The Religious Situation | Page 5

the grave, was to
him so much gain, and proved beneficence on the part of the Author of
his being. But if Mr. Chamberlain's theory is true, what is to be said in
the case of the myriads to whom life has been wretchedness, ending
perhaps in agony, often without the slightest responsibility on their part?
For these unhappy ones would it be well, as Mr. Chamberlain holds it
was for him, that there should be no hereafter? Is their being brought
into existence only to suffer compatible with our faith in supreme
benevolence? Is confidence in supreme justice compatible with the
conviction that the tyrant and the tortured victims of his tyranny, alike,
repose forever in the grave? Such, it is true, was the belief of the
Hebrew; indication of any other belief, at all events, he has left us none,
unless it be a faint glimpse of Sheol. The philosophy of Job halts
accordingly. The Hebrew believed that he would be rewarded or
punished in his posterity.
Bishop Butler's grand argument for belief in the possibility of a future

life goes upon the supposition that our conscious personality is distinct
and separable from our perishable frame, and is in itself
"indiscerptible," so that there is no reason why it should not survive the
death of the body. To prove that it ever has survived the death of the
body, or to show the mode of its survival, the Bishop does not attempt.
But Butler lived long before Evolution and the general advance of
physiology in these later days. Johnson, who was no sceptic, owned
that he yearned for more light on the "spiritual world," by which he
apparently meant immortality.
Positivism tenders us endless existence as particles in a collective
humanity, the "colossal man." But would there be much satisfaction in
existence when individuality and personal consciousness had been lost?
Would the prospect lead the ordinary man to work and suffer for
generations to come, at all events, for any beyond the circle of the
immediate objects of his love? What the end of the colossal man is to
be seems undetermined. The Positivist Church has produced very good
and beautiful lives, but its power as a religion to go alone would be
more clearly seen were not Christianity at its side.
Is there or is there not after all something in human nature apparently
unsusceptible of physical explanation and seeming to point to the
possibility of a higher state of being? Evolution may ultimately explain
our general frame, emotional and intellectual, as well as physical. It
may in time explain the marvels of imagination and memory. It may
explain our aesthetic nature with our music and art. It may explain even
our social and political frame and our habit of conformity to law. But
beyond conformity to law, social or political, is there not, in the highest
specimens of our race at least, a conception of an ideal of character and
an effort to rise to it which seem to point to a more spiritual sphere?

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