THE SOUL AND FUTURE LIFE. 



313 



humous activity (not of posthumous fame), how 

 the consciousness of a coming incorporation with 

 the glorious future of his race, can give a patience 

 and a happiness equal to that of any martyr of 

 theology. 



It would be an endless inquiry to trace the 

 means whereby this sense of posthumous partici- 

 pation in the life of our fellows can be extended 

 to the mass, as it certainly affects already the 

 thoughtful and the refined. Without an educa- 

 tion, a new social opinion, without a religion — I 

 mean an organized religion, not a vague meta- 

 physic — it is doubtless impossible that it should 

 become universal and capable of overcoming self- 

 ishness. But make it at once the basis of philos- 

 ophy, the standard of right and wrong, and the 

 centre of a religion, and this will prove, perhaps, 

 an easier task than that of teaching Greeks and 

 Romans, Syrians and Moors, to look forward to a 

 future life of ceaseless psalmody in an immaterial 

 heaven. The astonishing feat was performed ; 

 and, perhaps, it may be easier to fashion a new 

 public opinion, requiring merely that an accepted 

 truth of philosophy should be popularized, which 

 is already the deepest hope of some thoughtful 

 spirits, and which does not take the suicidal 

 course of trying to cast out the devil of selfish- 

 ness by a direct appeal to the personal self. 



It is here that the strength of the human fu- 

 ture over the celestial future is so clearly pre- 

 eminent. Make the future hope a social activity, 

 and we give to the present life a social ideal. 

 Make the future hope personal beatitude, and 

 personality is stamped deeper on every act of our 

 daily life. Now we make the future hope, in the 

 truest sense, social, inasmuch as our future is 

 simply an active existence prolonged by society. 

 And our future hope rests not in any vague yearn- 

 ing, of which we have as little evidence as we 

 have definite conception : it rests on a perfectly 

 certain truth, accepted by all thoughtful minds, 

 the truth that the actions, feelings, thoughts, of 

 every one of us — our minds, our characters, our 

 souls, as organic wholes — do marvelously influ- 

 ence and mould each other ; that the highest 

 part of ourselves, the abiding part of us, passes 

 into other lives and continues to live in other 

 lives. Can we conceive a more potent stimulus 

 to rectitude, to daily and hourly striving after a 

 true life, than this ever-present sense that we are 

 indeed immortal ; not that we have an immortal 

 something within us, but that in very truth we 

 ourselves, our thinking, feeling, acting personali- 

 ties, are immortal ; nay, cannot die, but must 

 ever continue what we make them, working and 



doing, if no longer receiving and enjoying ? And 

 not merely we ourselves, in our personal identity, 

 are immortal, but each act, thought, and feeling, 

 is immortal ; and this immortality is not some 

 ecstatic and indescribable condition in space, but 

 activity on earth in the real and known work of 

 life, in the welfare of those whom we have loved, 

 and in the happiness of those who come after us. 



And can it be difficult to idealize and give 

 currency to a faith which is a certain and undis- 

 puted fact of common-sense as well as of philos- 

 ophy ? As we live for others in life, so we live in 

 others after death, as others have lived in us, and 

 all for the common race. How deeply does such 

 a belief as this bring home to each moment of 

 life the mysterious perpetuity of ourselves ! For 

 good, for evil, we cannot die ; we cannot shake 

 ourselves free from this eternity of our faculties. 

 There is here no promise, it is true, of eternal 

 sensations, enjoyments, meditations. There is no 

 promise, be it plainly said, of anything but an 

 immortality of influence, of spiritual work, of 

 glorified activity. We cannot even say that we 

 shall continue to love ; but we know that we shall 

 be loved. It may well be that we shall conscious- 

 ly know no hope ourselves ; but we shall inspire 

 hopes. It may be that we shall not think ; but 

 others will think our thoughts, and enshrine our 

 minds. If no sympathies shall thrill along our 

 nerves, we shall be the spring of sympathy in 

 distant generations ; and that, though we be the 

 humblest and the least of all the soldiers in the 

 human host, the least celebrated and the worst 

 remembered. For our lives live when we are 

 most forgotten ; and not a cup of water that we 

 may have given to an unknown sufferer, or a wise 

 word spoken in season to a child, but has added 

 (whether we remember it, whether others remem- 

 ber it or not) a streak of happiness and strength 

 to the world. Our earthly frames, like the grain 

 of wheat, may be laid in the earth — and this 

 image of our great spiritual Master is more fit 

 for the social than for the celestial future — but 

 the grain shall bear spiritual fruit, and multiply 

 in kindred natures and in other selves. 



It is a merely verbal question if this be the 

 life of the Soul when the Soul means the sum of 

 the activities, or if there be any immortality 

 where there is no consciousness. It is enough 

 for us that we can trust to a real prolongation 

 of our highest activity in the sensible lives of 

 others, even though our own forces can gain 

 nothing new, and are not reflected in a sensitive 

 body. We do not get rid of Death, but we trans- 

 figure Death. Does any religion profess to do 



