The Other Life/Chapter 1
The Other Life.
CHAPTER I.
HOW CAN WE KNOW ANYTHING OF THE OTHER LIFE?
THE other life?
The skeptic looks into the grave of his friend and scornfully mutters:
"There is no other life. Who has returned from the dead and told us of it? If there be a God, why has He not revealed it so fully that all may be satisfied, and so plainly that no man can mistake his meaning?
'The grave's mouth laughs into derision
Desire and dread and dream and vision,
Delight of heaven and sorrow of hell.'"
The Christian clasps his beloved Bible to his heart and meekly exclaims:
"This is my pledge of immortality. Keeping these divine laws, I am assured of eternal life. What form I may have, where I may be, what I shall do, what laws and phenomena exist in the other world, I do not know, nor is it essential that I should inquire."
And so men pass from a temporal to an eternal state of being in a strange apathy respecting subjects of supreme value, as ignorant of the future that awaits them as the unborn babe is of the world into which he will be ushered.
Is this right? Is it necessary? Is it inevitable?
The skeptical philosopher affirms that there are positive limitations to human thought; that no possible scientific development or research can ever lead us to a knowledge of the soul and its destinies; that the existence of a spiritual world is a mere hypothesis, and all theology the offspring of dreamy abstraction and idle speculation.
The Christian concedes the finiteness and feebleness of the human understanding, and correctly infers from it the necessity of revelation. He accepts the Word of God as the revelation of a moral law. Assured of a blessed immortality, he asks for no special unfolding of the life to come. Indeed he persuades himself that God has intentionally and wisely kept us in ignorance of the laws and phenomena of the spiritual world: and that it is best for us to know little and think little of what seems to be concealed, and forbidden ground.
Is not this a hasty conclusion, an unfounded assumption, a fatal mistake? Would not a clear knowledge of the soul and its future surroundings throw an invaluable light upon the mysteries and conduct of this life? Is not this world, indeed, an insoluble enigma only because its connection with the spiritual world is not explained? How thoughtless to suppose that God designedly conceals from us the knowledge we most require! Our grossness, our sensuality, our worldliness, our moral obliquity, our spiritual blindness shut heaven and the angels from us. The revelations given to us are necessarily adapted to our own states. God ever bends lovingly down toward us, ready to flood our spirits with light. The solution of our darkness is simply this: the Church and the world have hitherto not been prepared to receive a revelation of the life to come, which must necessarily embody a new and sublime philosophy of mind and matter.
Are they now prepared? Are they at least preparing?
Many good Christians, full of faith and zeal, loving the Word of God sincerely, and experiencing in their own hearts the spiritual blessings it promises, live in a state of serene indifference amounting almost to torpor. Thinking, as we may say, from the affections rather than from the intellect, they pass their lives in a delicious day-dream of the sufficiency and infallibility of the Christian theology. They are ignorant or unconscious of the storms that are raging without and within the Church. They see no decay of its strength, no eclipse of its faith, no disintegration of its elements. They have never had the critical and rational spirit awakened in their minds, so as to discover the insecurity of their ground and the difficulties of their position.
The critical spirit, which is the rectifying or verifying power of the mind, arises spontaneously in the natural evolution of the human intellect. One of its earliest manifestations in Europe was the great Protestant battle for the right of private judgment. It has been the means of the emancipation of thought from the subtleties of metaphysics and the despotism of theology, which had their rise in the infancy and childhood of society. The reaction of the critical spirit against the conservative and dogmatic elements which are grounded in conventionalisms, is undoubtedly the cause of all the progress and liberty we have achieved in these modern times.
The weapon of the critical spirit is analysis. It dissects, searches, scrutinizes all things, and subjects every element to the test of reason and to the processes of inexorable science. It dissipates error, exposes fallacy and pretension, and separates the true from the false. It has no creed but truth, obtained by the study of facts and the universal organic laws which connect them together. Repudiating tradition and authority, it renders allegiance only to experiment, observation and reason.
This free spirit of inquiry has been turned with special earnestness to the analysis of the Bible and its claims to supernatural origin. Its decisions have been steadily adverse to those claims; and this is the true cause of modern infidelity with its innumerable phases, from the open atheist who scoffs at mystery and miracle, to the sincere thinker in the pulpit, who is secretly troubled in spirit at the doubts he cannot control and the questions he cannot answer.
The exercise of the critical spirit in the Church itself, has thrown its elements into a fearful state of ferment and dissension. The difficulty has been twofold: to reconcile the literal interpretation of the Bible with the increasing demands of reason and science; and to exonerate dogmatic theology from the charges of inconsistency, fundamental error and sheer incomprehensibility. The conservative element struggles earnestly to preserve the old landmarks. The radical element, outweighing it in intellect if not in numbers, would readjust the formulas of faith in correspondence with the reasonable demands of the critical philosophy. So the Church presents the singular spectacle of a vast body of men held compactly together by faith in God and the moral law, but repelled from each other by different and irreconcilable opinions.
How long is this to last? Where is it to end? Has the Church, with its present resources, the means of defence and recuperation, the power of harmonizing the discordant element within, and of converting the skeptical element without? Unquestionably not. Unless additional light from heaven is granted for its moral and intellectual renovation, its gradual disintegration and decay are inevitable, and it will fall a prey to time and the contending elements.
He, however, who has studied wisely the movements of Providence, will have no fear that the Church of God will perish or his Word fail.
Skepticism, growing up amid a general stimulus and collision of thought, is not the formidable enemy of the Christian religion that it seems to be. It is in reality a friend in disguise. It exists by divine permission and is overruled by Divine Providence for his own ends. In barbaric and half-civilized countries, where superstition and despotism reign, there are no skeptics. The undeveloped reason lies impotent at the feet of a childish imagination. Skepticism is a necessary and salutary phase in the ordinary evolution of the mind. By detecting and exposing error it prepares the way for the advent of truth. It is aggressive and destructive, but it is transitional. As evil spirits are permitted to tempt us, to stir up our wicked lusts and thus reveal us to ourselves, so skepticism comes to agitate our minds, disturb our false peace, and discover the nature and extent of our intellectual darkness.
For, if the Christian religion as now promulgated were a perfect and coherent system of truth, there could be no skepticism, for it would have fulfilled its mission. If the Church met promptly and fairly all the rational objections which have been propounded, if it satisfied the cold and critical reason as well as it does the glowing religious instincts of the heart, it would have no opponents but those insincere spirits whose infidelity is, really based on their moral alienation from God.
The critical spirit, legitimately exercised within the Church itself, detects and exposes every point of a weak, false or corrupt presentation of divine truth. It is a rough surgeon probing severely the deep wounds and discovering the unsound parts. It excites of course the antipathy, indignation or pity of the apathetic Christian, who would enjoy his religion in peace, and shut his eyes to the indefensible points of his belief.
The critical spirit, like the trumpet of an angel, will wake this unthinking religionist from his dream of perfection; will stimulate his reflective powers, sharpen his faculties, excite his doubts and arouse his fears. He will discover that the prevailing literal interpretation of many parts of the Bible is untenable, and that the fantastic dogmas erected upon it are unsatisfactory and incredible; and he will grope in every direction for that better light which is coming.
Powerful and aggressive as skepticism undoubtedly is, its mission is drawing to a close—a fact of which the skeptics themselves are wholly unconscious. We see the beginning of the end. The means are already being prepared by which the whole human mind, including all its most conservative and radical elements, shall be lifted into higher and purer light. Difficulties will be removed, obscurities explained, reconciliations effected, the skeptic silenced, and the Christian enlightened, when revelation is seen as a perfected whole, and not viewed in part. Divine truth shall burst forth with new glory from the spiritual sense of the Holy Word, and the prophecy will be fulfilled:
"And in those days the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days."
How is the skeptic to be delivered from his unbelief and brought back to the christian anchorage? How is the doubting Christian to be re-established and strengthened and comforted? By the combined prayers and faith and reasonings and persuasions of the Church as now constituted? No! By some spontaneous development of the human mind, so that it shall penetrate unaided into spiritual and divine mysteries as it has never been able to do before? By no means.
God has seen from his high heavens that the Church has executed his commission according to the light He gave it, which was only that of the letter of the Word. He has seen that the human mind in its orderly evolution has arrived at that stage when it bursts the bonds of literal or sensuous interpretation;—a further adhesion to the literal dogmas would be retrograde and destructive. The Church has unconsciously outgrown the old methods of interpretation which were necessary in its infancy and childhood; and the inevitable warfare between the spirit and the letter is the cause of all its doubts and difficulties and dissensions.
He has come to its rescue. He has come to enlighten, to revive, to bless, to purify it.
God has seen also the revolt of the human intellect against the absurd pretensions of tradition and authority; against spiritual bondage and priestcraft; against blind adhesion to literal interpretations which are wholly indefensible; and against the general inconsistency and unprogressiveness of the Church. He has heard the cry of his erring children for light. The time has come when He will satisfy their longings for truth, answer their hardest questions, grant their reasonable petitions, and remove all difficulties from the way of a perfeet understanding between the Creator and his creatures.
How is all this to be effected? By light from heaven. By a new revelation. By the opening of the seals which have hidden from our eyes the spiritual sense of the Word of God. In that sense alone lies the illuminating and unitizing power of the Scriptures. It is the inner garment of our Lord, which was of one piece woven without seam from top to bottom. The literal sense is "the clouds of heaven" which conceal from us the pure light of the sun. God is coming down in those clouds and will make them transparent with the glory of the spiritual sense.
When, where, and how is this to be accomplished?
If the honest and earnest dissenting element in and out of the Church—that element which hungers and thirsts after the truth, and refuses to recognize the so-called orthodoxy as truth; if that element could be concentrated and questioned as to its real sentiments, wants and needs, and could make a definite reply, we may imagine that it would be somewhat in the following strain:
"We ask a new and more satisfactory revelation from heaven. It is the one great, urgent, mighty need of the human soul. The revelation by a written Word, as it now stands, is incomplete. A revelation couched in prophetic mysteries and "dark sayings" is assuredly not a finality. We want that additional element which shall establish its unity, prove its truth and reveal its interior beauty and glory—which shall make it a living and perfect whole, uniting heaven and earth.
"If there ever was any revelation, any special insight into the spiritual world, any vision of angels, any communication with the dead, any manifestation of the Divine Presence, such things are again possible; for they never could have occurred by the violent disruption of organic natural laws, but through the operation of some higher laws of which we are ignorant. The potentiality of these conditions must inhere in the mental constitution of man himself. Their recurrence under providence must be determined by the historical evolution of the Church.
"We do not ask any addition to the biblical record: any new chapter or book appended to the Bible. However strongly substantiated by miracles and confirmed by witnesses, that book might be as obscure and unsatisfactory to future generations as Nahum or the Apocalypse is to us.
We do not ask for more miracles and mysteries, but for rational light on those already recorded. We will believe truth when we see it, without miracles; and no miracles can impose the unintelligible and contradictory on our minds as truth. Not a new Bible, but a divinely-authorized interpretation of the old one, is the grand theological desideratum of modern times.
"We do not ask for dead men to come out of their graves and tell us what they saw and heard in the other world. We do not ask for spirits to come and take possession of our minds and bodies and write and speak through us as mediums. Nor for holy men to have visions and ecstasies in which the life to come is revealed to them. These modes of instruction belong to the past. They are apt to be the sources of innumerable fallacies. At the best they are imperfect and unsatisfactory. They are not adapted to the present scientific and realistic stage of human development. Revelations must change their character according to the varying states and progressive evolution of the human mind.
"Revelations are only made through men as instruments of God's providence. Some man must be raised up for this new and stupendous mission. We are not all abashed at the idea that some man of our own times shall be prepared by Almighty God for experiences and labors more important and valuable in some respects than those of Moses or John. It is indeed the very thing needed and best calculated to restore to Moses and John the hold they are fast losing upon the faith of mankind. The credibility of the Christian religion depends largely, we think, on the universality and eternity of the laws and principles upon which it was founded. What was possible and probable two thousand or four thousand years ago, under similar conditions is possible and probable now. If human instruments for the divine work of revelation were necessary and available then, they may become so now.
"We cannot believe that Moses, Ezekiel or John had visions of angels and received truth from heaven, unless we admit that it would be possible for a person in our own age to have similar visions and receive still higher truths. We cannot believe that Paul was carried into the third heaven while still living in the body, without conceding the possibility, at least, that some modern Paul might, for the sake of great use to the Church, undergo similar and even far greater experiences. Those wonderful things were done away back in the ages of myth and fable. Let them be repeated now, with the necessary modifications, beneath the critical eyes of philosophy and science.
"Let the man to whom this sublime mission shall be entrusted, be fully prepared for it by all good agencies visible and invisible. Let him be a man of great intellectual capacity and of thorough philosophical and scientific culture. Let his character be pure and spotless, and let his catholicity be so broad and beautiful that sectarianism would not only be abhorrent, but impossible to his nature. Let him be superior to all ambitions in Church and State, exempt from all selfish and personal considerations, loving the truth wholly for its own sake. Let him be no poet who will see facts through the medium of fancy, and no metaphysician who will mystify by his abstractions, instead of instructing by his statements. Let him be purehearted, clear-thoughted, truthful, practical and thoroughly trustworthy.
"Let Providence prepare such a man for us, and in the maturity of all his powers open his spiritual sight into that vast spiritual realm which is said to lie unseen around us; as he opened the eyes of Moses to see the glory of God on the mount; as he opened the eyes of John to see the New Jerusalem descending from heaven. Let this modern Seer become familiar with spirits and angels. Let him converse with the good and wise of past ages who have gone before us into the land of light. Let him study the relations between spirit and matter; the laws and phenomena of the other life, so far as they may be comprehensible to the human understanding.
"Above all, let him report what angels and spiritual intelligences think of this Book which we call the Word of God; whether it has a divine meaning which penetrates into heaven or not; whether the angels understand it differently from us; and how they elicit its meanings. Let us be able to compare the theology of angels living in the light of God with the theology of our discordant sects. If there be any spiritual sense to the Bible, let his mind be illumined by spiritual light to receive it, and to transmit it to the benighted children of men.
"One condition more is essential to the perfection of this revelation we solicit. It must not be the dream or the vision of a night, or of many nights, but the waking business of a life! Let it last for twenty or thirty years. Let there be no hasty and superficial work; no hallucinations; no fallacies no errors. Let this agent of ours, admitted into the courts of heaven and studying for us the deepest mysteries of the universe, have the amplest opportunity to see and hear; to examine and scrutinize; to compare, to test, to verify. Then let him make his full report; his whole soul radiant with the light of heavenly truth, unbiased and untainted by any thought or feeling of worldly origin."
If such were the cry sent up to the Divine Wisdom from the doubting and despairing mind of man, who can say that it would be an unreasonable or an audacious petition? If the theology and psychology embraced between the lids of our Bible are true, this modern seership, stupendous as it seems at first sight, is not only practicable and credible, but inevitable. The sincere Christian should hail the thought of it with joy.
God knows our wants before we ask him. He anticipates our prayers. This very thing, which the skeptic demands as the crowning proof of revelation, and which the doubting Christian desires to relieve him from his perplexities, has been already accomplished! It was a part of the great plan of Divine Providence, foreseen and provided from the beginning. Revelation has its successive steps and degrees, one unfolding out of and founded on another. This last opening of the heavens explains, harmonizes, and unitizes all the others. Theology and Science are now married, and the truths of each are written upon the face of the other. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."
Emanuel Swedenborg was the instrument chosen and prepared by the Lord for this sacred mission. He works no miracles to compel belief, but gives us spiritual light to illumine the rational understanding. His own state was the greatest of miracles. What is the miracle of raising a dead man to life, in comparison with the miracle of keeping a living man for nearly thirty years in open communication with heaven, hell and the world of spirits? And this sublime manifestation of divine power is discredited, and looked upon as a case of self-magnetization, hallucination or chronic mental disease!
The outside questions of Swedenborg's authority and credibility can be answered to the satisfaction of any candid mind; but our final judgment must be based upon the intrinsic merit of what he has revealed. The mere weight of his name and character is little or nothing in the eyes of his readers. The truths he teaches are, like those of geometry, to be seen in their own light and in the relations they bear to each other. We do not believe geometrical theorems on the authority of Euclid, nor the laws and phenomena of the spiritual world on the authority of Swedenborg. They are true in the nature of things; and when once comprehended by the rational faculty, they can never be dislodged from the understanding.
Swedenborg's spiritual sight was not opened merely to gratify our curiosity about the future life, or even to unfold a new spiritual philosophy. Charming and instructive as are his communications upon these points, they are only incidental to a nobler purpose. His mission was to reveal the spiritual sense of the Word of God. That sense pre-existed in heaven before the Word was written upon earth. It has been for ages concealed in the clouds of the letter, and is utterly undiscoverable by the unaided intelligence of man. It is supreme folly to suppose that Swedenborg invented it.
Swedenborg proves not only the inspiration but the divinity of the Scriptures. He reveals to us the full meaning of that strange declaration, "and the Word was God." From his new and spiritual standpoint only can we understand the heavenly truths which are involved in the creation of the world, the fall of man, the flood, the story of the patriarchs, the bondage in Egypt, the return to Canaan, the history of the Jews, the dark sayings of the prophets, the incarnation and glorification of Christ, the end of the world, the last judgment, the descent of the new Jerusalem, and the second coming of the Lord.
This revelation of the spiritual sense is the genuine seal and warrant of his mission. By this alone is his claim to the sublimest seership recorded in the history of the race, to be tested. If he does not draw forth, by some interior illumination, a vast, coherent, comprehensive, pre-existing spiritual sense from the Word of God, then has he failed to substantiate his claims, and we may fairly discredit his statements on other matters. But if he has done this, if the spiritual sense illumines his pages, a further gift from the wisdom of the Divine Mind to man, to be seen by the pure in heart, and to be understood by the earnest, patient, candid, and humble seeker after Divine truth, then is Swedenborg the highest earthly authority on spiritual subjects.
It is because Swedenborg comes to us with the Bible in his hand, and proves his claims to our confidence by the spiritual interpretation he gives it, that we find it easy to accept his disclosures (always rational) about the life after death, about heaven, hell, and the world of spirits. And because the Spiritualists of the present day offer us a philosophy and theology different from those taught in the Bible, we can give no more heed to their communications than to the whisperings of the idle wind.
How can we know anything of the other life? Not from scientific studies, not from theological speculations, not from communication with spirits, but from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
It is from this source, divinely appointed and rationally authenticated—from this inexhaustible mine of spiritual treasures, and not from any communication with spirits or from any vain imaginations of my own, that I have drawn the interesting and beautiful things which the reader will find in this book. Let him not be dismayed at difficulties. The subject must unfold gradually. Each succeeding chapter will throw some light upon all that has gone before.