32 FAITH OF THE INDIANS. them an incentive to virtuous life, and that which corrected and shaped their views of death. It is regarded The inhabitants of the Mariana Islands, too, owning no God, having no conceptions of an infinite cause, seemingly without the least idea of their relation of the spiritual, so blind as to have neither temple nor altar, sacrifice nor priest, yet believed their souls immortal, and that there is a paradise and its opposite. "The idea of immortality" among the Mexican Indians, says Schoolcraft, "is thoroughly dwelt upon. It is not spoken of as a supposition or a mere belief not fixed. as an actuality, as something known and approved by the judgment of the nation. During the long period of my residence and travels in the Indian country, I never knew or heard of an individual who did not believe in it, and the appearance of the body in a future state. No small part of their entire mythology, and the belief that sustains man in his vicissitudes, arise from the anticipation of enjoyment in a future life after the soul has left the body." Thus far doth human testimony strengthen the belief that "life forever runs its endless race, And, like a line, death but divides the space A stop which can but for a moment last, A point between the present and the past." It is a belief that ever has been, and ever must be, a power in the soul. The perfection of that power is reserved for another era than that we are now considering. There is a difference between mythology and theology, of course. One may be conceived in the highest human wisdom, but the other is born of eternal truth, and must stand. The former is like the faint tints that precede the morning dawn; the other like the clearest beams of the midday sun. To assert the necessity of this order of things in the natural world is but to reiterate a fact the commonest minds fail not to receive. We attempt not to argue the same for the moral and spiritual world, but only remark that observation shows it to be thus. SCEPTICS FEW AND FOOLISH. 33 We do not expect people to see as clearly at the dawn of day as at noontide. We expect indistinctness along the whole line of vision in the former case. An object may appear in the distance of uncertain character; but suppose the eyes of many beholding it until all unite in the same conclusion respecting it, should we not rationally accept that conclusion? Would it not be considered folly to dissent when the thing is confirmed by so many? Find we not a parallel in this doctrine of immortality? The voice of the past, of all antiquity, consenteth unto it. We say not that there have never been those who have denied this fundamental truth. There have been those who have called, and professed to believe, "death an eternal sleep ;" who affirmed that the soul lieth down with the body in everlasting unconsciousness; but so small is the number of these compared with the mass of mankind, and so unsettled their faith notwithstanding their pretensions, it counts but little against the force of the argument, that the doctrine of immortality has been a universal belief. "If a number of fools," says a writer already quoted, "should think fit to put out their own eyes, to prevent them from feeling the effects of light, as Democritus, the ancient philosopher, is said to have done, it would form no argument to prove that all the rest of the world is blind. And, if a few sceptics and profligates endeavor to blind the eyes of their understanding by sophistry and licentiousness, it cannot prevent the light of reason, which unveils the realities of a future world, from shining on the rest of mankind, nor constitute the slightest argument to prove the fallacy of the doctrine they deny." 3 34 YEARNINGS OF CHILDHOOD. CHAPTER II. THE DESIRE OF CONTINUOUS LIFE AN INHERENT PRINCIPLE OF MIND. Yearnings of Childhood. The Soul's Thirstings. — Fear of Socrates. Cicero's Instructions to his Pupils.-Dying Testimony of Franklin.— Of Byron. Universal Action reveals Desire. Perpetual Longings. — Inferences. "Whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Whence this secret dread and inward horror 'Tis the divinity that stirs within us : "Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter, THUS mused the mind of Cato long ages since a mind not yet released from the thraldom of superstition, but surrounded, as he himself acknowledges, with "shadows, clouds, and darkness," weary, and tortured with conjecture. Wherefore, then, this depth of reasoning but from intuitions of that divine something which "stirs within," reaching after the immortal, and satisfied with nothing but the Infinite? As he looked forward, in his efforts to grasp the eternity of thought, and comprehend the endlessness of being, an "unbounded prospect" opened before him, and he exclaimed, "Thou pleasing, dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must we pass? Multitudes had asked the same questions before him, and manifested the same eager spirit of inquiry. They had been YEARNINGS OF CHILDHOOD. 35 echoed and re-echoed until sounds had been started whose vibrations were constantly increasing in power-sounds which, according to the theory of some, were to go on eternally in their accumulated strength; but whether this be so or not, they were certainly never to cease until the human soul had found a sure and permanent basis upon which to rest its hopes, and some appropriate aliment to feed its desires. From whence came this anxiety, save by the promptings of the deathless something within which ever asserts its claims to immortality, its alliance, and therefore its co-existence, with the Infinite? But it is not only those who have reached the full maturity of their powers; who have drank large draughts from the cup of pleasure, and found it mingled with gall; who have exulted in the promises of hope, and sorrowed in their non-fulfilment ; who have revelled in the sunshine of existence, and anon hid themselves from the gathering cloud; it is not only these who have experienced all that earth had for them, and, conscious of their speedy emancipation from their prison-house of clay, look forward with solicitude to what yet cometh. We have seen the child of few years, whose youthful cheek was oft traced with tears because she was so lonely" on earth and that, too, when hope is to life what the dancing sunbeam is to the glittering spray on a summer's morning—one shielded from every sorrow, so tenderly cherished as never to feel the bitterness of neglect, and yet pining for something above and beyond all to satisfy the yearnings of the soul. What is this but a desire inwoven into the very constitution of spiritual life to drink at a never-failing, ever-satisfying fountain, whose waters have power to quench the thirst that is quenchless elsewhere? er "The human soul," says Leighton, "thirsts after a good. invisible, immaterial, and immortal, to the enjoyment whereof the ministry of a body is so far from being absolutely necessary, that it feels itself shut up and confined by that to which it is now united as by a partition wall, and groans under thè pressure of it. Most nations have adopted these sentiments, 36 THE SOUL'S THIRSTINGS. though even unable to confirm them with any argument of irresistible force. Yet they felt something within them that corresponded with this doctrine, and looked upon it as most beautiful and worthy of credit." "Nobody shall drive me from the immortality of the soul," says Atticus, in Cicero; and the words of the world-renowned philosopher, Seneca, are expressive of peculiar pleasure relative to views of the soul's eternity and their actual belief. When his sun began to decline, and the remains of a broken constitution only appeared, "I resigned myself," said he, "to so glorious a hope as that of removing into the immensity of time, and into the possession of endless ages." It is unquestionably true that there is in man a desire for immortality. None can subdue it; not even the despairing wretch who flies to death for succor, and embraces the hope of annihilation as his only refuge. At the very instant when he dreads an immortality which he fears will be miserable, and withdraws himself from a life which he finds so, he wishes there were no such reason for choosing death, and preferring the utter extinction of his being; which is a manifest argument that he hath not yet put off the general desire for immortality. An unconscious betrayal is witnessed in even the professed enemies to the doctrine. Those who have most strenuously sought to put far away all thought and desire for these things, who have taken the idea of annihilation to their closest embrace, have, nevertheless, considered it a very cheerless thing to die when the body dies, -at best, but a "leap in the dark." The most daring infidels have been led to pay their involuntary tribute to the superiority of immortal hopes over their own delusions; for they are continually told of the measureless worth of such hopes, by convictions they cannot stifle, a voice they cannot hush. Nor are they uninfluenced, as we may rationally conclude, by desires that the doubtful may indeed be true. And why can it be subdued? It is coeval with mind, with the principle of life itself. |