side by side with the Divine Immanence, the Divine Transcendency, we might call him a Christian mystic, where now we can only call him a teacher of transfigured pantheistic individualism.

Pantheism denies the personal immortality of the soul. То pantheism death is the sinking of a wave back into the sea. We shall find, however, that Emerson, true to his central tenet of hallowed individualism, has again and again asserted the personal immortality of the soul, and never denied it in reality, though he has often done so in appearance.

When, in 1832, Mr. Emerson bade adieu to his parish in this city, he used, as on every occasion he is accustomed to use, memorable words. "I commend you," the last sentences of his letter to that parish read, "to the Divine Providence; may He multiply to your families and to your persons early genuine blessing; and whatever discipline may be appointed to you in this world, may the blessed hope of the resurrection, which He has planted in the constitution of the human soul, and confirmed and manifested by Jesus Christ, be made good to you beyond the grave. In this faith and hope I bid you farewell."*

These are wholly unambiguous words. You say that Emerson never has asserted, since 1832, the personal immortality of the soul; but what do you make of certain almost sacredly private statements of his to Frederika Bremer? That authoress, whose works Germany gathers up in thirty-four volumes, came out of the snows of Northern Europe, and one day found Mr. Emerson walking down the avenue of pines in front of his house, through the falling snow, to greet her. Day after day they conversed on the highest themes; months passed while Frederika Bremer was the guest of Boston; and toward the end of the lofty interchanges of thought between these two elect souls there occurred what Frederika Bremer calls a most serious season. One afternoon in Boston, with all the depth of her passionate and poetic temperament, she endeavoured to convince Emerson that God is not only in all natural law, but that he transcends it all; that He demands of us perfection, and that, therefore, as Kant used to say, we must expect personal immortality or opportunity to fulfil the demand; that religion is the marriage of the soul with God; and that the idea that God is objective to us, and that our souls may come into harmony with His, a Person meeting a person, is vastly superior, as an inspiration, to any pantheistic theory that all there is of God is what is revealed to us in the insignificant scope of our faculties. She endeavoured, in the name of lofty thought, to show the narrowness of * Emerson, R. W. Letter dated Boston, December 22, 1832, quoted in Frothingham's Transcendentalism in New England, 1876, p. 235.

pantheism at its best. The interview was serious in the last degree, and Frederika Bremer says that Emerson closed it with these words: "I do not wish that people should pretend to know or believe more than they really do know and believe. The resurrection, the continuance of our being, is granted; we carry the pledge of this in our own breast. I maintain merely that we cannot say in what form or in what manner our existence will be continued.*

Transcendentalism in New England was marked by a bold assertion of the personal continuance of the soul after death. The Dial always assumed the fact of immortality. "The transcendentalist was an enthusiast on this article," Mr. Frothingham says; and Mr. Emerson's writings, he adds, were "redolent of the faith." Theodore Parker thought personal immortality is known to us by intuition, or as a selfevident truth, as surely as we know that a whole is greater than a part. It must be admitted that New England Transcendentalism caused in many parts of our nation a revival of interest and of faith in personal immortality.† Mr. Emerson was the leader of New England Transcendentalism.

But you say that since 1850 Emerson has changed his opinion; and yet, if you open the last Essay he has given to the world, that on "Immortality," you will read :-"Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the The implanting of a

only sane solution of the enigma.

desire indicates that the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature that feels it. word with us.

The Creator keeps His

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Will you, with vast cost and pain, educate your children to produce a master-piece, and then shoot them down ?" What do these phrases amount to taken in connection with the two earlier passages which I have cited, and which assuredly assert personal immortality? "All sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction—namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so. I admit that you shall find a good deal of scepticism in the street, and hotels, and places of coarse amusement. But that is only to say that the practical faculties are faster developed than the spiritual. Where there is depravity, there is a slaughterhouse style of thinking. One argument of future life is the recoil of the mind in such company-our pain at every sceptical statement."

The "conscious personal" continuance of the soul, Emerson no more

* Emerson, Conversation with Frederika Bremer," Homes of the New World," vol. i. p. 223. + See Frothingham, Transcendentalism, pp. 195-198.

than Goethe denies. In this very essay, however, we must expect to find apparent self-contradiction, and accordingly we can read here these sentences, written from the point of view of a wavering Pantheism : "Jesus never preaches the personal immortality. I confess

that everything connected with our personality fails. The moral and intellectual reality to which we aspire is immortal, and we only through that."

Allow me on this occasion to contrast arguments with ipse dixits, and to use only the considerations which are implied in Emerson's teachings on immortality. You will be your own judges whether the conclusion that there is a personal existence after death must follow from his premises. I shall, of course, unbraid the reasoning and show its strands, but its braided form is Emerson's axiom: "The Creator keeps His word with us." The argument is old; and, for that reason, probably, Emerson values it. It has borne the tooth of time and the buffetings of acutest controversy age after age. In our century it stands firmer than ever, because we know now through the microscope, better than before, that there is that behind living tissues which blind mechanical laws cannot explain.

1. An organic or constitutional instinct is an impulse or propensity existing prior to experience and independent of instruction.

This definition is a very fundamental one; and is substantially Paley's.*

2. The expectation of existence after death is an organic or constitutional instinct.

3. The existence of this instinct in man is as demonstratable as the existence of the constitutional instincts of admiration for the beautiful, or of curiosity as to the relations of cause and effect.

What automatic action is you know; and an instinct is based upon the automatic action of the nervous mechanism. Who doubts that certain postures in anger, certain attitudes in fear, certain others in reverence, certain others in surprise, are instinctive? These postures are taken up by us without reflection on our part; they are organic in origin. It is instinct for us to rest when we are fatigued, and to take the recumbent position; and we do not reason about this. The babe does it. Instinctive actions appear early in the progress of life, and are substantially the same in all men and in all times. An educated impulse does not appear early, and is not the same among all men in all times. Of course it would avail nothing if I were to prove that the belief in immortality has come to us from education. If that belief result from an organic instinct, however—if it be constitutional— then it means much, and more than much.

* Nat. Theol., ch. 18.

4. The dulness of these instincts in a few low races or in poorlydeveloped individuals does not disprove the proposition that admiration for the beautiful and curiosity as to the relations of cause and effect are constitutional in man.

5. So the occasional feebleness of the expectation of existence after death does not show that it is not an organic or constitutional instinct. 6. This instinct appears in the natural operations of conscience, which anticipates personal punishment or reward in an existence beyond death.

You desire incisive proof that we have a constitutional anticipation of something beyond the veil; but can you look into Shakespeare's mirror of the inner man and not see case after case of the action of that constitutional expectation? Shakespeare's delineations are philosophically as unpartisan and as exact as those of a mirror. Is it not the immemorial proverb of all great poetry, as well as of all profound philosophy, that there is something that makes cowards of us all as we draw near to death, and that this something is not physical pain, but a somewhat behind the veil? Death would have little terror if its pains were physical and intellectual only. There is an instinctive action of the moral sense by which we anticipate that there are events to come after death, and that these will concern us most closely.

Archbishop Butler, in his famous sermons on Conscience, has no more incisive passage than that in which he declares that "Conscience, unless forcibly stopped, magisterially exerts itself, and always goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence which shall hereafter second and confirm its own." This prophetic action of conscience I call the chief proof that man has an instinctive expectation of existence after death. We are so made that we touch somewhat behind the veil. As an insect throws out its antennæ, and by their sensitive fibres touches what is near it, so the human soul throws out the vast arms of conscience to touch eternity, and Somewhat, not ourselves, in the spaces beyond this life. All there is in literature, all there is in heathen sacrifice, continued age after age, to propitiate the powers beyond death-all there is in the persistency of human endeavour, grotesque and cruel at times, to secure the peace of the soul behind the veil-are proclamations of this prophetic action of conscience; yet conscience itself is only one thread in the web o the pervasive organic instinct which anticipates existence after death.

7. This instinct appears in a sense of obligation to meet the requirements of an infinitely perfect moral law. We know that the moral law is perfect, and therefore that the Moral Lawgiver is perfect. But the moral law demands our perfection. "Therefore," said Immanuel Kant, "the moral law contains in it a postulate of immortality." Its

requirement is a part of our constitution, and cannot be met in this stage of existence. It is not met here, and therefore the moral law requires us to believe in an existence after death. That is Kant's very celebrated proof; but I am pointing to it only as one thread in this organic web which we call instinctive anticipation of existence after death. Put your Shakespeare on the fear of what is behind the veil, side by side with your Kant on this anticipation of the time when we can approximate to perfection, and you will find these broadshouldered men in the name of both poetry and philosophy, affirming, as the postulate of organic instinct in man, that existence after death is a reality.

8. It appears in the universality of the belief in existence after death. All widely-extended beliefs result much more from organic instinct than from tradition.

9. It appears in the human delight in permanence.

10. It appears in the unoccupied capacities of man in his present state of being.

11. It appears in the convictions natural to the highest moods of the soul.

"There shine through all our earthly dresse,

Bright shootes of everlastingnesse."

12. It appears in the longing for personal immortality characteristic of all high states of culture.

13. It appears conspicuously in Paganism itself, in the persistence of all the ages of the world, in the efforts to propitiate Supreme powers, and to secure the peace of the soul beyond the grave.

How is the force of any impulse to be measured unless by the work it will do? What work has not this desire of man, to be sure that all will be well with him beyond the veil, not done? What force has maintained the bloody sacrifices of the heathen world through all the dolorous ages of the career of Paganism on the planet? What force has given intensity to the inquiries of philosophy as to immortality? What has been the inspiration of the loftiest literature in every nation and in all time, whenever it has spoken of avenging Deities that will see that all is made right at last? How are we to explain the persistency of every age in the attempt to propitiate the powers beyond the veil, and to secure the peace of the soul after death, if not by this impulse arising organically and existing as a part of the human constitution?

14. Nature makes no half hinges. God does not create a desire to mock it. The universe is not unskilfully made. There are no dissonances in the Divine works. Our constitutional instincts raise no