shall bear spiritual fruit, and multiply in kindred natures and in other selves. It is a merely verbal question if this be the life of the Soul when the Soul means the sum of the activities, or if there be any immortality where there is no consciousness. It is enough for us that we can trust to a real prolongation of our highest activity in the sensible lives of others, even though our own forces can gain nothing new, and are not reflected in a sensitive body. We do not get rid of Death, but we transfigure Death. Does any religion profess to do more? It is enough for any creed that it can teach non omnis moriar; it would be gross extravagance to say omnis non moriar, no part of me shall die. Death is the one inevitable law of Life. The business of religion is to show us what are its compensations. The spiritualist orthodoxy, like every other creed, is willing to allow that death robs us of a great deal, that very much of us does die; nay, it teaches that this dies utterly, for ever, leaving no trace but dust. And thus the spiritualist orthodoxy exaggerates death, and adds a fresh terror to its power. We, on the contrary, would seek to show that much of us, and that the best of us, does not die, or at least does not end. And the difference between our faith and that of the orthodox is this: we look to the permanence of the activities which give others happiness; they look to the permanence of the consciousness which can enjoy happiness. Which is the nobler? What need we then to promise or to hope more than an eternity of spiritual influence? Yet, after all, 'tis no question as to what kind of eternity man would prefer to select. We have no evidence that he has any choice before him. If we were creating a universe of our own and a human race on an ideal mould, it might be rational to discuss what kind of eternity was the most desirable, and it might then become a question if we should not begin by eliminating death. But as we are, with death in the world, and man as we know him submitting to the fatality of his nature, the rational inquiry is thishow best to order his life, and to use the eternity that he has. And an immortality of prolonged activity on earth he has as certainly as he has civilisation, or progress, or society. And the wise man in the evening of life may be well content to say: 'I have worked and thought, and have been conscious in the flesh; I have done with the flesh, and therewith with the toil of thought and the troubles of sensation; I am ready to pass into the spiritual community of human souls, and when this man's flesh wastes away from me, may I be found worthy to become part of the influence of humanity itself, and so Join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.' That the doctrine of the celestial future appeals to the essence of self appears very strongly in its special rebuke to the doctrine of the social future. It repeats, 'We agree with all you say about the prolonged activity of man after death, we see of course that the solid achievements of life are carried on, and we grant you that it signifies nothing to those who profit by his work that the man no longer breathes in the flesh but what is all that to the man, to you, and to me? we shall not feel our work, we shall not have the indescribable satisfaction which our souls now have in living, in effecting our work, and profiting by others. What is the good of mankind to me, when I am mouldering unconscious?' This is the true materialism; here is the physical theory of another life; this is the unspiritual denial of the soul, the binding it down to the clay of the body. We say, 'All that is great in you shall not end, but carry on its activity perpetually and in a purer way;' and you reply, 'What care I for what is great in me, and its possible work in this vale of tears; I want to feel life, I want to enjoy, I want my personality,'-in other words, 'I want my senses, I want my body.' Keep your body and keep your senses in any way that you know. We can only wonder and say, with Frederic to his runaway soldiers, Wollt ihr immer leben?' But we, who know that a higher form of activity is only to be reached by a subjective life in society, will continue to regard a perpetuity of sensation as the true Hell, for we feel that the perpetual worth of our lives is the one thing precious to care for, and not a vacuous eternity of consciousness. 6 It is not merely that this eternity of the tabor is so gross, so sensual, so indolent, so selfish a creed; but its worst evil is that it paralyses practical life, and throws it into discord. A life of vanity in a vale of tears to be followed by an infinity of celestial rapture, is necessarily a life which is of infinitesimal importance. The incongruity of the attempts to connect the two, and to make the vale of tears the ante-chamber or the judgment-dock of heaven, grows greater and not less as ages roll on. The more we think and learn, and the higher rises our social philosophy and our insight into human destiny, the more the reality and importance of the social future impresses us, whilst the fancy of the celestial future grows unreal and incongruous. As we get to know what thinking means, and feeling means, and the more truly we understand what life means, the more completely do the promises of the celestial transcendentalism fail to interest us. We have come to see that to continue to live is to carry on a series of correlated sensations, and to set in motion a series of corresponding forces; to think is to marshal a set of observed perceptions with a view to certain observed phenomena; to feel implies something of which we have a real assurance affecting our own consensus within. The whole set of positive thoughts compels us to believe that it is an infinite apathy to which your heaven would consign us, without objects, without relations, without change, withVOL. I.-No. 5. 3 L out growth, without action, an absolute nothingness, a nirvâna of impotence, this is not life; it is not consciousness; it is not happiness. So far as we can grasp the hypothesis, it seems equally ludicrous and repulsive. You may call it paradise; but we call it conscious annihilation. You may long for it, if you have been so taught; just as if you had been taught to cherish such hopes, you might be now yearning for the moment when you might become the immaterial principle of a comet, or as you might tell me, that you really were the ether, and were about to take your place in Space. This is how these sublimities affect us. But we know that to many this future is one of spiritual development, a life of growth and continual upsoaring of still higher affection. It may be so; but to our mind these are contradictions in terms. We cannot understand what life and affection can mean, where you postulate the absence of every condition by which life and affection are possible. Can there be development where there is no law, thought or affection where object and subject are confused into one essence? How can that be existence, where everything of which we have experience, and everything which we can define, is presumed to be unable to enter? To us these things are all incoherences; and in the midst of practical realities and the solid duties of life, sheer impertinences. The field is full; each human life has a perfectly real and a vast future to look forward to; these hyperbolic enigmas disturb our grave duties and our solid hopes. No wonder, then, whilst they are still so rife, that men are dull to the moral responsibility which, in its awfulness, begins only at the grave; that they are so little influenced by the futurity which will judge them; that they are blind to the dignity and beauty of death, and shuffle off the dead life and the dead body with such cruel disrespect. The fumes of the celestial immortality still confuse them. It is only when an earthly future is the fulfilment of a worthy earthly life, that we can see all the majesty as well as the glory of the world beyond the grave; and then only will it fulfil its moral and religious purpose as the great guide of human conduct. FREDERIC HARRISON. LIFE AND TIMES OF THOMAS BECKET.1 BECKET was now forty-four years old. The king was thirty. The ascendency which Becket had hitherto exercised over his sovereign through the advantage of age was necessarily diminishing as the king came to maturity, and the two great antagonists, as they were henceforth to be, were more fairly matched than Becket perhaps expected to find them. The archbishop was past the time of life at which the character can be seriously changed. After forty men may alter their opinions, their policy, and their conduct; but they rarely alter their dispositions; and Becket remained as violent, as overbearing, as ambitious, as unscrupulous, as he had shown himself when chancellor, though the objects at which he was henceforth to aim were entirely different. It would be well for his memory were it possible to credit him with a desire to reform the Church of which he was the head, to purge away the corruption of it, to punish himself the moral disorders of the clergy, while he denied the right to punish them to the State. We seek in vain, however, for the slightest symptom of any such desire. Throughout his letters there is not the faintest consciousness that anything was amiss. He had been himself amongst the grossest of pluralists; so far from being ashamed of it, he still aimed at retaining the most lucrative of his benefices. The idea with which his mind was filled was not the purity of the Church, but the privilege and supremacy of the Church. As chancellor he had been at the head of the State under the king. As archbishop, in the name of the Church, he intended to be head both of State and king; to place the pope, and himself as the pope's legate, in the position of God's vicegerents. When he found it written that 'by me kings reign and princes decree judgment,' he appropriated the language to himself, and his single aim was to convert the words thus construed into reality. The first public intimation which Becket gave of his intentions was his resignation of the chancellorship. He had been made archbishop that the offices might be combined; he was no sooner consecrated than he informed the king that the duties of his sacred calling 1 Corrigenda in Nineteenth Century, June 1877 : Page 549, for Chinon read Martel near Limoges. 1 left him no leisure for secular business. He did not even wait for Henry's return from Normandy. He placed the great seal in the hands of the chief justice, the young prince, and the barons of the Exchequer, demanding and receiving from them a hurried discharge of his responsibilities. The accounts, for all that appears, were never examined. Grim, perhaps, when accusing him of rapine and murder, was referring to a suppression of a disturbance in Aquitaine, not to any special act of which he was guilty in England; but the unsparing ruthlessness which he displayed on that occasion was an indication of the disposition which was displayed in all that he did, and he was wise in anticipating inquiry. The king had not recovered from his surprise at such unwelcome news when he learned that his splendid minister had laid aside his magnificence and had assumed the habit of a monk, that he was always in tears-tears which flowed from him with such miraculous abundance as to evidence the working in him of some special grace, or else of some special purpose. His general conduct at Canterbury was equally startling. One act of charity, indeed, he had overlooked which neither in conscience nor prudence should have been forgotten. The mother of Pope Adrian the Fourth was living somewhere in his province in extreme poverty, starving, it was said, of cold and hunger. The see of Canterbury, as well as England, owed much to Pope Adrian, and Becket's neglect of a person who was at least entitled to honourable maintenance was not unobserved at Rome. Otherwise his generosity was profuse. Archbishop Theobald had doubled the charities of his predecessor, Becket doubled Theobald's. Mendicants swarmed about the gates of the palace; thirteen of them were taken in daily to have their dinners, to have their feet washed by the archiepiscopal hands, and to be dismissed each with a silver penny in his pocket. The tears and the benevolent humiliations were familiar in aspirants after high church offices; but Becket had nothing more to gain. What could be the meaning of so sudden and so startling a transformation? Was it penitence for his crimes as chancellor? The tears looked like penitence; but there were other symptoms of a more aggressive kind. He was no sooner in his seat than he demanded the restoration of estates that his predecessors had alienated. He gave judgment in his own court in his own favour, and enforced his own decrees. Knights holding their lands from the Church on military tenure had hitherto done homage for them to the Crown. The new archbishop demanded the homage for himself. He required the Earl of Clare to swear fealty to him for Tunbridge Castle. The Earl of Clare refused and appealed to the king, and the archbishop dared not at once strike so large a quarry. But he showed his teeth with a smaller offender. Sir William Eynesford, one of the 2 Ut putaretur possessor irrigui superioris et inferioris.' The 'superior' fountain of tears was the love of God; the 'inferior' was the fear of hell. |