CHAPTER XCVIII.

CHRISTIAN CONSOLATION. OPINIONS CONCERNING THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.

The voice which I did more esteem
    Than music in her sweetest key;
Those eyes which unto me did seem
    More comfortable than the day;
Those now by me, as they have been,
Shall never more be heard, or seen;
But what I once enjoyed in them,
Shall seem hereafter as a dream.

All earthly comforts vanish thus;
    So little hold of them have we,
That we from them, or they from us,
    May in a moment ravished be.
Yet we are neither just nor wise,
If present mercies we despise;
Or mind not how there may be made
A thankful use of what we had.
                                                   WITHER.

There is a book written in Latin by the Flemish Jesuit Sarasa, upon the Art of rejoicing always in obedience to the Apostle's precept,—‘Ars semper gaudendi, demonstrata ex solâ consideratione Divinæ Providentiæ.’ Leibnitz and Wolf have commended it; and a French Protestant minister abridged it under the better title of L'Art de se tranquiliser dans tous les evenemens de la vie. “I remember,” says Cowper, “reading many years ago, a long treatise on the subject of consolation, written in French; the author's name I have forgotten; but I wrote these words in the margin,—‘special consolation!’ at least for a Frenchman, who is a creature the most easily comforted of any in the world!” It is not likely that this should have been the book which Leibnitz praised; nor would Cowper have thus condemned one which recommends the mourner to seek for comfort, where alone it is to be found, in resignation to God's will, and in the prospect of the life to come. The remedy is infallible for those, who, like Mr. Bacon, faithfully pursue the course that the only true philosophy prescribes.

At first, indeed, he had felt like the bereaved maiden in Schiller's tragedy, and could almost have prayed like her, for a speedy deliverance,—

Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer,
Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunsche nichts mehr.
Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück!
Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück,
        Ich habe gelebt und geliebet.

But even at first the sense of parental duty withheld him from such a prayer. The grief, though “fine, full, perfect,” was not a grief that

            violenteth in a sense as strong
As that which causeth it.1

1 SHAKESPEARE.

There was this to compress, as it were, and perhaps to mitigate it, that it was wholly confined to himself, not multiplied among others, and reflected from them. In great public calamities when fortunes are wrecked in revolutionary storms, or families thinned or swept off by pestilence, there may be too many who look upon it as

Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris; 2

and this is not so much because

—fellowship in woe doth woe assuage,3

and that

    —the mind much sufferance doth oerskip
When grief hath mates and bearing fellowship3

as because the presence of a fellow sufferer at such times calls forth condolence, when that of one who continues in the sunshine of fortune might provoke an envious self-comparison, which is the commonest of all evil feelings. But it is not so with those keener griefs which affect us in our domestic relations. The heart-wounds which are inflicted by our fellow creatures, are apt to fester: those which we receive in the dispensations of Almighty wisdom and the course of nature, are remedial and sanative. There are some fruits which must be punctured before they can ripen kindly; and there are some hearts which require an analogous process.

2 INCERTI AUCTORIS.

3 SHAKESPEARE.

He and Margaret had been all in all to each other, and the child was too young to understand her loss, and happily just too old to feel it as an infant would have felt it. In the sort of comfort which he derived from this sense of loneliness, there was nothing that resembled the pride of stoicism; it was a consideration that tempered his feelings and assisted in enabling him to control them, but it concentrated and perpetuated them.

Whether the souls of the departed are cognizant of what passes on earth, is a question which has been variously determined by those who have reasoned concerning the state of the dead. Thomas Burnet was of opinion that they are not, because they “rest from their labours.” And South says, “it is clear that God sometimes takes his Saints out of the world for this very cause, that they may not see and know what happens in it. For so says God to King Josiah, ‘Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace; neither shall thy eyes see all the evil that I will bring upon this place, and the inhabitants thereof.’” This he adduces as a conclusive argument against the invocation of Saints, saying the “discourse would have been hugely absurd and inconsequent, if so be the saints separation from the body gave them a fuller and a clearer prospect into all the particular affairs and occurrences that happen here upon earth.”

Aristotle came to an opposite conclusion; he thought not only that the works of the deceased follow them, but that the dead are sensible of the earthly consequences of those works, and are affected in the other world by the honour or the reproach which is justly ascribed to their memory in this. So Pindar represents it as one of the enjoyments of the blessed, that they behold and rejoice in the virtues of their posterity:

Ἔστι δε καί τι θανόντεσσιν μέρος
        Καννόμον ἑρδόμενον,
Κατακρύπτει δ᾽οὐ κόνις
Συγγόνων κεδνὰν χάριν.4

4 PINDAR.

So Sextus, or Sextius, the Pythagorean, taught; “immortales crede te manere in judicio honores et pœnas.” And Bishop Ken deemed it would be an addition to his happiness in Paradise, if he should know that his devotional poems were answering on earth the purpose for which he had piously composed them:

    —should the well-meant songs I leave behind
With Jesus' lovers an acceptance find,
'Twill heighten even the joys of Heaven to know
That in my verse the Saints hymn God below.

The consensus gentium universalis, is with the Philosophers and the Bishop, against South and Burnet: it affords an argument which South would not have disregarded, and to which Burnet has, on another occasion, triumphantly appealed.

All sacrifices to the dead, and all commemorations of them, have arisen from this opinion, and the Romish Church established upon it the most lucrative of all its deceitful practises. Indeed the belief in apparitions, could not prevail without it; and that belief, which was all but universal a century ago, is still, and ever will be held by the great majority of mankind. Call it a prejudice if you will: “what is an universal prejudice,” says Reginald Heber, “but the voice of human nature?”—And Shakespeare seems to express his own opinion when he writes, “They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.”

That the spirits of the departed are permitted to appear only for special purposes, is what the most credulous believer in such appearances would probably admit, if he reasoned at all upon the subject. On the other hand, they who are most incredulous on this point, would hardly deny that to witness the consequences of our actions may be a natural and just part of our reward or punishment in the intermediate state. We may well believe that they whom faith has sanctified, and who upon their departure join the spirits of the “just made perfect,” may at once be removed from all concern with this world of probation, except so far as might add to their own happiness, and be made conducive to the good of others, in the ways of Providence. But by parity of reason, it may be concluded that the sordid and the sensual, they whose affections have been set upon worldly things, and who are of the earth earthy, will be as unable to rise above this earth, as they would be incapable of any pure and spiritual enjoyment. “He that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.” When life is extinguished, it is too late for them to struggle for deliverance from the body of that death, to which, while the choice was in their power, they wilfully and inseparably bound themselves. The popular belief that places are haunted where money has been concealed (as if where the treasure was and the heart had been, there would the miserable soul be also), or where some great and undiscovered crime has been committed, shews how consistent this is with our natural sense of likelihood and fitness.

There is a tale in the Nigaristan of Kemal-Pascha-zade, that one of the Sultans of Khorassan saw in a dream, Mahmoud a hundred years after his death, wandering about his palace,—his flesh rotten, his bones carious, but his eyes full, anxious and restless. A dervise who interpreted the dream, said that the eyes of Mahmoud were thus troubled, because the kingdom, his beautiful spouse, was now in the embrace of another.

This was that great Mahmoud the Gaznevide, who was the first Mohammedan conqueror that entered India, and the first who dropt the title of Malek and assumed that of Sultan in its stead. He it was, who after having broken to pieces with his own hands the gigantic idol of Soumenat, put to death fifty thousand of its worshippers, as a further proof of his holy Mohammedan indignation. In the last days of his life, when a mortal disease was consuming him, and he himself knew that no human means could arrest its course, he ordered all his costliest apparel, and his vessels of silver and gold, and his pearls and precious stones, the inestimable spoils of the East, to be displayed before him,—the latter were so numerous that they were arranged in separate cabinets according to their colour and size. It was in the royal residence which he had built for himself in Gazna, and which he called the Palace of Felicity, that he took from this display, wherewith he had formerly gratified the pride of his eye, a mournful lesson; and in the then heartfelt conviction that all is vanity, he wept like a child. “What toils,” said he, “what dangers, what fatigues of body and mind have I endured for the sake of acquiring these treasures, and what cares in preserving them, and now I am about to die and leave them!” In this same palace he was interred, and there it was that his unhappy ghost, a century afterwards, was believed to wander.