MR. LYTTELTON ON THE FUTURE STATE.*
MR. LvrrEvros need hardly, we think, have approached his subject with so great a fear of shocking the conventional religious
feelings and ideas of his day as has evidently possessed him.
His mind is naturally too full of reverence to admit of his saying a rash or flippant thing either about the great subjects of Revelation, or about the hardly less great subjects which, for some inscrutable reason, are not included within the scope of Revelation at all. And we can hardly feel that any great respect is due to purely conventional views, either on religious or on moral subjects. Is not, indeed, the region of the conventional the very region in which all true moral and religious life finds something like petrifaction ? Was there any occasion at all to treat that view of the state of the just mit& perfect,' which represents them as continually singing hymns, with the ex- treme delicacy and forbearance which Mr. Lyttelton shows in these pages? We know of nothing which is less like true religion than the hackneyed orthodox assumptions,—due originally, no
doubt, to metaphorical language used by great writers in some very different sense,—which have the effect of really preventing the play of true religious feeling round the greatest of spiritual hopes. True faith must be constantly making raids on the petrified conventional assumptions which mark the ebb instead of the flow of religious life, and Mr. Lyttelton, instead of needing any sort of excuse for assailing these mindless orthodoxies of phrase, might, with advantage to his very thoughtful and valuable little volume, have made a much more thorough-going onslaught upon them. We go, however, heartily with him in his drift, though we should have been glad to see him pressing it home with less reserve and more of edge in his language. His drift we take to be, that there is a much closer analogy implied in Revelation itself between the life of this world and the spiritual life, than the usual orthodox phraseology is at all inclined to allow ; indeed, that the conventional antithesis between this world and the next is in a very large degree indeed a false antithesis ; further, that the life of the body is not limited to this world at all, though the body through which we shall have to make the soul speak in the next state will not be such a body as we have now ; and as a consequence of these principles, that the life of labour, the life of art, the life devoted to the study of beauty and duty, though it will be richer and more refined in the next state than in this, will no more be absolutely swallowed up and lost in what is called 'devotion,' than the work of God in Creation has been during the eternity of the past swallowed up and lost in the illumination of human consciences and the work of disciplining, strengthening, and elevating human character. The monstrous and silly notion that Heaven is to be a perpetual twanging of harps by creatures sitting on damp clouds, does more to make the Christian faith ridiculous than anything which its opponents advance, and wise as Mr. Lyttelton's treatment of the sayings of apostles and evangelists on the subject is, we rather wish he had given a little more of vivacity to his assault upon this curious superstition. The truth which has, we suppose, been the original cause of these childish assumptions, as it presented itself to the minds of those whose ill-interpreted words gave rise to such notions, was this, that the highest and most perfect life, both as regards knowledge and as regards love, must consist in the true union with God,—or what the Catholic theology calls "the beatific vision," though the word " vision " does not seem to be nearly large enough for the thing denoted by it. But it seems obvious enough that the true union with God can only be attained by a finite and imperfect being, in finite and imperfect fashion, by the illumination and intensification of all our various powers, with perhaps the gradual addition of new ones still unknown to us. And it seems, therefore extremely unlikely that any of those powers which are capable of receiving a divine impress at all should be dropped out of us, by way of preparation for a more perfect union with God, who is BO infinitely beyond us. Especially does Mr. Lyttelton insist with great force on the life of action as part and parcelff the perfect spiritual life. Indeed, were it otherwise, it would seem that the very highest point of the earthly life, the point at which the divine life most plainly touches ours, would be eliminated from the still more spiritual life of the next world. Mr. Lyttelton puts the case as regards the language of Scripture with great beauty and force :— "All this gives a different view of the Future Life, and of the pro- * Scripture Revelations of the Life of Men after Death, and the Christian Doctrines of Descent into Hell, the Resurrection of the Bode, and the Life Everlasting, with Remarks upon Cremation and upon Christian burial. Edited by the Hon. and Rey. W. H. Lyttelton, Hector of Hagley and Honorary Canon of Worcester. London: Daldy, Iableter, and Co. paration for it, from that entertained by those who, like the ancient Gnostic and Manichasan heretics, have looked forward only to a strange disembodied, ghost-like existence of the soul alone in tho future world. Were such our expectation, we should have to try to live a strange, ghost-like life, as separate as possible from matter, here; we should look down upon everything that is material as in itself impure and altogether transitory ; as we gazed at sunrises, sunsets, the manifold glories of the material world, and indulged that sense of the Beautiful in such works of the Divine Artist, which is so streng a feeling in our nature in its present state, we should have to account all such pleasure something unspiritual—belonging to those joys of earth to which we must bid farewell for ever at the moment of death, and to which there will be nothing similar in the Great Future for which this life is the nursery-ground and divine training-school. But the groat Christian verity of the Resurrection of the Body shows the fallacy of all this. For it teaches us that Christ came not to redeem a part only of our nature —as, for instance, the soul only—but the whole of it. He has opened to us the'glorious hope that the redeemed soul will hereafter clothe itself in a perfect body, in order that in and through it in all its powers it may serve and glorify God. The doctrine of the Ascension of Christ for man tells us that, when He left the world, He carried up with Rim into heaven, not a fragment only of our nature—as, for in- stance, the contemplative faculties only—but human nature complete in all those powers which were not in their very nature connected with mortality—with birth or death, for instance. But if He carried all these powers into heaven, can any one suppose that they will lie idle there for ever ? Surely not. For every one of them there must be some exercise there. The passages of Scripture upon which some have founded the strange notion that the future life of Goi's redeemed will be spent in nothing but worship in the ordinary sense of that word, really prove nothing of the kind. They are mostly taken from the Apocalypse, a book which, divine in substance, is in its whole language and texture figurative and symbolical. And besides, if you were told of a certain place that it was 'always resounding with songs of praise,' you would not therefore conclude that singing praises was the occupa- tion of the inhabitants, but only that their occupations, whatever they were, were so joyful that their hearts continually overflowed in praise. They sing only because they are so joyful that they cannot help singing. Or, if you sat in a room with one reading a book, and at every new page which he turned over, he exclaimed, 'How beautiful !' would you conclude that the book was monotonous ? would you not rather wonder at the infinite, inexhaustible variety of interest and beauty there must be in it to keep up such unwearied delight? These passages of Scrip- ture then only tell us that the spirits of the blest are for ever joyful, for ever victorious, for ever conscious of the mighty efficacies of Christ's redemption. And from what has been said, and specially from the great Christian verity of the Ascension we have the strongest reasons for believing 'hat in the heavenly life there will be manifold and perfect exercise for all the pure powers of human nature, both of body and of soul. And hence if you ask what parts of our earthly life may be made a preparation and discipline for heaven ? we must answer, every part of it that is not impure or necessarily connected with sin and death."
We doubt if even in these interesting and simple sermons, quite enough stress is laid on the complete repudiation by St. Paul of the absurd doctrine that the very body which belongs to a man at the instant of dissolution is to belong to him in the more spiritual state to which he goes. It is true that Mr. Lyttelton's whole view is founded on St. Paul's doctrine, and that he ex- pounds it with great force. But has it ever occurred to any one to remember how utterly different is our point of view on these subjects from that of the ancient world, and how easy it would have been for any one speaking from merely human wisdom, and insisting, as St. Paul did eagerly insist, on the bodily resurrection of Christ, to have gone astray into a view which it would have been impossible for modern science to accept? Instead of doing so, St. Paul's illustration of the spiritual body which is to be not less different, nay, more different, from the corruptible body buried here, than is the tree from the seed which is sowed to generate it, might almost have been conceived in answer to the objections of modern science, and this is a point on which we think hardly sufficient stress has been laid even by those who, like Mr. Lyttelton, cordially adopt and ably interpret his teaching.
The only point in connection with this subject on which we think Mr. Lyttleton's sermons are open to question, is his as- sumption that the formative or building power which determines the structure of the body is a mediating power between body and soul (p. 30), and is one which, as he seems to assume, both there and later (p. 39), is directed by the soul. It is given, he says, to the soul "to lay hold of and appropriate surrounding matter," and so "to fashion its atoms into a living body, or rather into a succession of living bodies," suitable for the soul's dwelling.. place. But what, then, does he say of the body of plants and animals? Have not they, too, the power of appropriating physical atoms and moulding them into a succession of living bodies? And could he ascribe the direction of their structural life to any soul of the plant or the animal? And what would he say of the struc- tural life of the idiot ? Is it not safer to say that the law which gradually elaborates a body, and a body which, as the stage of creation rises, becomes more and more fit to be the organism of a conscious soul, is a law due to the divine spirit in creation, rather than to any "mediating power" directed by the individual soul, and operating upon the structural and organic life of man? As far as we can see, the structural organisation of man's bodily life is no more directed by a human soul than the structure of a crystal by a crystalline soul. The psychical laws are new laws superadded to the laws of organic life by the same creative spirit which prepares the body for the soul, but it is not possible to say that there is any soul in the body which directs the evolution of the body for its own purposes. With relation to Mr. Lyttelton's doctrine of the state of the good and the evil in the future life, we may say that it is too slightly in- dicated here to justify us in discussing it. But we cannot accept his doctrine that a gulf is placed between the evil and the good after death, which it is impossible to pass. That doctrine is founded on a single parable of our Lord's, the drift of which is by no means final and absolute,—especially as there are so many sayings, both of our Lord himself and of his apostles, which, if interpreted in their simplest sense, directly traverse that con- elusion; and we quite agree with Mr. Lyttelton, that when there is one passage in Scripture which speaks fully of a subject, and others which speak of it only briefly and allusively, the first should be assigned much the greater importance of the two. That a great gulf is fixed between those who are miserable as the result of wicked and wasted lives, and those who are full of the peace .of good and patient lives, is certain. But it does not follow that the gulf will always remain, if the causes which placed it there are not permanent. And certainly St. Paul had a confident hope of a time when all the enemies of God should be finally overcome, and God should be all in all. Without in the least assuming the doctrine of the Universalists, that evil can be over- come by a mere feat of divine power, or without the absolute surrender of the evil will to the spirit of good, we cannot con- ceive it, and do not find it, to be anywhere the teaching of Scrip- ture that death puts an end to the drama of spiritual hope and fear, and that a recovery which was possible up to the last moment of earthly life becomes impossible directly that apparently irrelevant event has taken place which terminates the connection of the individual character with a particular bodily state, and in- troduces it to the different conditions of a new and probably more refined bodily state. This, however, is the only serious point on which we cannot agree with Mr. Lyttelton. For the rest, his able sermons, with their thoughtful notes, and the fine sermon of Canon Perowne's "On the Life Everlasting," seem to us full of valuable thought, and of pointed as well as reverent illustration. On what Mr. Lyttelton says with respect to Christian Burial we need hardly say that We heartily agree.
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