i
the religious significance of death
the greeks had their story of tithonus, a deeply significant myth of a man who could not die, but who grew ever older and more decrepit until the tragedy became unendurable and he envied those “happy men that have the power to die.” methuselah’s biography is brief and compact, but it is full of pathos: “he lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years and he died.” there was nothing more to add. somebody has invented a radium motor which strikes a little bell every second and is warranted to go on doing that for thirty thousand years. the methuselah monotony and tedium seem much like that thin seriatim row of items. it just goes on with no novelty and no cumulation, and finally the one relieving novelty is introduced—“he died.” what a happy fact it was! the wandering jew[112] stands out in imaginative fiction as one of the saddest of all men—a being who endlessly goes on. the angel of death seems a gentle, gracious messenger when one thinks of the prospect of unending life, going on in a one-dimensional series, with no new values and no fresh powers of expansion. to many persons the idea of heaven is simply an expanded methuselah biography.
biologists have completely reversed the theory that death is an enemy. it has long ago taken its place in the system of teleology, among “the things that are for us.” death has, beyond question, and has had, “a natural utility.” it has played an important r?le in raising life from the low unicellular type to the rich complex forms of higher organisms, from “the am?ba that never dies of old age” to the new dynasty of beings that have greater range and scope, but which nevertheless do die. edwin arnold in his striking essay on death says: “the lowest living thing, the protam?ba, has obviously never died! it is a formless film of protoplasm, which multiplies by simple division; and the specimen under any microscope derives, and must derive, in unbroken existence from the am?ba which moved and fed forty ?ons ago. the slime of our nearest puddle lived before the alps were made!”[113] methuselah was a mere child in a perambulator compared to an am?ba.
in cases where the continued process of cell-division produced a lowered and weakened type of am?ba a rudimentary form of union of cells took place, which resulted in raising the entire level of life and eventually carried the biological order up to wholly new possibilities. so that the threatened approach of death was met with an increase of life. “it is more probable that death is a consequence of life,” says the famous biologist, edward cope, “rather than that the living is a product of the non-living.”[2]
but in any case the testimony of biology can give us little help. even if death has had a function in the process of evolution, as seems likely, that in no way eases the situation when the staggering blow falls into our precious circle and removes from it an intimate personal life that was indispensable to us. it is poor, cold comfort to be told that death has assisted through the long ?ons in the slow process of heightening the entire scale of life, if there is nothing more to say regarding the future of this dear one whose frail bark has now gone to wreck. we must somehow rise above the level of brute facts and discover[114] some spiritual significance which death has revealed, before we can arrive at any source of comfort. we are all agreed with shakespeare’s claudio that “’tis too horrible” to think of death as a sheer terminus:
“ ... to die and go we know not where;
to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
this sensible warm motion to become
a kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
to bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
in thrilling regions of rock-ribbed ice;
to be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
and blown with restless violence round about
the pendent world.”
death has undoubtedly brought to consciousness, as has perhaps no other experience, the deeper meaning and significance of personal life. this and not its biological function is what concerns us now. it has been said that “freedom,” so far as it is achieved, “is the main achievement of man in the past.”[3] i should be inclined rather to hold that man’s main achievement on the planet so far has been to discover that personal life reveals within itself an absolute value and possesses unmistakable capacity to transcend the finite and temporal, an experience which makes[115] freedom possible. i believe death has ministered more than any other single fact that confronts us in bringing those truths to clear consciousness. we cannot, of course, dissociate death and separate it from pain, suffering, struggle and danger, which are essentially bound up with it. if the world were to be freed completely from death it would at once ipso facto be freed from the danger of it and by the same altered condition struggle would to a large degree be eliminated, and likewise those other great tests of life—pain and suffering, which culminate in death. these things are all “perilous incidents” of finiteness, but of a finiteness which transcends itself and is allied to something beyond itself. to eliminate these things would be to miss the discovery of this strange finite-infinite nature of ours which makes life such a venture and so full of mystery and wonder. if we had been only naturalistic beings, curious bits of the earth’s crust merely capable of recording the empirical facts as they occurred, death would have taken an unimportant place as one more event in a successive series of phenomena. built as we are, however, with a beyond within ourselves, the fact of mutability and mortality has occasioned a transformation of our entire estimate of life and has led us by the[116] hand to a pisgah view which we should never have got if there had been no invasion of death into our world.
“it is a venerable commonplace,” as professor schiller of oxford has said, “that among the melancholy prerogatives which distinguish man from the other animals and bestow a deeper significance on human life is the fact that man alone is aware of the doom that terminates his earthly existence, and on this account lives a more spiritual life, in the ineffable consciousness of the ‘sword of damocles’ which overshadows him and weights his lightest action with gigantic import. nay, more; stimulated by the ineluctable necessity of facing death, and of living so as to face it with fortitude, man has not abandoned himself to nerveless inaction, to pusillanimous despair; he has conceived the thought, he has cherished the hope, he has embraced the belief, of a life beyond the grave, and opened his soul to the religions which baulk the king of terrors of his victims and defraud him of his victory. thus, the fear of death has been redeemed, and ennobled by the consoling belief in immortality, a belief from which none are base enough to withhold their moral homage, even though the debility[117] of mortal knowledge may debar a few from a full acceptance of its promise.”[4]
the early animistic views of survival, which were the first forecasts of a life beyond, were due not so much to the consciousness of the moral grandeur of life as to actual experiences which gave to primitive man a confident assurance of some form of life after the death of the body. dreams had an important part in leading man to this na?ve and yet momentous discovery. in a world which had no established criterion of “reality,” the experiences of vivid dreams were taken to be as real as any other experiences, and in these dreams the dreamer often found his dead ancestors and friends and tribesmen once more present with him, active in the chase or the fight and as real as ever they were in life. trance, hallucination, telepathy, mediumship, possession, are not new phenomena; they are very primitive and ancient. these things are as old as smiling and weeping. these psychic experiences had their part to play also in giving the early races their belief that the dead person still existed though in an altered and attenuated form as an animus or “spirit” or “shade.” this empirical[118] view of survival, built on actual experiences, was more or less incapable of advance. no further knowledge could be acquired and the constructions fashioned by imagination, in reference to “the scenery and circumstance” of the departed soul, could satisfy only an uncritical mind. these constructions were, too, often crude and bizarre, and tended, in the hands of priests, to hamper man’s moral development rather than to further it. but in any case man had made the momentous guess that death did not utterly end him or his career. poor and thin as this dimly conceived future world of primitive man’s hope may have been, the psychological effect of the hope was by no means negligible. professor shaler of harvard was probably speaking truly when he wrote:
“if we should seek some one mark, which in the intellectual advance from the brutes to man, might denote the passage to the human side, we might well find it in the moment when it dawned upon the nascent man that death was a mystery which he had in his turn to meet. from the time when man began to face death to the present stage of his development there has been a continuous struggle between the motives of personal fear on the one hand, and valor on the[119] other. that of fear has been constantly aided by the work of the imagination. for one fact of danger there have been scores of fancied risks to come from the unseen world. against this great host of imaginary ills, which tended utterly to bear men down, they had but one helper—their spirit of valiant self-sacrifice for the good of their family, their clan, their state, their race, or, in the climax, for the infinite above.”[5]
it marked a still greater intellectual advance when primitive man came to the immense conclusion not only that death was a mystery which he in turn must meet, but that he was a being that would survive death.
it is, however, in another field that we must look for the most important spiritual results from the contemplation of death, that is in what we may call the field of spiritual values. i have already contended that man’s greatest discovery was his discovery of the absolute value of moral personality. of course, it came fairly late in the development of the race and by no means has everybody made it yet! but at any rate there came a time somewhere in the process of history when man did discover a beyond within himself,[120] a greater inclusive self present within his own fragmentary, finite spirit, revealed as a passion for perfection not yet attained or experienced, a prophesying consciousness of eternity within his often baffled and defeated temporal life. no one has expressed the fact of this inner beyond within us better than old sir thomas browne did in the seventeenth century: “we are men and we know not how; there is something in us that can be without us and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history of what it was before us, nor can tell how it entered in us.... there is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements and owes not homage unto the sun.”
the sublimity and grandeur revealed in nature, the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the mystery of the ocean, the glory of the sun and stars, the awe inspired by the thunderstorm, awakened man’s own spirit and made him dimly conscious of a kindred grandeur in his own answering soul. the greatest step of all was taken when man awoke to the meaning and value of love. in some dim sense love preceded the emergence of man. the evolution of a mother and of a father, as drummond showed, began far back in forms of life below man. but the[121] type of love which transcends instinct, which is raised above sex-assertion, and is transmuted into an unselfish appreciation of the beauty and worth of personal character—that type of love is one of the most wonderful flowers that has yet blossomed on our igdrasil tree of life and it was late and slow to come, like flowers on the century-plant.
when death broke in and separated those who loved in this great fashion the whole problem of death at once became an urgent one. in fact death received attention in proportion as the higher values of life began to be realized. walt whitman’s fiery outburst reveals clearly his estimate of the worth of personality. “if rats and maggots end us, then alarum! for we are betrayed”—he might have said “if microbes end us.” emerson’s poignant outcry of soul is found in his greatest poem—“threnody”:
“there’s not a sparrow or a wren,
there’s not a blade of autumn grain,
which the four seasons do not tend
and tides of life and increase lend;
and every chick of every bird,
and weed and rock-moss is preferred.
o ostrich-like forgetfulness!
o loss of larger in the less!
[122]
was there no star that could be sent,
no watcher in the firmament,
no angel from the countless host
that loiters round the crystal coast,
could stoop to heal that only child,
nature’s sweet marvel undefiled,
and keep the blossom of the earth,
which all her harvests were not worth?”
no such high revolt of spirit was occasioned so long as death was a mere biological event, terminating one life to give room for another. this cry of soul means the discovery of the infinite preciousness of personal life. the mind now turns in on itself and takes a new account of its stock, and as a result man began to solve the problem of death in an enlarged way. he was no longer satisfied with a form of survival based upon his experiences in dreams, trance and hallucination; he came to feel that he must have a destiny which fitted his spiritual worth as a man. he finds within himself intimation of powers and possibilities beyond those required for the struggle of life here. he feels by that same insight which carries him out beyond the seen to a rational faith in the unseen that is necessary to complete it, that this little arc of earthly life with its revelations of spiritual value and its transcendent[123] prophecies of more must find fulfillment somewhere in a form of life that rounds it out full circle.
the argument does not build on a passion of desire, as some doubters have said. we do not assume immortality just because we want it. it rests upon the moral consistency of the universe, upon the trustworthy character of the eternal nature of things. the moral values which are revealed in fully developed personality are certainly as real, as much a fact of the universe, as are the tides or the orbits of planets. if we can count upon the continuity of these occurrences and upon our predictions of them, just as surely can we count on the consistency of the universe in reference to spiritual values. if there is conservation of matter there is at least as good ground for affirming conservation of moral values. if biological life can pass over the slender bridge of a microscopic germ-plasm and can carry with itself over that feeble bridge the traces of habit and feature, the curve of nose and the emotional tone of some far-off dead ancestor, and all the heredity gains of the past, may we not count upon the permanence of that in us which allies us to that infinite spirit who is even now the invisible environment of all we see and touch?
[124]
it is not a matter of reward or of “wages” that concerns us. it is not “happy isles” or care-free “edens” that we seek, not “golden streets” and endless comfort to make up for the stress and toil of the lean years here below. we want to find the whole of ourselves, we ask the privilege of seeing this fragmentary being of ours unfold into the full expression of its gifts and powers. the new period may be even more strenuous and hazardous than this one has been—still we want the venture. we ask for the culminating acts that will complete the drama, so far only fairly begun. it must be not a mere serial, or straight line, existence; it must be the opening out and expansion of the possibilities which we feel within ourselves—new dimensions, please god.
i am not wrong, i am sure, in claiming that this postulate, this rational faith in the conservation of values, is an asset which death has revealed to the race. the shock of death has always made love appear a greater thing than we knew before the baffling crisis came upon us. it has, too, by the same shock of contrast, awakened man to the full comprehension of the moral sublimity of the good life. kant maintained that the sense of the sublime is due to the fact that when[125] we are confronted with the supreme powers of nature we then become aware of something unfathomable in ourselves, and feel that we are superior to the might of the storm, or the mountain or the cataract. nowhere is this truer than when man—man in his full, rich powers—is confronted by death. instead of cringing in fear, he rises to an unaccustomed height of greatness and is utterly superior to death and aware of some quality of being in himself which death cannot touch. it is just then in that moment of seeming disaster and dissolution that a brave, good man is most triumphant and ready to burn all bridges behind him in his great adventure. mrs. browning, all her life an invalid, says about this so-called gigantic enemy: “i cannot look on the earthside of death. when i look deathwards i look over death and upwards.” her husband, who was “ever a fighter,” has this way of announcing the triumph:
“and then as, ’mid the dark, a gleam
of yet another morning breaks,
and like the hand which ends a dream,
death, with the might of his sunbeam,
touches the flesh and the soul awakes.”[6]
[126]
here is the testimony of a french soldier who writes at a moment when death is close beside him: “i had often known the joy of seeing a spring come like this, but never before had i been given the power of living in every instant. so it is that one wins, without the help of any science, a vague but indisputable intuition of the absolute.... these are hours of such beauty that he who embraces them knows not what death means.”
having come upon the higher values of personal life which death has forced upon us we can never again, as men, be satisfied with such facts of survival as may come to light through dreams, hallucinations, telepathy and mediums, or in fact through any empirical experiences. even if the evidence were vastly greater than it is for some form of animistic survival, it would fall far short of our moral and spiritual demands. we already have some intimations in us of “the power of an endless life,” and we seek for a chance to bring it full into play, for the “heavenly period” to “perfect the earthen,” for an ampler life that will reveal what we have all the time meant life to be.
winifred kirkland in the new death well says: “the new death, i.e., the new view of death, is the perception of our mortal end as the mere portal of an eternal progression and the[127] immediate result is the consecration of all living.... it is a new illumination, a new death, when dying can be the greatest inspiration of our everyday energy, the strongest impulse toward daily joy.”
ii
the new born out of the old
walking across the fields in the spring i found the empty shell of a bird’s egg. the tiny bird that once was in it was lying still and happy under its mother’s wings, or was chirping its new-born song from the limb of a nearby tree, or was trying its new-found wings on the buoyant air. the empty shell was utterly worthless, a mere plaything for the wind. the miracle of life that had stirred within it and had used it for its shelter had gone on and left it deserted. there is a fine proverb which says, “god empties the nest by hatching out the eggs,” and the world is full of this gentle, silent, divine method of abolishing the old by setting free to higher ends all that was true and living in it.
“to-day i saw the dragon-fly
come from the wells where he did lie.
[128]
an inner impulse rent the veil
of his old husk: from head to tail
came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
he dried his wings: like gauze they grew;
through crofts and pastures wet with dew
a living flash of light he flew.”
in the water below, the “old husk” lay empty and useless, while the bright-colored living thing found its freedom in the invisible air. i never go to a funeral without thinking of this miracle of transformation which brings the bird out of the egg, the flower out of the seed, the dragon-fly out of its water-larva. in his own mysterious way god has emptied the nest by the hatching method, and all that was excellent, lovable, and permanent in the one we loved has found itself in the realm for which it was fitted. the body is only the empty shell, the shattered seed, the old husk, which the silent forces of nature will slowly turn back again into its original elements, to use over again for its myriad processes of building:
“and from his ashes may be made
the violet of his native land.”
those who treasure up the outworn dust and ashes, who make their thoughts center about the[129] empty shell, are failing to read aright the deeper fact, which life everywhere is trying to utter, that that which belongs in the higher sphere cannot be pent up in the lower.
this divine hatching method may be seen, too, in the progress of truth, as it unfolds from stage to stage. nothing is more common than to see a person holding on to a shell in which truth has dwelt, without realizing that the precious thing he wants has gone on and re?mbodied itself in new and living ways which he fails to follow and comprehend. while he is saying in melancholy tones, “they have taken away my lord and i know not where they have laid him,” the living lord is saying, “have i been so long time with thee and yet dost thou not know me?”
truth can no more keep a fixed and permanent form than life can. it lives only by hatching out into higher and ever more adequate expressions of itself, and the old forms in which it lived, the old words through which it uttered itself, become empty and hollow because the warm breath of god has raised the inner life, the spiritual reality, to a higher form of expression.
the writer of the epistle to the hebrews was very much impressed with this crumbling of old forms and expressions to give place to the new.[130] god spoke, he says, to our fathers in sundered portions and in a variety of manners, but he is speaking to us now by his son. the things that can be shaken, he writes, are being removed that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. luther must have felt this shaking process in his day; and when he saw the old forms of religion crumbling, he wrote that great hymn of the reformation, “a mighty fortress is our god.” he had found something that could not be shaken. he could stand his ground and face the seen and unseen world in faith, because he knew that the hatching was going on, and the new was being born in higher, truer, and more adequate forms as the old was vanishing.
let us hope that this ancient divine method may still operate in this momentous hour of human history. never, perhaps, since the fall of rome, has there been such a world-shaking process affecting every country and all peoples. immense changes are under way. nothing will ever be quite the same again. the old is vanishing before our eyes and the new is being born. so much was wrong and outworn, and unjust and inhuman, that the changes must go very far, and they will necessarily involve some breakage. but even now, in this most dynamic period of modern[131] history, that which is to mark permanent progress will come forth, not by a smashing process, but by the hatching of the eggs, by the emergence of the underlying forces of life and the realization of those human hopes and aspirations that have long been held in and suppressed.
there is always the gravest danger from blind rage and sullen wrath. the passionate resentment for the suffering of immemorial wrongs, when once it breaks through the dams of restraint, is an almost irresistible force; but sooner or later the sound, serious sense of the intelligent human race comes into play and brings the world back to order and system. the real gains in these crises are made not by the smashings and the blind iconoclastic blows, but by the wise, clear-sighted fulfillment of the slowly formed ideals which have been the inspiration of many lives before the crisis came. may it be so now! it must not be, it cannot be, that these millions of men shall have unavailingly faced death and mutilation. it was not wreckage and chaos they sought in their brave adventure with death. they went out to build a new world and to destroy, only that a new re-creation might begin. this is the time of incubation and birth, for ripening into reality those mighty hopes that make us men.
[132]
it means at once that we must deepen down our lives into the life of god, that we must suppress our petty individual passions and feel the sweep of god’s purposes for the new age. in a multitude of ways the world moves on, and as it moves the spirit of god ends old forms and methods and brings fresh and living ways to light. may we have eyes to see what is of his divine hatching and what is empty shell!
