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bewildered by philosophical scepticism, death is not thought of or spoken of as an interruption of conscious existence, much less a ceasing to be, but merely a going away, a change of place. The ancients reasoned from this, that the consciousness of immortality was indicated by the very nature. of language. Men have no more doubt of a future life than they have of the present. This belief does not depend upon, is not necessarily strengthened by, culture, civilization, education. It is as distinct and confident in the North American savage as in the German doctor of philosophy; in fact, much more so. It was more firm and general in the age of Homer than in that of Socrates. Not one of the characters of Homer ever insinuates a doubt of a future existence. But from Socrates we learn that the majority of men in his time disbelieved the immortality of the soul, and thought it would be dissipated and annihilated at death. This is the natural effect of culture without faith. Men had lost their hold on the primitive sentiment and could not grasp it as a logical sequence. Between the two, they fell into doubt. Scepticism is the intermediate state between nature and faith. The voice of nature spoke at first, and men believed. Then they insisted on a logical proof of that which was be yond the reach of ratiocination, and failing to find it, they doubted and disbelieved. As man "by wisdom knew not God," so "by wisdom" he knew not himself. As false and

over-bold reasoning lost the true idea of the Divine, so it lost the true idea of the human. The same age and the same process gave birth to atheists and doubters of the soul's immortality to an Aristodemus and a Simmias. True ideas of God and man always go together, and cannot be held apart. No man who believes the divine origin of the human soul ever doubted its immortality; and no man who rejects the first can hold to the last. Paul has traced the course of this mental aberration in a few masterly words, which are as applicable to the spiritual nature and future life of man as to the "eternal power and deity of

Plut. de Anima, near the beginning.

2 Plat. Phaed.

God." "That which can be known of God is manifest in men, for God hath revealed it to them. But in their reasonings they went astray, and their foolish heart was darkened. Calling themselves wise, they were turned into fools." Humanity doubtless underwent a vast development from the age of Homer downwards. But spiritual ideas, either of God or man, did not partake of it. Homer with all his myths and sensualities, has no word to denote an image or material representation of God. In the age of Pericles, as afterwards in that of Paul, Athens and all Greece was full of idols (KaTeidwλos). In the Homeric poetry, no one breathes a doubt that the soul would live after death. In the age of Socrates, scepticism was the fashion, and was avowed by some of his intimate friends. In fact, Homer's conception of a future life was, in one essential point, much simpler and nobler than even that of Socrates. The theory of the latter included the metempsychosis with all its revolting absurdities. The notion of a transmigration of souls never appears to have crossed the mind of Homer. His idea of a future life admitted no confusion of natures or of personalities. His Achilles, though stalking gloomily through the shades of Hades, is Achilles still, a properly human and individual soul, "with thoughts that wander through eternity," and thus far an infinitely truer and more sublime conception than the same soul animating the body of a lion or a vulture. Nor did the belief improve, either in certainty or form, as ages rolled away and civilization advanced. In the tragic poets we have, indeed, a constant recognition of the immortality of the yuxń (which with them, as with Homer, is the whole incorporeal man); but it is an immortality altogether of the Homeric order. Antigone says:4 "for a much longer duration must I please the dwellers below than those on earth for there I shall abide forever;"

1 Rom. 1: 19-22.

2 Veith (Ant. Hom. p. 25) considers Il. 6. 270 a probable allusion to imageworship. But the probability is weak, the more so as it stands alone in the Homeric poetry.

3 Phaed. Cap. XXXI. seq

4 474 seq.

πλείων χρόνος

*Ον δεῖ μ' ἀρέσκειν τοῖς κάτω τῶν ἐνθάδε·
Ἐκεῖ γὰρ ἀεὶ κείσομαι.

She expects a meeting and an approving recognition from her father, mother, and brother.

Ἐλθοῦσα μέντοι κάρτ ̓ ἐν ἐλπίσιν τρέφω
Φίλη μὲν ἥξειν πατρὶ, προσφιλὴς δὲ σοί,
Μῆτερ, φίλη δὲ σοὶ κασίγνητον κάρα.

But her notions of that world were just as vague, dreary, and utterly joyless as were those of the Homeric personages. So were those which Euripides puts into the mouth of Medea in behalf of her children, and of his other characters, under the like circumstances. And four or five centuries later, Homer's ideas of the soul and its future state are reproduced, without expansion or improvement, by Virgil, who lived in the very bloom of the Græco-Roman civilization. His necrology (as to the spiritual conceptions it embodies) is nothing more than a feeble and servile imitation of that of HoEven the enlightened and thoughtful Cicero, after all the fine things he has put into the mouths of Cato and others on the subject, confesses his own utter uncertainty by saying, "I hope there is a place where I and all good men will meet after death, but I dare not affirm it." Nor does he draw a single argument or exhortation in behalf of virtue, from the contemplation of a future life, in his admirable Offices.

mer.

And the sentiment seems to have continued equally vague and uncertain (to have become even more so, in fact) after the coming of Christ, in those who rejected or were ignorant of, the Gospel. Still the pagan mourner" sorrowed without hope," still engraved on the tombstone of the beloved dead, "eternum vale!" The virtuous Perseus has not, as far as we remember, a hint of immortality. Hadrian exclaims to his departing soul: "quæ nunc abibis in loca?" And after some eighteen centuries more of civilization and development, there is no firm belief in the immortality of the

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soul, but that which is the product of Christian faith. Hume played cards and joked about Charon and the Styx, almost to the last moment of life. Dr. Franklin is said to have exclaimed: "Oh, that dreadful uncertainty!" And Kant, when asked by a friend, shortly before his death, what were his expectations of a future life, after a thoughtful silence, replied: "I have no idea of a future life!"

So much for "the progress of reflection," as Dr. Voelcker expresses it, in its relation to the belief in a distinct, separable, and immortal soul. We do not owe it to "reflection." We owe it to the finger of God which wrote it on the heart; to the voice of God which spoke it in the ears of men (an utterance, however perverted, bewildered, and weakened, never to be forgotten by after generations); to the nature of the soul itself as it was breathed into the nostrils of man, conscious of its source and so conscious of its immortality. Whether in Homer it was an old tradition, a reach of his own powerful and deeply working intellect, a notion gathered up in his eastern travels, or a special suggestion from the Source of all truth to one who was to exert so powerful an influence in moulding ten centuries of the human race; certain it is, that the living Agamemnon and Achilles were not more clearly or fully endowed with intellect, heart, and will, than were their souls in Hades.

That the state of these departed souls was destitute of every cheerful concomitant, is quite true. A dreary abode, a joyless existence, is that of the Homeric vyaí. But they are immortal. And the idea of immortality, in its rudest form, is one of infinite dignity and importance. It lifts man above the world of matter and mere animal natures around him, and opens a boundless future to his thoughts and aspi rations. There can be no virtue, no worship, no faith nor hope, nor capacity for them without it. Without it, man is a mere animal, nobler and more susceptible only to be agitated by mightier passions and vulnerable to keener sorrows and fears. But when he expects a future life he will think of it; he will connect with it some idea of retribution. The very opening of this boundless vista before him leave

him less at the mercy of low impulses and material circumstances. Every thought of it, every glance into it, is a quickener to his faculties, a check on his passions, an incentive to his hopes.

Homer lacked the completive idea of a future life, the resurrection of the body. There can be no distinct, firm, and cheerful expectation of a future life without that. The soul, which has so long been the "hospes comesque corporis," cannot look forward to an existence in which it is to be eternally separated from that which has been the sharer of its life, the organ of all its operations from the beginning of its existence, without a desolating sense of loneliness and imperfection. The anticipation of thus surviving (like the friend of old," nec carus æque nec superstes integer"), could yield but little comfort in looking beyond death.

— τίς βίος μοι σοῦ λελειμμένῃ φίλος;

with a higher truth than those words were at first used, would express the emotions with which the soul must expect such an eternal widowhood, such an eternal separation from a part of itself. The dismal gloom of the Homeric picture of futurity is the inevitable consequence of this deficiency. He appears to have felt it himself. Hesiod and Pindar have attempted to depict a happy state of mere spirits. Homer's mind was of that order which demanded consistency and completeness in its own ideas. He could not conceive, at least he has not attempted to describe, happiness without body. To only two of mortal men has he allotted a happy life beyond death; and those he has transported, one to Olympus, the other to Elysium, in the body. His vxal who are doomed to a disembodied existence, leave the body with lamentation and take up their abode in a region, the epithets of which, κερόεις, ἀμείλιχος, στυγερός, imply the absence of every element of cheerful existence. Foreshadow

ings of the future revelation may perhaps be discovered in the pious care which was paid to the body and even the ashes of the beloved dead; a consciousness of the necessity

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