"THE THRESHOLD OF BOUNDLESS LIFE 141 combined, "united in some wondrous whole." Throughout creation certain imperfect qualities existing as fragments suggested some one creature yet to make "Some point where all those scattered rays should meet Convergent in the faculties of man." 1 Such a broad and deep foundation bespoke the nobility of the edifice to be reared: "in completed man begins anew, a tendency to God." This tendency, Browning argues, demands immortality to follow out: "My foot," says Paracelsus, "is on the threshold of boundless life." "Leave Now," said the Grammarian, "for dogs and apes! Man has For-ever." 2 "Mid the dark, a gleam Of yet another morning breaks, And like the hand which ends a dream, 3 "That the fact of the soul's immortality is not more obtrusively evident is of enormous advantage to morality and to us men. If, instead of dwelling in what may be termed an intellectual twilight, it was as evident to us as are the faces of our friends, generous devotion and all selfdenial would be almost impossible to us, on 1 Paracelsus. 2 The Grammarian's Funeral. 142 CONVICTION NOT FORCED UPON US account of the certainty we should have about future rewards and punishments. The same consideration applies also to our practical apprehension of God's existence. If His Being and Majesty could not be ignored by us, the most selfish motives would conspire with better ones to prompt us to actions materially virtuous, but sadly deficient in formal goodness. Only by ignorance in these respects can we become worthy to participate in the greatest good. God has been more gracious and merciful to us than to make the evidence of His existence so plain that its non-recognition is a mark of intellectual incapacity. Certain and irrefutable as are the proofs of His Being, yet conviction on the subject is not actually forced upon men as is the conviction of the existence of the sun at noonday. God will not allow Himself to be caught at the bottom of any man's crucible, and He is too benevolent to yield Himself to the experiments of ill-intentioned and irreverent inquirers, who would only draw down additional misery on themselves by a revelation which they were permitted to extort at will, without any regard to their state of preparedness for its reception." 1 Walt Whitman, as we have seen, no less than Browning, believed in soul, and was very sure of God. Though he made no attempt to define immortality, he had the strongest faith in it— 1 On Truth, St. George Mivart, M.D., F.R.S., pp. 490-91. PRE-EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL "My foot is tenoned and mortised in granite; I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time. 143 I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go With you; but I know I came well, and shall go well." Browning held the theory of the previous existence of the soul; this imaginative, poetic idea is a very ancient and widely-spread one. The Greek philosophers and the early Fathers of the Church largely held it. No doubt it was originally derived from Indian sources. Says Browning-1 "Ages past the soul existed, Here an age 'tis resting merely, In his exquisite poem to his wife, One Word More, he refers to this progress in a future series of lives, and pleads that in the present life he attains to verse alone; but "Other heights in other lives, God willing." In Old Pictures in Florence, again, he tells of the "new work for the soul in another state," where souls repeat in large what they practised here in small, "through life after life in unlimited series," only on a changed scale. Yet he reflects that when the child has reached manhood's estate we burn the rod, and he thinks Men and Women. 1 Cristina. 144 OUT OF GOD ALL IS CHANGE the uses of labour are done with when this life ends, and he for one longs for rest. The chief business of the soul here is to mingle with some other soul "Else it loses what it lived for, There may be better ends and deeper blisses in prospect, but this life's end and this love-bliss have been lost.1 Though the woman has lost the man, her soul is his; she has missed her chance of perfection, he has gained his life's object, is perfect— "Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and blended; And then, come next life quickly! This world's use will have been ended." "2 But out of We change It is the nature of the soul to seek durability, it hates to be the slave of change. God all is vicissitude. He alone IS. in the very act of saying "I am." Durability can be found only in union with God. That union is possible for us because God dwells in us, and by love we may become assimilated to Him. If mere earthly love is the commingling of souls-and without it there can be no love at all the love of God unites us in an ineffable manner with the divine, and because "love's first 2 Ibid. 1 Cristina. UNION WITH GOD 145 demand is that love endure eternally,"1 the seal and pledge of our immortality consists in our absorption in the love of God in the present life. That great mystical writer St. John of Cross explains how this is. "In order, then, to understand what this union is, we must remember that in every soul, even that of the greatest sinner in the world, God dwells, and is substantially present. This way of union or presence of God in the order of nature, subsists between Him and all His creatures. By this He preserves them in being, and if He withdraws it, they immediately perish and cease to be. And so when I speak of the union of the soul with God, I do not mean this substantial presence which is in every creature, but that union and transformation of the soul in God by love, which is only then accomplished when there subsists the likeness which love begets. For this reason shall this union be called the union of likeness, as the other is essential or substantial union; this latter one is natural, the other is supernatural, which takes effect when two wills, the will of God and the will of the soul, are conformed together, neither desiring aught repugnant to the other. Thus the soul, when it shall have driven away from itself all that is contrary to the divine will, becomes transformed in God by love. This is to be understood, not only of that which is contrary in act, 1 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. L |