shall know his friends hereafter is not impossible, not improbable; neither is it certain. He may desire it, expect it, but not with speculative pride dogmatically affirm it, nor with insisting egotism presumptuously demand it. To the uncritical Christian the recognising reunion of friends in heaven is an unshaken assurance. There is nothing to disturb his implicit reception of the plain teaching of Scripture. The legitimate exhortations of his faith are these. Mourn not too bitterly nor too long over your absent dead; for you shall meet them in an immortal clime. As the last hour comes for your dearest ones or for yourself, be of good cheer; for an imperishable joy is yours. You recur. "Cannot lose the hope that many a year Hath shop on a gleaming way, Put not away the intruding thoughts of the departed, but let them often The dead are constant. You know not how much they may think of you, how near they may be to you. Will you pass to meet them not having thought of them for years, having perhaps forgotten them? Let your mind have its nightly firmament of religious communion, beneath which white and sable memories shall walk, and the sphered spirits of your risen friends, like stars, shed down their holy rays to soothe your feverish cares and hush every murmuring doubt to rest. From the dumb heavings of your loving and trustful heart, sometimes exclaim, Parents who nurtured and watched over me with unwearied affection, I would remember you oft, and love you well, and so live that one day I may meet you at the right hand of God. Early friends, so close and dear once, who in the light of young romance trod with me life's morning hills, neither your familiar faces nor your sweet communion are forgotten by me: I fondly think of you, and aspire towards you, and pray for a purer soul, that I may mount to your celestial circle at last;— "For many a tear these eyes must weep, And many a sin must be forgiven, Blessed Jesus, elder Brother of our race, who sittest now by thy Father's throne, or pacest along the crystal coast as a leader, chief among ten thousand, whose condescending brow the bloody thorns no longer press, but the dazzling crown of thy Divinity encircles, oh, remember us, poor erring pilgrims after thine earthly steps; pity us, help us, and after death bring us to thy home. To the sympathetic poet, the man of sentiment and meditation, who views the question from the position of the heart, in the glory and vistas of the imagination, but with all the known facts and relations of the • Gräfe, Biblische Beiträge zu der Frage, Werden wir uns wiedersehen nach dem Tode. VM when a whorunk g Halet, Beleuchtung der Hauptgründe für den Garden st Vinhos any und Weberuhen tach dem Tode, Procter, Sene Beiträge zur Kritik des Glaubens www.herung nach dem Tode, * forkorte kuthutinein expremnon disbelief in the preservation of personality and onsciousness The same promnd had been taken in the work published anonymously at Halle in 1773, Mida uni fathultz janarita des Plyx, e, on the other side of the question, Wohlfahrt, Tempel der t-natepidikkelt, oder neue Anthologie der wichtigsten Aussprüche, besonders neuerer Weisen hit Witchet # W. CHAPTER VII. LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE. ACCORDING to the imagining of some speculative geologists, perhaps this earth first floated in the abyss as a volume of vapor, wreathing its enormous folds of mist in fantastic shapes as it was borne along on the idle breath of law. Ages swept by, until this stupendous fog-ball was condensed into an ocean of flame, whose billows heaved their lurid bosoms and reared their ashy crests without a check, while their burning spray illuminated its track around the sable vault. During periods which stagger computation, this molten conflagration gradually cooled down, constant rivers wrung from the densely-swathing vapor poured over the heated mass and at last submerged its crust in an immense sea. Then, for unknown centuries, fire, water, and wind waged a Titanic war, that imagination shudders to think of,-jets of flame licking the stars, massive battlements and columns of fire piled up to terrific heights, the basin of the sea suddenly turned into a glowing caldron and the scalded atmosphere saturated with steam, explosions hurling mountains far into space and tearing the earth open in ghastly rents to its very heart. At length the fire was partially subdued, the peaceful deep glassed the sky in its bosom or rippled to the whispers of the breeze, and from amidst the fertile slime and mould of its sheltered floor began to sprout the first traces of organic life, the germs of a rude species of marine vegetation. Thousands of years rolled on. The world-ocean subsided, the peaks of mountains, the breasts of islands, mighty continents, emerged, and slowly, after many tedious processes of preparation, a gigantic growth of grass, every blade as large as our vastest oak, shot from the soil, and the incalculable epoch of ferns commenced, whose tremendous harvest clothed the whole land with a deep carpet of vivid verdure. While unnumbered growths of this vegetation were successively maturing, falling, and hardening into the dark layers of inexhaustible coal-beds, the world, one waving wilderness of solemn ferns, swept in its orbit, voiceless and silent, without a single bird or insect of any kind in all its magnificent green solitudes, the air everywhere being heavily surcharged with gases of the deadliest poison. Again innumerable ages passed, and the era of mere botanic growths reaching its limit, the lowest forms of animal life moved in the waters, the earliest creatures being certain marine reptiles, worms, and bugs of the sea. Then followed various untimed periods, during which animal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, by plesiosaurus and pterodactyl,-horrible monsters, hundreds of feet in length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flight loaded the groaning air,--to the dolphin and the whale in the sea, the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, the nightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air. Finally, when millions of æons had worn away, the creative process culminated in Humanity, the crown and perfection of all; for God said, "Let us make man in our own image;" and straightway Adam, with upright form, kingly eye, and reason throned upon his brow, stood on the summit of the world and gave names to all the races of creatures beneath.1 At this stage two important questions arise. The first is, whether man is the final type of being intended in the Divine plan for this world, or whether he too is destined in his turn to be superseded by a higher race, endowed with form, faculties, and attributes transcending our conceptions, even as our own transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence. Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures of the antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast, crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheep for his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would have replied, without hesitation, "I exhaust the uses of the world. What animal can there be superior to me? beyond a question, my race shall possess the earth forever!" The mastodon could not know any uses of nature except those he was fitted to experience, nor imagine a being with the form and prerogatives of man. Therefore he would not believe that the mastodon-race would ever be displaced by the human. We labor under the same disqualification for judgment. There may be in the system of nature around us adaptations, gifts, glories, as much higher than any we enjoy as our noblest powers and privileges are in advance of those of the tiger or the lark. It is a remarkable fact that the mature states of the antediluvian races correspond with the foetal states of the present races, and that the fœtal states of embryonic man are counterparts of the mature states of the lower races now contemporaneous with him. This great discovery of modern science, though perhaps destitute of logical value, suggests to the imagination the thought that man may be but the fœtal state of a higher being, a regent temporarily presiding here until the birth and inauguration of the true king of the world, and destined himself to be born from the womb of this world into the free light and air of the spiritkingdom! The resources of God are inexhaustible; and in the evolution of his prearranged ages it may be that there will arise upon the earth a race of beings of unforetold majesty, who shall disinter the remnant bones and ponder the wrecked monuments of forgotten man as we do those of the disgusting reptiles of the Saurian epoch. But this is a mere con 1 Harris, The Pre-Adamite Earth. ceit of possibility; and, so far as the data for forming an opinion are in our hands, it is altogether incredible. So far as appears, the adaptation between man and the earth is exhaustive. He is able to subdue all her forces, reign over all her provinces, enjoy all her delights, and gather into his consciousness all her prophecies. And our practical conviction is absolute that the race of men is the climax of being destined for this earth, and that they will occupy its hospitable bosom forever with their toils and their homes, their sports and their graves.2 The other question is this:-Was the subjection of the human race to physical death a part of the Creator's original plan, or the retributive result of a subsequent dislocation of that plan by sin?-a part of the great harmony of nature, or a discord marring the happy destiny of man? Approaching this problem on grounds of science and reason alone, there can be no hesitation as to the reply. There are but two considerations really bearing upon the point and throwing light upon it; and they both force us to the same conclusion. First, it is a fact admitting no denial that death was the predetermined natural fate of the successive generations of the races that preceded man. Now, what conceivable reason is there for supposing that man, constructed from the same elements, living under the same organic laws, was exempt from the same doom? There is not in the whole realm of science a single hint to that effect. Secondly, the reproductive element-an essential feature in the human constitution, leading our kind to multiply and replenish the earth-is a demonstration that the office of death entered into God's original plan of the world. For otherwise the earth at this moment could not hold a tithe of the in habitants that would be demanding room. When God had permitted this world to roll in space for awful ages, a lifeless globe of gas, fire, water, earth, and then let it be occupied for incommensurable epochs more by snails, vermin, and iguanodons, would he wind up the whole scene and destroy it when the race of man, crowning glory of all, had only flourished for a petty two thousand years? It is not credible. And yet it must have been so unless it was decreed that the successive generations should pass away and thus leave space for the new-comers. We conclude, then, that it is the will of God--and was in the beginning— that the human race shall possess the earth through all the unknown periods of the future, the parents continually passing off the stage in death as the children rise upon it to maturity. We cannot discern any authority in those old traditions which foretell the impending destruction of the world. On what grounds are we to believe them? The great system of things is a stable harmony. There is no wear or tear in the crystalline machinery of creation, rolling noiseless in its blue sockets of ether. It seems, comparatively speaking, to have just begun. Its Agassiz says no higher creature than man is to be expected on earth, because the capacities of the earthly plan of organic creation are completed and exhausted with him. Introduction to Study of Natural History, p. 57. |