than as a fact. There are many who acknowledge the Death and Resurrection of Christ in what they call a spiritual sense, to whom the plain words of the Creed, "He was dead and buried, He descended into Hell, the third day He rose again from the dead," are merely words which they repeat because they have repeated them from childhood. Numbers more hold those words to be the relics of an effete superstition, out of which the world has extracted whatever good there was in it, and which may now be left to crumble. I wish to inquire whether the spiritual men, or these words of the Creed, meet the demands of the human heart best; whether these words, or those who cast them aside, are most favourers of superstition.

​1. St. Paul says: "The last enemy which shall be destroyed is Death." Strauss being at issue with him on most other points, appears to have reached the climax of opposition upon this. He says,—"The last enemy which shall be destroyed is the belief of man in his own immortality." Some may suppose that he has merely uttered an audacious paradox, for the sake of startling us, and showing us how far his vehemence against our ordinary faith will go. I do not think so. If we question our own minds honestly, we may find that there have been many hours, days, weeks, perhaps years, in which we have practically yielded assent to his proposition. “If I could get rid of this sense of immortality, if I could convince myself that my years would be rounded with a sleep, if I could be sure that there would be no dreams in that sleep,—what freedom I should possess! how I should be able to enjoy the threescore years, or the thirty or twenty years, which are allotted me here!” Surely the modern teacher has a large body of unconfessing, unconscious disciples; he must have known that he was the spokesman for thousands, whom some fear withheld from expressing their own feelings, And have I not been obliged to confess in former Essays that there is a justification for these feelings? Cannot numbers tell of sad effects which the dread of the world to come has produced upon their conduct to other men, upon their judgment of the beautiful world in which God has placed them, upon their thoughts of God Himself? Have they not been cold, hard, selfish, whenever their minds have been occupied with the one problem, how they may avert the doom which they fear is awaiting them hereafter? Have they not almost cursed the trees and flowers, the new birth of spring, the songs of birds, the faces of children, as if they ​were mockeries,—witnesses of some present life. with which they cannot safely sympathise? Has not the vision of God been one of darkness and horror? When they have said, "Our Father," have they not intended one who might destroy them, and from whom they have wished to be delivered? Such experiences in themselves interpret what they read in history. They see what frightful crimes have been committed by men for the sake of pleasing or appeasing those who may dispose of their future destiny; how these crimes have become a part of their moral system, sanctioned and promoted by those who had apparently more insight into the mind of their God or gods than they have; what poverty and filth, what neglect of relations, what slavery and cowardice, have been engendered by the notion that the business of existence here is to provide for the possibilities of another existence elsewhere.

has been no unreasonable summary of this evidence. Is not this summary expressed in another form by the words, “The enemy.to be got rid of is the sense of immortality.”

But practical men are driven to ask themselves another question. How is this sense to be got rid of? How is the enemy to be destroyed? No experiments for the purpose have succeeded yet; no theories of the universe, no new arrangements of it. When you have seemingly extinguished this consciousness, it starts up again; the arguments and schemes which were to exclude it themselves suggest it and awaken it. And yet there have been such approximations to the extinction of this feeling, as show clearly the only way in which it ever can be reached. Each one may ​understand for himself that the more he cultivates a merely animal existence, the more he forgets that he was created for anything but to eat and drink and sleep, the less clear and strong is this sense of immortality. And if he could stifle all thoughts that carry him back into past generations, and onward into those which will be when he has left the earth; if he could disconnect himself altogether with family, race, country, social sympathies; if he could cease to think of himself as a person, and become merely a thing—he might quit himself of this coil; not, I suspect, till then. As long as everything about him preaches of permanence and restoration, as well as of fragility and decay; as long as he is obliged to speak of succession and continuance and order in the universe, and in the societies of men; as long as he feels that he can investigate the one, and that he is a living portion of the other;—so long the sense of immortality will be with him: he cannot cast it off. The philosopher to whom I have alluded probably supposes that he can substitute a political immortality for a personal one; that he can teach men to be indifferent about their own continuance after death, by making them think of the life and endurance of their race. He will find that the more strongly one sentiment is developed, the more certain the other is to come forth; that if one perishes, the other must perish. For he who heartily believes himself to be the member of a family or society, for which it is worth while to fight and to perish, has the strongest conviction of his own personality; he cannot separate his life from its life; if it has any being he must have a being.

But, on the other hand, it is most true that a man may become awfully conscious of his own personality, while he is standing apart from all human beings. ​This is what I spoke of in a former Essay as emphatically the sense of Sin, the experience of a dark, hopeless isolation, caused by one’s own self, certain to continue while that continues. And this it is which unites Sin to Death, which makes it so hard for us to divorce them in our thoughts. Death, in the obvious aspect of it, is isolation; the separation of each creature from its fellow. The internal dread of it strictly corresponds to this its outward manifestation. "I said, in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of the grave; I am deprived of the residue of my days. I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord, in the land of the living. I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world." This was Hezekiah’s language—the most natural language that a man could utter—the revelation of the thoughts of innumerable hearts. He has in himself the sense of immortality. It has been nourished by all his faithful acts as a King, by all his sympathies with his nation, by all his efforts to preserve it alive, by all his confidence that God would uphold it from generation to generation. Now he is losing sight of all those with whom he has shared his hopes, his fears, his sorrows. He is losing sight of the temple of God, of all that has reminded him of His presence. Where shall he be? shall he not be alone? A living creature, but an exile from living creatures. No longer in an order—perhaps in a chaos. Oh! infinite horror, the horror of absolute solitude!—what can be compared with it?

The German philosopher, then, has much to say for himself; but I think St. Paul has more. The sense of immortality is very dreadful, but the terror is not one which the thought of death relieves us of; the thought of death awakens it in us,—the nearer we come to death, the more it faces us. Death then is the enemy; ​we must grapple with that if we would overcome the other. And men do grapple with it. There is a deep conviction in their minds that death is utterly monstrous, anomalous,—something to which they cannot and should not submit. Generations of moralists have done nothing whatever to enforce the experience of six thousand years. They go on denouncing the folly of men for thinking that death is not a necessity, for not yielding to the necessity; the heart of man does not heed their discourses: their own hearts do not heed them. There is that in them which rebels against death, which rebels against it all the more because it is a necessity. Till you explain what that is, till you justify it, you will not cure it. You may wonder why men are so unreasonable, why they dread death, hate it, defy it, and then again seem to long for it, to suppose that it is the only end of their struggle of pain and doubt and despair; but you will fall into the same unreasonableness yourself, you will repeat all these inconsistencies as soon as you pass from the professor’s chair to the couch of actual suffering.

I cannot see that the belief in Christ’s death would be any deliverance from these awful perplexities, if that death were an artificial arrangement for saving us from a future penalty, while the actual penalty which makes us tremble is incurred as much as ever. But it is not in this light that the Cross ever presented itself to a weary, heavy-laden man. He hears that there is One who has shared his death and the death of the whole world; One in whom God delights; One in whom each man may delight. If this news is believed, the separation of death, that which is indeed its sting, is taken away. It is now, for the first time, common to the individual man with his race. He shall not die alone. ​He shall not cease to see the Lord, even the Lord in the land of the living; no, nor man with the inhabit- ants of the world. A new and mysterious attraction holds him to both. Death becomes a bond to them. And it is no longer a mere necessity. Christ chose it because it is ours. We can choose it as His more than ours. What I am saying has no direct reference to our belief in the issue of the death. That may be always implicitly contained in our belief of the death itself. We should not be satisfied with it if we did not see in it the pledge of triumph. But Jesus Christ, as the Crucified, has been an object of rest and comfort to multitudes who have not consciously dwelt on His resurrection. The fact is undoubted, and we do not rightly understand ourselves or our fellow-creatures if we overlook it.

2. Nor are we accurate observers of facts, if we roughly confound the feelings of men respecting death with those which are awakened by the grave. Philosophers or divines may classify them together,—for actual men they are different. “He is gone,” are the words by which those who are standing by a bedside declare that the person whom they knew is not in the form which they look upon. But that form is sacred and awful. It is the witness and pledge that he has been. They cannot look at it in its stillness and repose, and satisfy themselves with any thoughts of a disembodied spirit. In some way or other they must connect it with the friend who spoke with them, and cared for them. And yet the instinct, “Bury the dead out of our sight,” is also deep and healthy; there is something essentially brutal in those people who, like the Tartars, can bear to leave corpses exposed. We call that which the earth encloses, that which it ​devours and assimilates to itself, "remains," or "what is mortal;" we have a horror of identifying it with the actual body which was so precious to us. We shrink from the mummy as from a weak, irreverent, materialistic experiment to preserve that which was meant to perish. The earth or ashes seem to us far better; we would rather cast the dearest form into the sea than give it that horrible, unnatural kind of endurance. These are true feelings, which are found strongest in the truest minds; yet they are very inexplicable. The body associates itself with any thoughts we have of personality and immortality; that which lies in the earth, or is consumed with the fire, we naturally and inevitably associate with decay, putrefaction, destruction. It is easy for superstition to confound the feelings, and to invest relics with the sacredness which we must attach to body; none of its appeals to the heart have been so successful. But the conscience bears witness against the confusion, and longs for a deliverance from it. "HE was buried," He, the King of men, the true Man, the Son of the Highest, has been in the grave. He knows its secrets, not as a stranger, but as an inhabitant. I believe myriads of sorrowers have found comfort in that conviction, which all their speculations could not give them, but rather took away. His burial, they feel, ought to explain that which all others cannot explain. And they do get the explanation into their hearts, though their understandings may still be much bewildered.

3. But besides and beyond this narrow house, there are fields of speculation, in which men have lost themselves almost from the beginning of the earth until now. Lord Byron has brought Cain into the Abyss of Space, Lucifer being his guide thither. ​No conception can be truer. The first murderer must have traversed those regions; innumerable footsteps have followed his—all perhaps under the same conduct. A dark, formless world, in which there is nothing for the eye to dwell upon, for the heart to embrace, where all is vague and monstrous,—this may become, this has become, the habitation of human intellects, formed in God’s image. We can come into such utter dreariness, because we are spirits, because we have a home and a Father, because we can have no rest till we find that home and that Father. If we were merely children of earth, we might be satisfied with its pictures and images; these would be all in all to us. Being better than this, we must make a hell for ourselves if we cannot find a heaven. Yes, a hell! the simple language is the best. I will not quarrel about the etymology of Hades. It may mean the unseen, or the formless. But the unseen becomes to the bewildered conscience the formless, the negation of a world, the darkest conception a man can have of that which is without himself. He brings into it a more terrible darkness, that which is within himself; the worm of conscience which he cannot kill, the fire he can never quench. To be delivered from that is to be delivered from sin. But how may he be delivered from the imagination to which sin has imparted its own horror and confusion? What glimpse of daylight can he discern in the trackless abyss? "He descended into Hell.” Mighty words! which I do not pretend that I can penetrate, or reduce under any forms of the intellect. If I could, I think they would be of little worth to me. But I accept them as news that there is no corner of God’s universe over which His Love has not brooded, none over which the Son of God and ​the Son of Man has not asserted His dominion. I claim a right to tell this news to every peasant and beggar of the land. I may bid him rejoice, and give thanks, and sing merry songs to the God who made him, because there is nothing created which his Lord and Master has not redeemed, of which He is not the King; I may bid him fear nothing around him or beneath him while he trusts in Him. I may beseech him to watch continually, lest he should lose his confidence in the divine and human Saviour and Conqueror, or forget that He has saved and conquered for his brethren as well as himself. I may tell him that if he does, he will become again the self-seeking, self-worshipping, cowardly creature the Devil is always seeking to make him, and that then he will assuredly fall into a condition of utter falsehood, in which all real things will seem to him unreal, and all unreal real,—in which the worm and the fire of conscience will become ever more and more intolerable.

4, The Gospel narratives of the Resurrection are only a little longer and more minute than those which record the fact of Christ’s burial. The women go to the sepulchre; they find the stone rolled away; angels ask them why they seek the living among the dead. He is not there, He is risen. They tell Simon Peter. He and John go to the sepulchre. One stays with- out, one looks at the linen cloth and the napkin. They tell it to the rest. There is wonder and doubt.—This is the story. What! only this? no greater array of proofs to secure our assent for that which stands solitary in the history of the world? No more overpowering testimonies than that of these women and these fishermen, in support of an event which is to be the basis of a world-belief? No!— ​meditate the fact well—this is all. Diligent men in later times may have shown with great skill why these fishermen and women were entitled to credit; why their simplicity and their own doubts confirm their trustworthiness; what they endured for their perseverance in their story, etc. Those to whom the word of the Resurrection first came, received it simply as a message which, through whatever feeble voices it might reach them, must have been sent them from a Father in Heaven, because no one else knew how much they wanted it. If they had a Father,—if He wished them to know that they had,—this, they felt, must be His way of telling them. Between them and God there had been a dark impassable gulf; if that were not in some way filled up, they might talk of Him, use His name in their petitions, dream that He meant them well; but nothing had actually been done for them,—no one hope of their hearts had been satisfied, no dread had been taken away. If there was no person who was actually one with God and one with man, the gulf must remain for ever unfilled; if there was, it was not incredible that He had entered into man’s death, grave, Hell; it was absolutely incredible that He should be holden of them, Everything such a Being did must be actual, not fictitious ; seeming could have no relation to His nature; what men knew of suffering and fear He must have known. But to suppose that His Father forgot Him, did not own Him, did not claim Him, because He was exhibiting the fulness of His love, and carrying out His purposes, would have been a shock to the heart and reason such as they had never been called to undergo yet. Here was the evidence for the Resurrection; with this did the preachers of it subdue the world.

​And this, I believe, must and will be the evidence of it in all generations to come, as much as it was in the first. The testimony will be mighty, because the thing testified of is that which all men, everywhere, are wanting,—which some who do not crave for what is peculiar and distinguishing, who must have that which is human, are taught by many hard processes that they want. But though I hold this evidence to be the highest, and to be that which all other kinds of it only serve to corroborate, I am convinced that the experience of eighteen centuries,—our experience especially of the confusions and contradictions into which churchmen and church doctors have fallen respecting the state of men here and hereafter, the experience that is appealed to as conclusive against our Creed,—illustrates the words I have been speaking of in this Essay as they could not have been illustrated in the first ages.

1. We speak continually of death as the separation of the soul from the body. If we try to give ourselves an account of what we mean by Soul and Body, we should say, I suppose, roughly, that the soul is that with which we think; the body that which moves from place to place, and to which certain organs of sense belong. If this be so, how little does our language correspond to the fact which it tries to describe! Death, so far as we can judge from any of the phenomena it presents to us, affects the powers of thinking, of motion, of sensation, equally; our natural impression would be, that whatever influence it produces on one, it produces also on the other. But that strange “sense of immortality” which the benevolent German is so eager to extinguish would not allow people to follow this conclusion of nature; ​something, they said, must survive. The soul would go to Hades; the hero himself would be a prey to the birds and dogs. We have adopted the language very nearly; often we adopt it altogether, even though we have a confused impression that the soul has more to do with the hero himself, and the body with that which the dogs or birds devour. But when that conviction has thoroughly taken possession of a man, when his “sense of immortality”. has begun to express itself in the only language which can express it, and he says, "I shall survive, I cannot perish!" then, first, all that horror which Strauss would deliver us from is awakened; then, secondly, it becomes impossible for the man to divide his soul from that which has been, during all his experience of it, its yoke-fellow. If he has cultivated his powers of reflection, and has studied the forms of language, he may learn gradually to find that the names which have stood so distinct in men’s discourses have distinct realities answering to them. But he will not allow his imperfect psychology to interfere with the witness of his conscience—that he, who uses equally the powers of thought and the powers of motion and sensation which have. been entrusted to him, is responsible for both;—that, how- ever they may be divided or united, they are both intimately attached to his personality.

If, then, there comes upon him a much stronger sense of his connection with deeds done in the body than he had while he was drawing those artificial lines, and also a much stronger conviction of the dignity and sacredness of the body than those can entertain who would separate it from the soul,—the marvel of death, which seems to extinguish soul as well as body, and yet which he can neither hope nor ​fear will extinguish him, presents itself under a new aspect. He must have a solution of it. The solution must be one which does not hide any part of the fact, which does not impose a notion upon him as a substitute for the fact. The Scripture says plainly, that Christ poured out His soul, as well as His body, to death. The description of His agony and crucifixion has been received by those who have believed it—practically, if not in name—as the history of the death of a soul as well as of a body. Those who have wished to represent His death as different from all others, for the sake of enhancing its worth, have dwelt upon this as its most wonderful characteristic. To me it seems the most wonderful, because from it I am able to learn what other deaths are—what the death of man is. Christ gave up all that was His own,—He gave Himself to His Father. He disclaimed any life which did not belong to Him in virtue of His union with the Eternal God. It is our privilege to disclaim any life which does not belong to us in virtue of our union with Him. This would be an obvious truth, if we were indeed created and constituted in Him,—if He was the root of our humanity. We should not then have any occasion to ask how much perishes or survives in the hour of death. We should assume that all must perish, to the end that all may survive.

2. Such a conclusion would go far, I think, to help us through that terrible perplexity, into which I said we all fell, respecting the body and that which we commit to the ground. As long as we suppose the mystery of death to be the division of soul and body, so long we must cling, with a deep love, to those remains which yet we are forced to regard with a kind of loathing. We shall be ready to believe stories of ​miracles wrought by them; we shall be half inclined to worship them. Or if we reject this temptation,—because Romanists have fallen into it, and we think it must therefore be shunned,—we shall take our own Protestant way of asserting the sanctity of relics, by maintaining that at a certain day they will all be gathered together, and that the very body to which they once belonged will be reconstructed out of them. That immense demand is made upon our faith—a demand in comparison of which all notions of cures wrought at tombs fade into nothing—by divines who would yet shrink instinctively from saying that what they call a living body here is a mere congeries of particles,—who would denounce any man as a materialist if he said that. This demand is made upon us by divines who use as a text-book of Christian evidences "Butler’s Analogy," the ground chapter of which, "On the Future State," is based on the argument that there is no proof that death destroys any of our living powers—those of the body more than those of the soul; and which distinctly calls our attention to the fact that ordinary attrition may destroy the particles of which the matter of our bodies consists more than once in the course of a life; so that nothing can be inferred from our depositing the whole of that matter at the moment of dissolution. This demand is made upon our faith by divines who read to every mourner as he goes with them to the grave of a friend, that corruption cannot inherit incorruption; that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.

But though I speak of this opinion as "a demand upon our faith," I hold it to be the fruit of our unbelief. If we did attach any meaning to that expression upon which St. Peter at Jerusalem, St. Paul at Antioch, ​dwelt so earnestly, that Christ’s body saw no corruption,—if we did believe that He who was without sin showed forth to us in Himself what is the true normal condition of humanity, and showed forth in that body of His what the human body is,—we should not dare, I think, any longer to make the corrupt, degrading, shameful accidents which necessarily belong to that body in each one of us, because we have sinned, the rule by which we judge of it here: how much less should we suppose these to be the elements out of which its high and restored and spiritual estate can ever be fashioned?

It is impossible not to perceive, under this notion of a resurrection of relics,—of that corruption which our Lord did not see,—a very deep conviction that the body of our humiliation must be identical with the body redeemed and renewed. This conviction is so rooted in the heart, that it will absolutely force nature, fact, Scripture, everything, into accordance with it. I must be in all respects the same person that I was before I put off my tabernacle; therefore these elements, which were once attached to my body, must come from all the ends of the earth to constitute it. What a witness for the reality of a belief, that it can sustain such a contradiction as this rather than cease to exist. All through my life on earth, soul and body are groaning together under a weight of decay and mortality,—are crying for deliverance from it. An hour comes which seems to say that their emancipation has taken place; that these Adam conditions belong no more to the man; that as to them he is utterly dead. The preacher of God’s Gospel runs about saying, "Oh, no! it is a mistake! These witnesses of the fall,—these pledges of pain and shame, ​from which fever, consumption, cholera, after days or years of suffering, have at last set your friend free,—belonged to him inseparably, necessarily, eternally. They are that body, the most curious, wonderful, glorious, of God’s works; they are not, as your consciences tell you, as the Scripture tells you, the proofs that this wonderful fabric has suffered a monstrous and cruel outrage; that it needs a deliverer to raise it and renew it.” A strange Gospel, one would think! And yet one which men receive, which they will continue to receive and hold, rather than think that they are to perish, or that they are to have merely a visionary soul-life.

"As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." This is St. Paul’s broad statement in that passage of his writings which deals specially and formally with this subject. It is in strict accordance with all his other doctrine. Christ is the Lord of Man, the Life-giver of Man, the True Man; Adam is the root of his individuality, of his disease, of his death. All is strictly in order. Death has its accomplishment: the Adam dies, and is buried, and sees corruption; Christ gives Himself to death, and sees no corruption. If a man has an Adam nature, and is also related by a higher and closer affinity to Christ,—is the effect of that union that he shall be redeemed, body and soul, out of the corruption which is deposited in the grave, or that it shall be his future, as it has been his past, inheritance?

But has not St. Paul spoken of a change to take place in the twinkling of an eye? and has he not connected this with the last trump? I hope, at some other time, to examine the whole of this great chapter, and to see what it actually reveals to us. But I can​not refuse even here to meet this special objection, it is for many reasons so practically important.

If, then, there was no allusion to that last trump of the Archangel in this sentence, I do not think we should any of us have hesitated to believe that St. Paul, in strict conformity with all his teaching respecting our death in Adam, and our life in Christ, was unfolding the mystery,—so deep, so necessary to all, so contrary to ail the notions of the Corinthians, that men, instead of sleeping in their graves, would be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. And I believe no one could have hesitated in any particular case to have applied the words. Nay, I do not find that men hesitate, even with their customary notions and opinions, to apply them now. As they watch the last breath departing from a dear friend, they seize the language—they feel they have a right to it. They say, "A moment ago he was mortal, and now he is free! It has been but the twinkling of an eye, and what a change has come!" Such are the unconscious utterances of men’s faith and hope, grounded, as they surely think, and as I am convinced they have a right to think, on St. Paul’s words,

Nor does the thought then disturb them that there is a want of identity between him that has been and him that is. Though the decaying, agonised frame is lying calm and at rest, they do not then doubt that he who spoke to them a few minutes before did not derive his powers of speech, any more than the celestial smile which still remains on the clay, from that clay. Faith and reason, however crushed and confounded, are too strong in that hour of reality for a notion so cold and so inhuman.

"But the trump of the Archangel! that seems to ​put all belief of a resurrection of the body to an inconceivable distance, and to make the hypothesis, which identifies it with a resurrection of remains, after all, the only Scriptural one." And this opinion becomes so intertwined with the expectation of a great future judgment of the just and the unjust, and therefore with all the most sacred moral principles, that we may well tremble when we encounter it. If I did not feel that morality and godliness, and the practical belief of a judgment, were put into the greatest risk by the confusions which we are tolerating respecting these words, I would gladly pass them by. But I dare not be silent, because I see what a mass of unbelief and indifference is congealing in men’s minds under a thin coating of apparent orthodoxy.

I scarcely need ask any Protestant whether the words "trump of the Archangel" convey to him precisely the impression which he would derive from the picture of Michael Angelo. He is likely to answer, with what I should think rather excessive and unnecessary indignation, that none of his impressions are derived from pictures; that he has the greatest horror of their sensualising effect; that of course he does not dream of a material trumpet. I do not use this language myself. I have learnt from pictures, and am willing to learn from them. I believe I might learn much from this one of Michael Angelo’s which would do me great good, which would give strength, distinctness, even depth, to my own convictions and to the words of inspiration. But I accept the statement, from which I am sure no pious and intelligent Romanist would for an instant dissent, that the mere trumpet, whether read of in a book, or seen in a picture, though it may be helpful to the mind in deliver​ing it from vagueness, is symbolical; that to give it an actual material counterpart would be gross and superstitious in the last and lowest degree.

I should scarcely think it necessary to make this remark, if I did not perceive painful proofs that our zeal—to a great extent, I think, an honest zeal,—against symbolism sometimes involves us in a confusion, to which those who are educated in it (being thereby, I allow, exposed to other temptations) are not equally subject. We adopt what we suppose is a spiritual substitute for some literal or material representation. We find we have got only a shadow or phantom. We must fill up the hollow in our hearts by some means; and we unconsciously add on the very driest and most material conception to the (so-called) spiritual one, as a necessary support to its feebleness. I could give instances upon instances of this strange intellectual hocus-pocus; the neglect of them by divines is, I believe, contributing most effectually to the return of Romanist notions and habits. I do not therefore think it unnecessary to bring each person who speaks of the Archangel’s trumpet distinctly to book, and to make him confess,—though he

may be disposed to shrink from the acknowledgment as too obvious and humiliating—that he does not mean such a trumpet as men play upon; that he would count it shockingly irreverent to let the thoughts of such an instrument dwell in his mind in connection with such a subject.

But are we then to dismiss the phrase as if it imported nothing to us, because we cannot reduce it to this signification, which would be actually nothing? I apprehend that it has the most serious import, and that the Scriptures tell us what it is. The Prophets ​of the Old Testament, in whose ears the trumpet that sounded loud and long on Sinai was ever repeating its notes, did not allow their countrymen to rest in the old image. Every rending of the mountains,—every earthquake, everything which idolaters looked upon as the sion of the wrath of the tyrant before whom they trembled, everything that the mere philosopher calls an ordinary convulsion of nature,—was with them an Archangel’s trumpet, declaring that the righteous and everlasting King was coming forth to punish the earth for its iniquities, and to set truth and judgment in the midst of it. This was the teaching—the uniform teaching,—of the old seers, in whose school St. Paul’s mind was formed. Are we to suppose that he had a less comprehensive, less spiritual idea of the divine method than they had,—that he deserted them for some more heathenish conception? Are we not rather to conclude that he was carrying out their truth to its highest power; that whatever they meant he meant still more perfectly?

If you ask whether he meant that there would sound in his own day an Archangel’s trumpet, which would call the nations,—his own first,—into God’s judgment, and that a mighty change in the condition of them all—the beginning of what may be rightly called a new world—would follow upon that judgment, I should answer, Undoubtedly I think so; I can put no other construction upon his language; and I can put no other construction upon the facts of history except that they fulfilled his language. But if you ask, further, how he connected this with the condition of each individual man who might or might not be alive at that crisis in the world’s history, I should say, Since he held that in Adam all die, and that in Christ ​all are made alive, he of necessity believed also that a day was at hand for every man—a day of revelation and discovery—a day which should show him what life was and what death was—what his own true condition, what his false condition, was. And everything which warned a man that such a day was at hand, which roused him to seek for light and to fly from darkness, was a note of the Archangel’s trumpet—a voice bidding him awake, that Christ the Lord of his spirit might give him light. And in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, by a fit of apoplexy, by the dagger of an assassin, the vesture of mortality which hides that light from it might drop off from him, and he might be changed. What had merely sounded to him here as some common earthly note of preparation for death, would then be recognised as the Archangel’s trumpet calling him to account, asking him whether the light that had been vouchsafed to him, whilst shadows were still about him, had been faithfully used, or whether he had loved darkness rather than light, because his deeds were evil?

In both these anticipations,—if they are, or can be separated,—I accept St. Paul and the other Scriptures as a guide respecting the condition of us who are living in this later period of the world. I look for a judgment of Nations and Churches to wind up our age, as he looked for one to wind up his age. I believe the trumpet of the Archangel has been sounding in every century of the modern world, that it is sounding now, and will sound more clearly before the end comes. But I do not, for this, allow myself to doubt that it is sounding in the ears of each individual man; that a time will come when the light will burst in upon him, and show him things as they are; when he will ​know that there is all life for him in Christ, and that there is all death in himself. I cannot persuade myself that the eloquent words I have heard from preachers, in which this truth was pressed home upon the consciences of men,—in which they were told how all personal and family visitations were messages from heaven, trumpets of the Archangel calling them to repentance,—were merely fine metaphors, which, if possible, were to produce a startling effect, but which meant nothing. It is indeed "fiddling while Rome is burning," for God’s ambassadors to be indulging in fine talk about His judgment, which their congregations are not to take as real. I must suppose that they think such language not metaphorical, but the translation of metaphors into reality. And if so, there is nothing in this part of the teaching of St. Paul to hinder us from accepting the other part as a confirmation, not a contradiction, of the inference which we should draw from the New Testament generally,—that Christ was buried in order that the body might be claimed as an heir of life, as redeemed from corruption.

3. Supposing this to be the doctrine which is involved in the belief of Christ’s descent into the grave, another enormous weight would be taken from the human spirit,—a weight which the heart and the understanding have been equally unable to bear. We are told to believe in a place of disembodied spirits. According to all the maxims which we ordinarily recognise, place appertains to body; it is only of body that you can predicate it. And this logical principle, so far from being at variance with our higher instincts, entirely accords with them. People talk of their friends as disembodied. When they think of them, ​they are obliged to suppose them clothed with bodies. They admit the necessity; it is part, they say, of their weakness. They ought to feel otherwise. They ought to compel themselves to imagine that which they cannot imagine; that which they do only imagine at the peril of a direct contradiction! "But Scripture. demands it." How, and where? It speaks of the bodies of saints coming forth and showing themselves after the Resurrection. It speaks of Moses and Elias appearing to the disciples. It records acts of our Lord on earth by which bodies are recalled from the unseen region into ours. "Oh! but these are exceptions." Exactly; and Scripture presents nothing but exceptions to your theory. If, however, I accept the Scriptures as teaching me laws by instances, and so correcting my theories, and dispossessing me of them, I think I am at least as much bowing my neck to its authority as you are, even though the result may be that I am not obliged to force my conscience or my intellect into an impossible position.

"But are we not, then, to believe in a Hades?" It was not a duty, but a terrible necessity, which led men of the old world to speak of Hades. They did not believe in it; there was nothing to believe. The void beyond the grave had never been entered; they could do nothing but mark it down in their charts by some name which left an impression of its vague, inaccessible character. But the heart was so impatient of the void that all earthly forms and pictures must be thrown into it, if, perhaps, it might be filled. It cannot be all Stygian darkness; there may be verdant meadows here and there, scattered in the midst of the desolation; the forms of human justice must be there ; Æacus and Rhadamauthus will decide which of the ​shadows that pass by them shall be consigned to the better, which to the more hateful, region. The Jew, taught in the law of his fathers, dared not let his fancy indulge in such creatures. There was no Elysium in his Hades. He fled from the frightful vision of mere death and darkness to trust in the living God. The dead he was sure could not praise Him: if God had been his hope and deliverer all through his pilgrimage, He would not desert him at last. He would not leave his soul in Hades, nor suffer that which had been holy in His eyes to see corruption. Yet the fact of corruption was before his eyes; the grave did receive its victim; the worms did gnaw upon him. Was this confusion to last for ever? I believe that the words, "His soul was not left in Hades; His body did not see corruption," are a removal of it, once and for ever. I have no right to speak again of an unvisited, trackless region beyond the grave; I have no right to people that region with forms of my fancy. Elysium and Stygian pools have vanished ; I have no right to call them into existence again. I have no right to accept the darkness which haunted the minds of patriarchs and prophets, and in which they believed it was a sin to dwell, as if it were intended for us.

"But we mean by Hades a place of Spirits; do not you believe in that?" Certainly, I believe in a place where Spirits dwell. This earth is such a place; we who dwell in it are spirits. There may be a multitude more dwelling in it, who have cast off their conditions of mortality, or who have never been subject to such conditions; I do not know; there is nothing to oppose such a belief,—much, perhaps, to encourage it. As the butterfly in its free flight may drop upon ​the leaf or flower, and taste its sweets, on which it fed as a caterpillar, or in which it lay wrapped as a chrysalis, so those who could just see the glories of the earth through its decay, and were sometimes so entranced by them as to forget their own greatness and their Father’s house, may now enter fully and safely into the beauty which overpowered them, and make it the occasion for thanksgiving, or may be instruments in leading us to an apprehension of it. There may be many more places for Spirits in those innumerable worlds which the Astronomer is discovering to us, and which we shall delight in and wonder at the more, as we become more convinced that they are God’s worlds, and that not one of them can have been made without Him who is the Light of men. The question is, whether, above and beyond all these, I must invent a place which my senses do not tell me of, which Science does not open to me,—not for spirits, but for shadows, and must use the language of Scripture, which apparently is meant to deliver me from such a dreary necessity, as the excuse for it.

"But Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison." I rejoice to believe it. I do not indeed know, more than St. Augustine did, to what age or place that preaching is to be referred; I may think with him that the words of St. Peter, literally taken, point more to the time of Noah than to a later time. But be that as it may, I thank God that Christendom, even in some of those traditions wherein there has been most of vagueness and fancy, has borne witness to the fact that Christ is the Lord of all spirits who have lived in all times, and that He is the great deliverer of spirits. I thank God that men have been sure that there was a justification for that faith in ​Scripture, whether it is to be found in the particular texts to which they appealed, or not. But how that preaching to spirits in prison warrants me in building a prison for them which, according to no laws that the Scripture teaches us about spirits, could hold them,—a place for the disembodied—I have yet to be informed.

"But your language, pushed to its consequences, might prove that there is no Heaven and no Hell." Forgive me; that is the very consequence which I dread from the perplexity into which you have led us. I believe that Christ came into the world expressly to reveal the kingdom of Heaven, and to bring us into it. He and His Apostles speak of it as the kingdom of righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Ghost. They present Righteousness, Love, Truth, to us as substantial realities, as the Nature of the Living and Eternal God, manifested in the Only-begotten Son, inherited by all who claim to be made in His image. And since they reveal Heaven to us, they of necessity make known Hell also. The want of Righteousness, Truth, Love, the state which is contrary to these, is and must be Hell.

"Mystical! mystical! States, not places. So we expected." A danger to be feared, and one to be carefully avoided. I have tried to avoid it by saying that I know of no place for disembodied spirits. I cannot understand how men realise a state, except in some place. I do not try to understand it. I find some spirits in different places of this earth very miserable, and others in a certain degree of blessedness. I do not find that the place in which they are makes the difference. The most fertile and beautiful may be the most accursed; the naturally sterile may be more desirable. I should conclude from these ​observations, if I had nothing else to guide me, that the moral and spiritual condition of the inhabitants is the means of making a heaven or a hell of this earth. Scripture sustains this conclusion. All it tells me of the kingdom of Heaven shows me that man must anywhere be blessed, if he has the knowledge of God, and is living as His willing subject; everywhere accursed, if he is ignorant of God and at war with Him. This, I have a right to say, I know. And if I believe God’s revelation of His Son, I may know a little more. I may be sure that death, as Butler maintains from analogy, does not change the substance of the human creature, or any of its powers or moral conditions, but only removes that which had crushed its substance, checked the exercise of its powers, kept its moral condition out of sight. I may conclude, even if Christ did not tell me so expressly in all His parables, that the laws of God’s kingdom in its different regions are not different; that one must explain the other; that everywhere to know God, and work for God and with God, to help His creatures, to cry and labour for the extirpation of evil, must be the good of spirits formed in God’s image; that everywhere sympathy, fellowship, affection, must be the condition of right human existence; selfishness, its plague and contradiction. I cannot believe the good anywhere, in any creatures, to have reached its climax, because the Scriptures and reason teach me that there must be a perpetual growth in the knowledge of God, and in the power of serving Him. And as long as there is any evil in the universe, I must suppose, seeing that God and His Son desire its overthrow, that good spirits also desire its overthrow. Further than this I dare not go. And this it seems to me, should be enough ​to make our zeal in proclaiming the Gospel of men’s deliverance from evil and death and hell very strong and vehement, and in exhorting our brethren not to reject so great a salvation; seeing that, left to our- selves, without a Redeemer and a Father, there must be a continual descent into a lower depth. It cannot signify much to me, or any man, whether I call that depth Hades or Gehenna. To me the Hades becomes a Gehenna, because my own self becomes one, if I cannot be raised out of myself, and brought into sympathy with God’s order and God’s love.

4, When Jesus said to Martha, "Thy brother shall rise again," she, taught in the popular school of the time, answered, "I know that he shall rise in the resurrection at the last day." "Jesus answered," says St. John, "I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." It seems to me sometimes, in low and desponding moods, that in the nineteenth century of the Christian Church, we have got back to Martha’s point of view,—that we believe just what the Pharisees had instructed her to believe, that the glorious mystery implied in the words by which our Lord raised her out of that condition of mind, and in the act which confirmed them, has perished out of the circle of our convictions. But I am sure this is not so, and that-it only seems to be so, because we judge of the inward belief of human beings,—of that deep and secret wisdom which they receive from above,—by the hard and formal propositions which they have caught from us, and have probably misunderstood. This distinction,—which I find it more and more necessary to keep in mind respecting ourselves, that I may feel ​our sins, and God’s mercy,—is also a great comfort in thinking of Unitarians. To me, nothing sounds harder and colder than their mode of talking about Christ’s Resurrection. In old times they clung to the belief with great tenacity; it was the main article of their faith. The Resurrection, they said, proved the truth of immortality, which philosophers had always disputed. It proved also the truth of the Christian religion. Apparently the translation of the first statement is, that a stupendous violation of all the laws and principles of the universe was divinely ordained, to convince men of a truth which they had never been able to forget; which had haunted them, and given birth to the most frightful superstitions; from which the most modern wisdom hopes that we may at last be rescued. As to the second reason, a man is compelled to ask, “And what is the religion which this stupendous anomaly is to establish?” for it cannot itself be the religion; it is described as a means to an end—a mere mode of demonstration. Is it to show that certain great moral maxims are sound and true which would commend themselves to the conscience without any such evidence, and which cannot be obeyed at all the more, if it were multiplied a thousandfold? Both these difficulties would seem to have been increased greatly by the perseverance with which Priestley and the earlier Unitarians maintained the simplest materialism, denying the existence of a soul, and holding that the body slept till some distant Resurrection day. And yet I am sure that the faith of these Unitarians in the Resurrection was often most strong, most energetic. It bore them through many outward difficulties, made them ready to encounter popular indignation and contumely, saved them from ​the temptation—which must have been often great, as the correspondence between Gibbon and Priestley shows,—to cast in their lot with the accomplished infidels, who respected them for their knowledge of physics, and despised them for their want of boldness in not wholly repudiating the supernatural. A belief which could bear these fruits, I at least feel that I have no right to speak slightingly of; nor do I discover that I have what German doctors call "a theological interest" in undervaluing it. I rather think that, if I were thoroughly rooted in the principles which I have endeavoured to assert in this and the foregoing Essays, I should give thanks for these signs and witnesses that Christ is with those who seem to speak most slightingly of Him, testifying to them that He is risen indeed, and that they have a life in Him which no speculations or denials of theirs have been able to rob them of, even as we have a life in Him, which our sins often hinder us from acknowledging, but cannot quench. Since, however, it is evident that the younger Unitarians cannot retain the ground which their fathers held,—since they must either give up all belief in the fact of the Resurrection, or find some divine basis for it which was not perceived by them,—I do very earnestly ask them to reflect upon the deeds and words on which I have been trying to comment, and not to let the theories of my brethren, or mine, hinder them from uniting with us to confession which existed before all these theories, and will live when they have perished.