What then? Will you undertake to confute the poet-prophet? If you do, he but eludes you. You meet him even in the precincts you thought he, heretic that he is, might not be allowed to profane. Behold him there throned as the very symbol of the deity you intended to adore in your self-righteous solitude and uniqueness!

And perhaps Schiller's greatness consists after all in just that power of uttering himself with a thrilling earnestness, while yet always reserving for his words a breadth of possible application; never quite narrowing his stated principles to the suggestive text or the particular dramatic symbol; leaving them to adopt for the reader in his own meditation other more sympathetic expressions, confident that they must in the end return for the happiest local instance and poetic presentment to the text or dramatic symbol Schiller adopted.

Hence, after four generations of reading, Schiller has lost no freshness; and even to such of us, as would in cold blood disagree with his doctrine, his lyric utterance continues to have human poignancy, and the most convincing and persuasive power. Blessed surely are the Germans who quite instinctively and sincerely love Schiller, and who have besides the world's only Schiller so to love!

The University of the South.

WILLIAM NORMAN GUTHRIE.

HUMANITY'S LONG TRAVAIL AFTER

IMMORTALITY

Christian preachers and writers often assert, or seem to assert, that the doctrine of personal immortality and resurrection was new to the Gentile world when the first evangelists of the religion of the Christ went forth from Olivet in obedience to the command of Jesus to convert the nations, and that they owed much of their extraordinary success to the fact that their message contained that great doctrine. Undoubtedly there is a real and a very important sense in which it is true that "life and immortality were brought to light through the gospel," but we shall be hindered instead of helped in understanding that important statement by overlooking the fact that neither immortality nor resurrection were new ideas when Jesus appeared among men.

It is the purpose of this paper to enquire what was the distinctive peculiarity of the Christian religion in relation to these all-important themes, and to show what is the service which it has really rendered mankind in connection with them.

Let us first advert to the state of the question at the beginning of the Christian era. For immemorial ages the doctrine of a future life beyond the grave had left its traces in the religions and philosophies of mankind. Of this the earliest and most impressive example is furnished by ancient Egypt, "the mother of religion." The Pyramid texts of the 5th and 6th dynasties (B. c. 2750) show that men in that early age looked forward to a future judgment "according to the deeds done in the body." The ferryman who conveyed the departed in his boat to the Field of the Blessed, did not receive all who applied for passage, but only those of whom it could be said, "There is no evil which they have done." We need not recall the familiar picture of the deceased appearing before the tribunal of Osiris to answer "guilty," or "not guilty" of the forty-two sins, while his heart is weighed in the balances against the feather of truth to test the validity of his plea. But we must note that their doctrine of immortality went hand in hand with a

doctrine of the transmigration of the soul through every variety of animal life for a period of three thousand years when (so Herodotus reports their belief) it would return to the human body. Moreover their passionate desire to preserve the body from decay through the process of embalming, arose from the belief that as long as the body remained undestroyed, the soul would remain with it and not quickly pass into the bodies of the lower animals.

The Egpytian was never able to detach the future life entirely from the body. "It is evident that he could conceive of no survival of the dead without it."" "They said, 'As Osiris lives, so shall he also live.' As the limbs of Osiris were again imbued with life, so shall the Gods raise him up." So in those earliest ages they contemplated death without dismay, for they said of the dead, "They depart not as those who are dead, but they depart as they who are living."

Now these beliefs of the Egyptians exerted a strong influence upon both Greek and Roman religious conceptions. Indeed the Egyptian religion was widely disseminated in the Roman empire and in Rome itself. This worship had gained a footing in Rome as early as the days of Sulla — it ran like wildfire over the Empire even as far as Britain.

Another example of the prevalence of the doctrine of immortality is furnished by the Eleusinian mysteries which had been in vogue for centuries before Christ. They were influential even as late as the close of the first century of our era. We find Plutarch (b. A. D. 46) comforting his wife on the death of their little daughter by recalling to her mind the bright vision of the future life which had been revealed to them in the secret mysteries of Dionysos. The thought of immortality is entwined round the legendary figure of Orpheus in the pre-historic age of Grecian story. Pythagoras discoursed of it more than five centuries before Christ. A century later Socrates and Plato constructed their great arguments in favor of the doctrine. The Platonists and Pythagoreans continued to teach it, more or less distinctly for centuries. Then the Roman philosophers and

'Breasted's Egypt, p. 68.

" Id. p. 66.

poets took up the argument, and the doctrine found able exponents in Cicero and Virgil. Even the Stoic philosophy, at first so unfriendly to it, yielded to its influence, and Seneca, in some of his moods, writes with almost the assurance of a Christian concerning the future life: "The moment of death," he says, "is the birthday of eternity; this life is but the prelude to a better life beyond the grave, where the wondrous secrets of the starry worlds shall be revealed."

In the same age we find Plutarch, the Greek historian, clinging fondly to the precious hope of immortality, and vehemently assailing those philosophers who seek to rob men of that hope, on the pretext of delivering them from superstition.

The picture, however, has another side. When we scrutinize it carefully, we find this hope of immortality was often very vague, very pale, and very weak. It was held with a hesitating grasp even by those who were most explicit in avowing it. Some, as the Stoics, held to the notion of a limited immortality; a life renewed beyond the grave, but only till the next great cataclysm of the universe. Others held it in the form of . the transmigration of the soul into some other body, perhaps of the lower animals; others held to a kind of impersonal immortality. Even Plato in his sublimest and most triumphant argument for a future life, cannot hide- nor does he seek to hide the shadow of doubt that darkens his own mind as to the possibility of any conclusive proof of immortality. The best argument he tells us, is but a raft upon which one may sail through life, in default of a revelation from God which might more surely and safely carry him. And Seneca-the almost saint, the almost Christian, at least in his reasoning on a future life - even he wavers and hesitates at times between the creed of the materialist and the hope of immortality — appearing to admit the possibility of a return at death to ante-natal nothingness, This is the verdict of the chief Roman philosophers: "Great men avow rather than prove so acceptable a doctrine," and the greatest of Roman orators says of Plato's argument for immor

Phædo, p. 414.

Tusc. Disp. I x1. 24.

tality: "I have often pondered it, but, I know not how it is, while I read I assent to it, but when I have laid down the book and begun to think with myself concerning the immortality of the soul, all that assent vanishes." If we go down into the tomb excavated in our day at Mycenæ and at Athens, where we have, so to speak, a statue of the Greek mind in the presence of death, we do not see its brow lifted up to heaven and lit with the radiance of immortality, but rather we see it shadowed with gloom as it bends to earth seeking to gather up in memory's urn the ashes of the life that is gone.

We hear many strong voices lifted up in denial and refutation of the doctrine of immortality. Julius Cæsar in a public speech frankly avows his belief that death is the end of all things for man, "the final term of joy and sorrow." In the same age Lucretius, in his famous and wonderful poem on the nature of things, preached the gospel of nothingness after death; death was a night without a morning, a sleep without an awakening. And a century later Pliny the Elder, the accomplished naturalist, fiercely inveighs against the madness of the doctrine of immortality.

If we turn back to ancient Greece, we find the greatest of all her philosophers, Aristotle, testing the argument of his master, Plato, for immortality with his cold and pitiless logic, and arriving at the conclusion that there is no sufficient proof of a separate conscious future life for man. And then a century later rises Epicurus with his gospel of sensualism and his creed of annihilation at death—a gospel and a creed which exercised a wide sway over men for long ages after. It was, we are told, the prevailing philosophy in the last days of the Republic. On the tombs of the period we read such inscriptions as these:

"Non fueram: non sum: nescio."

"Non fui: fui: non sum: non curo."

The departing sensualist bids his friends walk in his footsteps,

"My friends, while we live, let us live;

Eat, drink, disport thyself, and then join us."