DREAMS AXD REALITIES. 



533 



ure of Judaism. The Christian priest calmly 

 reads to his hearers the melancholy skepticism of 

 the Jewish preacher, and assures them that every 

 word is divinely inspired. " The living know that 

 they shall die : but the dead know not anything, 

 neither have they any more a reward, for the 

 memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, 

 and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished ; 

 neither have they any more a portion in anything 

 that is done under the sun. . . . 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." 



If some of the preacher's phrases may be 

 forced to look another way, his doctrine is one 

 which reads strangely in a Christian mouth ; so 

 strangely, one may say, that if his book were 

 now discovered for the first time it would have as 

 little chance of being added to the canon as the 

 magnifioent stanzas of Omar Khayyam of being 

 incorporated with the gentle pietism of the " Chris- 

 tian Year." Or, again, what is the true moral of 

 the book of Job, accounted to be the most im- 

 pressive poetical treatment iu all literature of the 

 great problem of the unequal distribution of good 

 and evil ? Is it to be found in the odd statement 

 — surely not very edifying from any point of 

 view — that Job was rewarded with six thousand 

 camels and fourteen thousand sheep, besides 

 oxen, asses, sons, and daughters ; or, is it not 

 virtually a splendid declamation in favor of 

 agnosticism ? The problem of the universe is 

 insoluble. The wisest of us cannot presume to 

 comprehend even a fractional part of the vast 

 scheme of the universe. The ways of the God 

 who made Behemoth and Leviathan are past 

 finding out, and we must not presume even to try 

 to understand. When Dante incarnated in poetry 

 the deepest thought of an age really penetrated 

 to the core with a belief in future retribution, we 

 know how he answered the problem. He replied 

 by the most elaborate and minute description of 

 that future world in which the demands of a 

 rigid justice will be satisfied to the uttermost 

 scruple. It is plain that the faintest hint of such 

 a solution was scarcely present to the mind of 

 his Jewish predecessor when awed, overpowered, 

 and driven to the most skeptical utterances by 

 the pressure of this tremendous problem. It is 

 surely strange that the most impressive books in 

 the Hebrew canon are such as could be accepted 

 almost without reservation by the skeptic who is 

 reproached for denying their divine authority. 



A Christian preacher, then, should be the last 

 man to deny that a religion which pointedly omits 



all reference to the doctrine of immortality may 

 yet, under some conditions, lay the most vigorous 

 grasp upon human nature and supply the life- 

 blood of a Puritanical code of morality. But the 

 Christian creed itself includes contrasts which 

 are from some points of view even more remark- 

 able. The discussion as to the logical basis of be- 

 lief has suggested another as to the superstruct- 

 ure. Canon Farrar has lately published a set of 

 sermons upon " Our Eternal Hope," which have 

 been criticised by the representatives of various 

 shades of Christian opinion in the Contemporary 

 Review. It is barely possible with the best inten- 

 tions to take such a discussion seriously. Bos-' 

 well tells us how a lady interrogated Johnson as 

 to the nature of the spiritual body. She seemed 

 desirous, he adds, " of knowing more ; but he 

 left the subject in obscurity." We smile at Bos- 

 well's evident impression that Johnson could, 

 if he had chosen, have dispelled the darkness. 

 When we find a number of educated gentlemen 

 seriously inquiring as to the conditions ef exist- 

 ence in the next world, we feel that they are 

 sharing Boswell's naivete without his excuse. 

 What can any human being outside a pulpit say 

 upon such a subject which does not amount to 

 a confession of ignorance, coupled it may be 

 with more or less suggestion of shadowy hopes 

 and fears? Have the secrets of the prison- 

 house really been revealed to Canon Farrar or 

 Mr. Beresford Hope? Have those gentlemen 

 some private information about the next world 

 that they can lay down its geography as Mr. 

 Stanley can describe the course of the Congo? 

 Dante did so once; and the very vigor of his 

 realism suggests hallucination, if not conscious- 

 ness of a deliberate invention. But Dante was 

 at least creating outward symbols for a vivid 

 sentiment. The darkness has gathered since his 

 days. It is hardly to be dispelled by special 

 pleading as to the meaning of texts and the opin- 

 ions of respectable divines. It is due to the 

 "utter dearth of metaphysical knowledge," says 

 Canon Farrar, that we cannot now understand 

 that eternal is a word having no relation to time. 

 Alas ! if we had all the knowledge of that kind 

 which has accumulated in all ages, we should, 

 as Voltaire forcibly observes, know fort peu de 

 choses. The question as to what the Jews meant, 

 or St. Paul meant, or what the articles mean, is 

 doubtless very interesting in certain relations, 

 but one would like to see a rather clearer recog- 

 nition of the fact that such meanings have but 

 an infinitesimal bearing upon the ultimate prob- 

 lem itself. St. Paul was doubtless among the 



