ANOTHER STAGE OF ACTION. 495 heart was wedded ?* But, far more, shall a loving and compassionate nature anticipate with complacency the period when the soul, all consecrated to worship or filled with its own supreme felicity, shall no longer select, among its fellow-creatures, its objects either of pity or of love? In a word, is it the depraved only who are likely to look with coldness on a prospective state that offers scarce any theater for the exercise of the qualities we have been wont to admire, and of the sympathies that have hitherto bound us to our kind? Is it the vicious alone who may find little to attract in a future where one universal sentiment, how holy soever, is to replace all others?-where one virtue, one duty, is instantly to supersede, in the character and the career of man, the varied virtues, the thousand duties, which, here below, his Creator has required at his hands? Men may take their fellows to task for the indifference with which so many regard a heaven which as yet they are neither prepared to appreciate nor fitted to enjoy; God, who has made man's heart the multiform and richly-dowered thing it is, never will. I anticipate the objection which may here be made. Our conceptions may not rise to the height of that transcendent heaven which has been described to us; If it be doubted whether such regrets ever haunt the death-bed of a scientific man, let the following vouch for the fact:-"Berzelius then became aware that his last hour had come, and that he must bid adieu to that science he had loved so well. Summoning to his bedside one of his devoted friends, who approached him weeping, Berzelius also burst into tears; and then, when the first emotion was over, he exclaimed, 'Do not wonder that I weep. You will not believe me a weak man, nor think I am alarmed by what the doctor has to announce to me. I am prepared for all. But I have to bid farewell to science; and you ought not to wonder that it costs me dear."" "This was Berzelius's leave-taking of science; in truth, a touching farewell."-"Siljeström's Minnesfest öfver Berzelius," Stockholm, 1849, pp. 79, 80. 496 MAN'S INSTINCTS TOO LITTLE STUDIED. our feelings may not warm under the description of it; but, if we know nothing of a mediate state of existence except that it is,—if we have scarcely a glimpse disclosing its character, or indicating its privileges, or revealing its enjoyments, how much better or happier shall we be for a belief so vague and shapeless? Rather a Heaven whose beatific glories dazzle without attracting, than a Paradise of which the very outlines are indistinguishable. How can we vividly desire an unknown life, or be comforted or influenced by anticipation of a state so dim and shadowy? If those who put forth this objection assumed only facts that must be admitted, the objection would be fatal. What they do assume is, that we can know nothing of a Hades in the future. Are they right in this? Beyond the scanty and (be it admitted) insufficient indications to be gleaned from Scripture, I perceive but two sources whence such knowledge can be derived: first, analogy; and, secondly, such revealings as may come to us through narratives similar in character to those I have brought together in this volume, or otherwise from ultramundane source. We study our instincts too little. We listen to their lessons too carelessly. Instincts are from God. None of the instincts which we observe among animal races other than our own are useless, or ill adapted, or incomplete. The impulse induces an action strictly corresponding to future contingencies which actually arise. In one sense, these instincts are of a prophetic character. When the bee, before a flower has been rifled of its sweets, prepares the waxen cells, when a bird, in advance of incubation, constructs its downy nest, the adaptation is as perfect as if every coming incident had been expressly foretold. Man has reason and instincts. Sometimes he forgets this. It is his right and duty, in the exercise of his MAN'S NATURE AND HIS SITUATION. 497 reason, to judge his instincts; yet reverently, as that in which there may be a hidden wisdom. Men, sometimes from a religious error, more frequently from a worldly one, are wont to fall into the thought that it is expedient to discard or to repress them. There is a strange mystery pervading human society. It is the apparent anomaly presented by man's character taken in connection with his position here. Let us speak of the better portion of mankind, the true and worthy type of the race. What, in a word, is the history of their lives? A bright vision and a disenchantment. A struggle between two influences: one, native, inherent; the other, foreign, extraneous, earthly; a warring between the man's nature and his situation. Not that the world he enters can be said to be unadapted to receive him. For in it there is knowledge to impart, experience to bestow, effort to make, progress to attain; there are trials to test courage and firmness; there are fellow-creatures to love; there are helpless creatures to aid; there are suffering creatures to pity. There is much to interest, and not a little to improve. The present is, doubtless, an appropriate and necessary stage in the journey of life. None the less is it a world the influences of which never fully develop the character of its noblest inhabitant. It is a world of which the most fortunate combinations, the highest enjoyments, leave disappointed and unsatisfied some of the most elevated instincts of man. All religions, more or less distinctly, admit this. We speak of our better nature, as though there were two. There is but one,-one and the same in childhood, in youth, in manhood, till death. The same, for the Immortal perishes not; never obliterated, but how often, in the course of this earth¡ife, dulled, dimmed, obscured! How the fleshly envelope weighs upon it! And what a training, as it runs the 498 THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD gauntlet of society, it has! Warm, impulsive, it meets with cold calculation; generous, it encounters maxims of selfishness; guileless, it is schooled to deceit; believing, it is overwhelmed with doubts, it is cheated with lies. And for the images of its worship,-how are they broken and despoiled! It had set them up on earthly pedestal, and had clothed them, all unworthy, in the robes of its own rich conception. Its creative promptings had assumed, perhaps, their highest and holiest phase,—the phase of love; and then it had embodied, in a material existence, that which was but an ethereal portion of itself; investing-alas, how often!-some leaden idol with the trappings of a hero or the vestments of a god. Bitter the awakening! Dearly rued the self-deception! Yet the garment was of heaven, though the shattered idol was of earth. Thus, for one encouragement to its holier aspirations, it receives twenty sordid lessons from the children of this world, grown wise in their generation; so wise that, in their conceit, they despise and take to task a child of light. They deride his disinterestedness; they mock at his enthusiasm. Assuming the tone of mentors, they read him prudent warnings against the folly of philanthropy and the imbecility of romance.* And thus, in ten thousand instances, God's instincts fall, like seed by the wayside, on hard and stony ground. They thrive not. Their growth is stunted. Happy if the divine germ penetrate the crusted surface at all! Either this is an example of a failure in adaptation, or we are looking at a portion only of a great whole. Shall we suppose it a failure? Shall we imagine that He who, in the lower, cared for it that the innate impulse should exactly correspond to the future occasion, failed to exert similar care in the higher?—that the instincts * A word of excellent etymology, if of indifferent reputation,-derived from the Welsh rhamanta, to rise over, to soar, to reach to a distance. AND THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT. 499 of the bee and the bird are to find theaters of action perfectly suited to their exercise, while those of a crea ture far above them are to be dwarfed in development and disappointed in fruition? We outrage all analogy in adopting such a hypothesis. We must accept this anomaly, if we accept it at all, as an exception-the only one known to us throughout the entire economy of God-to a rule co-extensive with the universe. But if, unable to credit the existence of so striking an anomaly, we fall back on the remaining hypothesis, -that here we are but looking on a fraction of human life, then from that fraction we may obtain some idea of the remainder. Then we may predicate in a general way, and with strong probabilities, something of the character and occupations of Hades. - There are favored moments,-at least, in every good man's life,-moments when the hard and the selfish and the worldly are held in abeyance,-moments when the soul springs forth, like a durance-freed bird, equal to every effort, capable of every sacrifice; when nothing seems too high to reach, nothing too distant to compass, -moments in which the exultant spirit recognizes its like welling up in some other heart's holy confession, or flashing out through true poetry like this: "Past the high clouds floating round, Past the million-starry choir,... These are the moments when the still, small voicethe Immortal one-asserts its supremacy. These are the * The lines are Barry Cornwall's. |