34 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



love and service of God, and preeminently looked 

 away from earthly hopes to the prospect of their 

 future reward. I refer to the saints of the 

 Church. And it is a plain matter of fact, which 

 no one will attempt to deny, that these very men 

 stand out no less conspicuously from the rest in 

 their self-sacrificing and (as we ordinary men re- 

 gard it) astounding labors in behalf of what they 

 believe to be the highest interests of mankind. 



Before I conclude, I must not omit a brief 

 comment on one other point, because it is the 

 only one on which I cannot concur with Lord 

 Blachford's masterly paper. I cannot agree with 

 him that the doctrine of human immortality fails 

 of being supported by " conclusive reasoning." 

 I do not, of course, mean that the dogma of the 

 Beatific Vision is discoverable apart from revela- 

 tion ; but I do account it a truth cognizable with 

 certitude by reason, that the human soul is natu- 

 rally immortal, and that retribution of one kind or 

 another will be awarded us hereafter, according 

 to what our conduct has been in this our state of 

 probation. Here, however, I must explain my- 

 self. When theists make this statement, some- 

 times they are thought to allege that human im- 

 mortality is sufficiently proved by phenomena ; 

 and sometimes they are thought to allege that it 

 is almost intuitively evident. For myself, how- 

 ever, I make neither of these allegations. I hold 

 that the truth in question is conclusively estab- 

 lished by help of certain premises; and that 

 these premises themselves can previously be 

 known with absolute certitude, on grounds of 

 reason or experience. 



They are such as these : 1. There exists that 

 Personal Being, infinite in all perfections, whom 

 we call God. 2. He has implanted in his ra- 

 tional creatures the sense of right and wrong ; 

 the knowledge that a deliberate perpetration of 

 certain acts intrinsically merits penal retribution. 

 3. Correlatively, he has conferred freedom on 

 the human will; or, in other words, has made 

 acts of the human will exceptions to that law 

 of uniform sequence which otherwise prevails 

 throughout the phenomenal world. 1 4. By the 

 habit of prayer to God we can obtain augmented 

 strength for moral action, in a degree which 

 would have been quite incredible antecedently to 

 experience. 5. Various portions of our divinely 

 given nature clearly point to an eternal destiny. 

 C. The conscious self or ego is entirely hetero- 

 geneous to the material world: entirely hetero- 



1 I shall not, of course, be understood to deny the 

 existence and frequency of miracles. 



geneous, therefore, to that palpable body of ours 

 which is dissolved at the period of death. 



I do not think any one will account it extrav- 

 agant to hold that the doctrine of human im- 

 mortality is legitimately deducible from a com- 

 bination of these and similar truths. The anti- 

 theist will of course deny that they are truths. 

 Mr. Greg, who has himself " arrived at no con- 

 viction" on the subject of immortality, yet says 

 that considerations of the same kind as those 

 which I have enumerated "must be decisive" in 

 favor of immortality "to all to whose spirits 

 communion with their Father is the most abso- 

 lute of verities." * Nor have I any reason to 

 think that even Mr. Huxley and Mr. Harrison, if 

 they could concede my premises, would demur 

 to my conclusion. 



Mr. FREDERIC HARRISON 1 .— [I have now, 

 not so much to close a symposium, or general dis- 

 cussion, as to reply to the convergent fire of nine 

 separate papers, extending over more than fifty 

 pages. Neither time, nor space, nor the indul- 

 gence of the reader, would enable me to do jus- 

 tice to the weight of this array of criticism, 

 which reaches me in fragments while I am other- 

 wise occupied abroad. I will ask those critics 

 whom I have not been able to notice to believe 

 that I have duly considered the powerful ap- 

 peals they have addressed to me. And I will 

 ask those who are interested in this question to 

 refer to the original papers in which my views 

 were stated. And I will only add, by way of 

 reply, the following remarks, which were, for the 

 most part, written and printed, while I had noth- 

 ing before me but the first three papers in this 

 discussion. They contain what I have to say on 

 the theological, the metaphysical, and the mate- 

 rialist aspect of this question. For the rest, I 

 could only repeat what I have already said in the 

 two original essays.] 



Whether the preceding discussion has given 

 much new strength to the doctrine of man's im- 

 material soul and future existence I will not pre- 

 tend to decide. But I cannot feel that it has 

 shaken the reality of man's posthumous influence, 

 my chief and immediate theme. It seemed to 

 me that the time had come, when, seeing how 

 vague and hesitating were the prevalent beliefs 

 on this subject, it was most important to remem- 

 ber that, from a purely earthly point of view, 

 man had a spiritual nature, ami could look for- 

 ward after death to something that marked him 

 off from the beasts that perish. I cannot see 



1 See his letter in the Spectator of August 25th. 



