A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



27 



ious ears little else than the passionate outcries 

 of souls that cannot endure to part with hopes on 

 which they have been nurtured, and which are in- 

 tertwined with their tenderest affections. Logi- 

 cal reasons to compel conviction, I have met with 

 none — even from the interlocutors in this actual 

 Symposium. Yet few can have sought for such 

 more yearningly. I may say I share in the an- 

 ticipations of believers ; but I share them as aspi- 

 rations, sometimes approaching almost to a faith, 

 occasionally, and for a few moments, perhaps 

 rising into something like a trust, but never able 

 to settle into the consistency of a definite and en- 

 during creed. I do not know how far even this 

 incomplete state of mind may not be merely the 

 residuum of early upbringing and habitual asso- 

 ciations. But I must be true to my darkness as 

 courageously as to my light. I cannot rest in 

 comfort on arguments that to my spirit have no 

 cogency, nor can I pretend to respect or be con- 

 tent with reasons which carry no penetrating con- 

 viction along with them. I will not make but- 

 tresses do the work or assume the posture of 

 foundations. I will not cry " Peace, peace, when 

 there is no peace." I have said elsewhere, and 

 at various epochs of life, why the ordinary 

 "proofs " confidently put forward and gorgeously 

 arrayed " have no help in them ; " while, never- 

 theless, the pictures which imagination depicts 

 are so inexpressibly alluring. The more I think 

 and question, the more do doubts and difficulties 

 crowd around my horizon, and cloud over my 

 sky. Thus it is that I am unable to bring aid or 

 sustainment to minds as troubled as my own, and 

 perhaps less willing to admit that the great enig- 

 ma is, and must remain, insoluble. Of two things, 

 however, I feel satisfied — that the negative doc- 

 trine is no more susceptible of proof than the af- 

 firmative, and that our opinion, be it only honest, 

 can have no influence whatever on the issue, nor 

 upon its bearing on ourselves. 



Two considerations that have been borne in 

 upon my mind while following this controversy 

 may be worth mentioning, though neither can be 

 called exactly helpful. One is, that we find the 

 most confident, unquestioning, dogmatic belief in 

 heaven (and its correlative) in those whose heaven 

 is the most unlikely and impossible, the most 

 entirely made up of mundane and material ele- 

 ments, of gorgeous glories and of fading splen- 

 dors 1 — just such things as uncultured and un- 



1 "There may be crowns of material splendor, there 

 may be trees of unfading loveliness, there may be pave- 

 ments of emerald, and canopies of the brightest radiance, 

 and gardens of deep and tranquil security, and palaces of 

 proud and stately decoration and a city of lofty pinna- 



disciplined natures most envied or pined after on 

 earth, such as the lower order of minds could 

 best picture and would naturally be most dazzled 

 by. The higher intelligences of our race, who 

 need a spiritual heaven, find their imaginations 

 fettered by the scientific training which, imper- 

 fect though it be, clips their wings in all direc- 

 tions, forbids their glowing fancy, and annuls 

 that gorgeous creation, and bars the way to each 

 successive local habitation that is instinctively 

 wanted to give reality to the ideal they aspire 

 to ; till, in the effort to frame a future existence 

 without a future world, to build up a state of 

 being that shall be worthy of its denizens, and 

 from which everything material shall be excluded, 

 they at last discover that in renouncing the 

 " physical " and inadmissible they have been 

 forced to renounce the "conceivable" as well; 

 and a dimness and fluctuating uncertainty gathers 

 round a scene from which all that is concrete 

 and definable, and would therefore be incongru- 

 ous, has been shut out. The next world cannot, 

 it is felt, be a material one ; and a truly " spirit- 

 ual" one even the saint cannot conceive so as 

 to bring it home to natures still shrouded in the 

 garments of the flesh. 



The other suggestion that has occurred to me 

 is this : It must be conceded that the doctrine of 

 a future life is by no means as universally diffused 

 as it is the habit loosely to assert. It is not 

 always discoverable among primitive and savage 

 races. It existed among pagan nations in a form 

 so vague and hazy as to be describable rather as 

 a dream than a religious faith. It can scarcely 

 be determined whether the Chinese, whose culti- 

 vation is perhaps the most ancient existing in the 

 world, can be ranked among distinct believers; 

 while the conception of Nirvana, which prevails 

 in the meditative minds of other Orientals, is 

 more a sort of conscious non-existence than a 

 future life. With the Jews, moreover, as is well 

 known, the belief was not indigenous, but im- 

 ported, and by no means an early importation. 

 But what is not so generally recognized is that, 

 even among ourselves in these days, the convic- 

 tion of thoughtful natures varies curiously in 

 strength and in features at different periods of 

 life. In youth, when all our sentiments are most 

 vivacious and dogmatic, most of us not only 



cles, through which there unceasingly flows a river of 

 gladness, and where jubilee is ever sun:: by a concord 

 of seraphic voices." — Dr. Chalmeri 'a Sermons. 



" Poor fragments all of this low earth — 

 Such as in dreams could hardly soothe 

 A soul that once had tasted of immortal truth." 



Christian Year. 



