EQUALITY IN HEAVEN.
VERY few, indeed, of the popular notions about "Heaven,"— using that word as the popular synouyme for the future life, and not as the alternative to Hell,—will bear the most ordinary or momentary investigation. As a rule those notions are the merest condensations of widely diffused hopes, which hopes, again, are often the product of certain disgusts at circumstances which in this world cannot be removed. The notion, for example, that Heaven is perpetual peace, a place where "congregations ne'er break up, and Sabbaths ne'er shall end," a long or eternal rest, is the result of the weariness which all good men must feel of their never- ending struggle with the world, the flesh, and the devil, a hope no more in accordance either with reason or revelation than Hawthorne's, that he might be permitted a good long sleep of about Mc) thousand years as a siesta before he was set to work again. If the word Heaven has any meaning, it means a state of existence in which we shall do the Lord's work more perfectly than at present, in which we shall struggle more ardently against sin, and probably against misery (thoughthat thought issubject to the rider that misery may be merely discipline), and certainly against ignorance of Him, all of which duties involve work, willing work or happy work, but still Work, and not Rest, which, again, is absolutely incompatible with the increased desire of the " regenerated " but still finite soul to know Him, the Infinite. The struggle up a mountain may be the happiest effort of our existence, but except by a perversion of words it cannot be called Rest. Nor are we able to perceive that at rest or at work the condition of the soul can be one of absolute and complete happiness. A priori, he only can be perfectly happy whose knowledge and whose power are synonymous, synchronous, and con- terminous, because otherwise he must either make mistakes, or wait, —or be disappointed. But this cannot possibly be true of any finite being ; and with regard to the especial finite being called man, there can be no solution of continuity, otherwise he is not an im- mortal being, or a being capable of a future life, but only a being who, like a wheat-grain, is capable of reproduction in a different stage. Increased, indeed, happiness may be, for us so increased that, in comparison, it may be called perfect, but absolutely per- fect in any arithmetical sense it cannot be. If there is no solution of continuity, there must be memory, and with memory, regret, and with regret, shame, and with shame, suffering, however modi- fied in degree by a clearer perception of the infinite purpose which, though regulating all things, has yet, as one great action in par- suit of that purpose, left human will in freedom. Again, there is the notion, most magnificent and productive of all the unproved
ideas, perhaps greatest and moat fruitful of all ideas proved or unproved, that we shall in Heaven "know God." How should we know God? That we shall know Him better may be conceded easily, for an inborn conviction tells us, even without revelation, that the flesh acts as a veil between us and the Maker, just as it acts, to use an unworthy simile, as a veil between many minds and absolute mathematical truth ; —and that we shall know Him much better follows from the certainty that half the obscuring influences will have in another world no place, that, for example, as Southey sang, avarice could not continue even in hell,—" earthy that passion of the earth "; but, nevertheless, the eternal truth will remain that He is infinite, we finite, that the finite, however near its comparative approximation, is still infinitely distant from the Infinite, that, though to use Paul's glorious simile, here" we see through a glass darkly,"—his "glass" was a sort of semi-translu- cent slag, not our artificial crystal,—and shall there see face to face, yet when we see even a human being face to face we do not,
therefore, know its owner, may mistake him, always fail to know more than a fraction of him.
Of all the popular ideas of the future state, however, perhaps the most popular and the most erroneous is that expressed in the common saying, "We shall all be equal there." That saying is as old as Christianity ; it appears in the Epistles, though St. Paul did not mean his words to bear so wide an interpretation; and it has for ages been one of the few grand consolations of the poor, the oppressed, and the Buffering. We are not sure whether it has not exercised as great an influence as any of the incidental ideas of Christianity ; whether it has not, for example, greatly contributed to mould the organization of all Churches, the Roman Catholic Church more especially, and to form the ideal of all social reformers outside as well as within the pale of belief. There is something in it which suits human nature,—the instinctive sense every man occasionally entertains of his own nothingness before the Almighty,
— and also, perhaps, —one must speak frankly to speak truthfully,
— the instinctive wickedness, or rather feebleness, of human nature, its incapacity of freeing itself wholly of jealousy, envy, self-con- sciousness, pride, the wish that the next world may reverse in some visible manner the unjust judgment of this. The contrast between the real and the apparent, between the relation of a man to men and his relation to the Omniscient, has struck all religious legislators, and we do not, therefore, wonder at the universal diffusion of the thought, and yet how little can it have to rest on 1 It is a certainty, if anything can be a certainty, that if Heaven or a future state exists at all, there can in it be no permanent solution of continuity, no change of identity ; for if so, not only is the human period wasted—and God does not waste—bat God's justice and mercy are alike rendered imperfect, and His glory dimmed. On what is styled the orthodox view, we should have the awful sight of a being condemned to torment without knowledge of the cause, out of what to him seems caprice ; and on what seems to us the truer view, we should have the equally awful sight of a being held back through eternity by influences which, being unconscious of them, he cannot overcome. Yet, if there be no solution of continuity, if the soul which is here is also there, how can then be equality in the next world ? The soul cannot escape the influences which have modified it here. It may, no doubt, escape the passions, some of which at least are fleshy and depart with the flesh,—which latter may be lying in the British Museum, a subject for intellectual speculation,—but how be free of that portion of the effect of those passions which dwarfs or smirches, or, it may be, expands and elevates the soul? Avarice, for instance, is, if we agree with Southey, of all strong passions the one most directly earthy,—having in it leas of entrain than lust, the most carnal of all,—and avarice can hardly continue in the next world ; yet how can the effect of avarice, if it has modi- fied the mind and soul, be lost, if there is no solution of continuity? Or how can the effect of a noble impulse, say that of self-sacrifice for the cause of God, be wholly taken away ? If it is taken away, what use in virtue or in strife? And yet if it remain, where is the equality? Many, perhaps most of our readers, however, would acknowledge moral inequalities in Heaven, and a large sec- tion of them would rejoice in them, but in what way do they pro- pose to get rid of inequalities of intellect and knowledge ? The intellect must continue if continuity continues, and with intellect its inequalities, or Hodge becoming suddenly Newton or Newton Hodge, the freed soul ceases to be that either of [lodge or Newton. The smallest differences of culture, of knowledge, of those intel- lectual circumstances which create impulse, must have their effect, however small, and their effect much in the direction they had in this world, or otherwise the continuousness of the sense of moral responsibility, that is, of the fact of moral responsibility—for the sense is the fact, or an idiot would be responsible,—would, pro tan to, be weakened. No doubt, these differences would, under the new light, seem so small as to be almost imperceptible,—though light, by the way, reveals rather than covers differences,—and no doubt, also,
the differences there and the differences here would be judged by widely different laws, but still they would exist. To take the most visible, and, perhaps, the most important of all superficial distinctions among men, that which we call refinement, is that to be abrogated? Nine-tenths of it, probably, would be, as either arti- ficial, or hypocritical, or the result of physical tendencies ; but that other tenth, which seems in this world to affect even the soul, and which certainly affects the moral nature, if only in the
self-restraint it breeds, is that to disappear? How can it disappear without an erasure of the past, fatal pro tarao to
the very idea of continuous responsibility? Infinitesimal, it may be ; but still the infinitesimal is not the non-existent, and for so much there is in the earthly sense a grade in Heaven, a
little step in the road towards the ideal by which John starts in advance of Thomas. Then there is the hunger to advance, to in- quire, to accumulate new knowledge, is that to go? It is possible, indeed easy, to conceive of a Bengalee who is a Christian up to the spiritual level of any Englishman, yet lacks this hunger entirely; is he the equal at first in Heaven of the man who, having all he has, has this besides, and having it, diverts its direction—as he would in the new light divert its direction—into a pursuit of the one object of Heaven, closer relation in all respects to the Divine? And if not the equal at first, why is he to be the equal at any time? Why is he, to speak in non-theological terms, to catch up the competitor as eager as himself, but less weighted ?
Let us take the extreme case, for that, after all, though not the only way of arguing such speculations, is the only way of making such arguments large enough to be intelligible. The popular theory assumes that in the next world the ordinary idiot of Earls- wood and Sir Isaac Newton, or, say, Melancthon, start fair. Why do they start fair ? Surely if they do start fair, such a miracle has been wrought on one or other of them that there has been a virtual new creation as of a new being, disconnected either with the Idiot or Sir Isaac. Take any view of idiotcy you please, that, for instance, it is the result of mere bodily malformation ending instantly with death—quite the most probable view—and still the loss of the life's experience of volition must, if life be continuous at all, and soul and mind related, have been a loss to the soul, leaving it behind as a child's might be left behind in the great race. The ground may be caught up quickly ; but surely it is not caught up through the intervention of miracle, else why not similar miracle as to moral status, but through some process of spiritual education and slow enlightenment. The possibility of education must exist in Heaven, and the possibility of education involves ex necessitate inequality. Earthly position may be reversed; of course, in many cases, must be reversed,—one could not conceive, for example, of the royal caste occupying any but a very low posi- tion in the new life,—but grades there must still be. The theory of equality is nothing but an effort to express the inexpressible— the distance which must exist between the highest creature and the Creator, a distance so great that all other distances beside it seem as the inequalities in fine sand. Still, no two grains of sand are of the same size.
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