At any rate, if we accept this view, we are absolved from the baffling task of justifying the existence of evil and apologizing for the world as it is. We are not to condone it, we are to hate it, as God hates it, and fight it, as God is fighting it. We are called to be co-workers with God, who needs our help. There will then be no more a problem of evil than there is a problem of good. Or rather, the only problem of evil will be the problem of how quickest to get rid of it, how so to work that future generations will have less of it to bear; and meanwhile, how to bear it ourselves with serenity and inward peace.

J. S. Mill, "Nature," in Three Essays on Religion; Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, chap. VII. G. Galloway, Philosophy of Religion, chap. xiv. B. P. Bowne, Theism, pp. 262-86. G. Santayana, Reason in Religion, chap. IX. A. M. Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, bk. chaps. III-IV. Anon., Evil and Evolution (Macmillan, 1899). F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, bk. II, chaps. III, IV, VIII. G. A. Gordon, Immortality and the New Theodicy. E. H. Rowland, Right to Believe, chap. v. C. Gore, ed. Lux Mundi, chap. I. F. C. Wilm, Problem of Religion, chap. vi. J. M. E. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, secs. 171–215. G. T. Ladd, Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, chap. XXXII. T. Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, lects. VIII-XI. A. K. Rogers, Religious Conception of the World, pp. 231-60. W. N. Clarke, Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 431-62. J. Wedgwood, The Moral Ideal, chap. VIII. Harvard Theological Review, vol. 7, p. 378. Hibbert Journal, vol. 1, p. 425; vol. 2, p. 767.

CHAPTER XXIV

IMMORTALITY

The evolution of the belief in a future life

So accustomed have we of Christian nurture become to faith in a future life, happier than the present, that we are apt to forget how few out of the billions that have lived on earth have shared that anticipation. Yet it is a recent one in man's history. Primitive man, to be sure, in his inability to realize the fact of death, commonly thought of his friends and foes as continuing to exist in some vague and shadowy fashion. Such a ghostly future existence has been believed in by most peoples. But it has been rather dreaded than longed for; it has been seldom thought of as a condition of bliss, as a reward or consolation, but usually as an unavoidable and dubious fate. Homer, for example, in a wellknown passage,1 makes one of his heroes declare that the humblest earthly life is to be preferred to the best estate in the underworld. Many of the more cultivated of the ancients, however, rejected the idea altogether, as a mere superstition, and looked forward calmly to their individual extinction. The hopefulness of Socrates in the matter stands out in sharp contrast to the unbelief of his friends, and evidently occasions them surprise. "Are you not aware, Plato makes him say to Glaucon, "that the soul is immortal and imperishable?' He looked at me in astonishment, and said: 'No, indeed; you do not mean to say that you are able to prove that.'

1 Odyssey, bk. XI, 489–91.

2 Republic, 608. Cf. ibid., 330: “Let me tell you, Socrates, that when a

Among the Jews matters stood about the same, a general naïve belief in a pale and rather undesirable future existence in an underworld yielding among the more reflective to a skeptical attitude. King Hezekiah said, when facing death: "I shall go to the gates of the grave, I shall not see Jehovah in the land of the living. . . . The grave cannot praise thee: they that down go into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, the living man alone shall praise thee, as I do this day." 1

...

In similar vein the psalmist wrote: "I am counted with them that go down into the pit; I am as a man that hath no strength, free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more; they are cut off from thy hand. . . Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Can the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy loving kindness be declared in the grave, or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark, and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?" And again: "In death there is no remembrance of thee; in the grave who shall give thee thanks?" 3

The author of the Book of Job, in his vain endeavor to find a solution for the problem of evil, does not attempt to justify evil through its relation to a future and happier life. "There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again. But a man dieth, and wasteth away; yea, a man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth

man thinks himself to be near death he has fears and cares which never entered into his mind before; the tales of a life below and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here were a laughing matter to him once; but now he is haunted with the thought that they may be true." Cf. also the Phado. It is true, however, that the Greek mystery religions taught a faith in a happy future life. And the Christian conception may owe a great deal to them. This point has not yet been cleared up satis factorily.

1 Isa. 38:9-19.

2 Ps. 88.

3 Ps. 6:5.

If a

down and riseth not; till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, or be raised out of their sleep. man die, shall he live again!" 1

And in Ecclesiastes we read, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither thou goest.

The Christian belief in heaven springs from neither the Jewish nor the pagan conception of the underworld-life of departed shades. It comes from a radically different source, namely, the late-Jewish hope in a coming Messianic Kingdom on earth. What the Jews had really thought of and longed for was simply long life on this earth, with children to inherit their name and preserve their memory. But as they lived generation after generation, oppressed, ground under foot by stronger races, they came more and more passionately to believe in an ultimate reversal of affairs, a time when Jehovah should manifest his power and love for them, smite their enemies, and establish an era of prosperity and peace. We have traced in an earlier chapter the rise of this belief, and then its transformation in Gentile minds into the belief in a future life in the skies, whither the faithful should go when the last trump sounded. Gradually, as the expected New Age did not appear, and believers died. without participation in it, it came to be held that their souls, separating themselves from the body at death, went at once to their reward in this heavenly region.

3

The conception of heaven has always been vague and unsatisfactory in Christian thought, but the belief in it remained hardly shaken until the more critical reflection of modern times turned its search-light upon all the traditional dogmas.

What considerations make against the belief?

(1) It takes no critical acumen to perceive the prima facie case against immortality. In all our experience a man's conscious life is bound up with the fortunes of his body. We see men stunned by a blow, we see their minds enfeebled by bodily injury, we see their bodies killed and with that their mental life apparently ended. Consciousness seems to be dependent upon the body's supply of food, air, and sleep, and its safety from harm. To suppose that when the bodily mechanism stops entirely, consciousness, which has been so subject to its influence, gains a new lease of life on its own account, has always been difficult for reflective persons. And this explains, no doubt, the pale and impotent existence which the ancients almost universally attributed to the dead.

(2) The rise of modern physiological psychology, showing us, as it does, the intimate correlation of mind and brain, increases the difficulties of faith. We have discovered that thinking tires the brain; or, to put it the other way, the fatigue of brain-cells retards and inhibits thinking. The loss of memory, weakening of the will, increase in petulance of old age go hand in hand with a degeneration of braintissue. Certain kinds of consciousness are bound up with specific parts of the brain; when a certain portion of the brain is diseased or injured, the mind is affected in a definite manner. Whatever may be the relation between brain and consciousness, the study of the close parallelism between their activities makes it harder to resist the conviction that the disintegration of the one involves the disintegration of the other.

(3) Moreover, it is difficult to conceive what conscious life can be like, without a physical body, with its sense organs and organs of expression. If we cut out of our consciousness