1 Redeemed souls in the intermediate state must be possessed of ample means of happiness, if it were only for this plain reason—that else the long period of their waiting for the final consummation would be insupportable. To those who depart now, or departed recently, it will be a duration of very many ages; and no doubt they know it well. But think of the saints before the deluge, or in the patriarchal ages, foreseeing that consummation, at the distance of many thousand years, or at least having had now the actual proof of the long delay. We must not imagine them exercising patience, since that implies something endured, suffered; but to cause them an entire complacency under this immensely protracted delay of their highest felicity,-to secure them invariably happy in their present time and state, century after century, millennium after millennium,-to prevent such earnestness of anticipation, as should partake of restlessness; to do this, what mighty resources for enjoyment must they possess! And these resources must be in the activity of the intellectual faculties and the affections; in attaining truth, loving goodness, admiring grandeur, adoring the Divinity. Nor can we well conceive they should be in a state of total inaction in a more practical sense; that they should be, so to speak, laid aside in an inert existence, while activity is prevailing, in all probability, through the whole empire of the Almighty. Should it not be probable that the servants of God, of every order, everywhere in the universe, and in every stage of their existeņce, have something to do, some office to execute? And if such be the vocation of departed human spirits, it might be no violence of conjecture to suppose they may sometimes, some of them, have appointments in a certain connection with the race here, to which by their nature they still belong, though their immediate mortal relation to it has ceased. Benevolent they certainly are, and if they have active employments assigned them, it cannot be conceived there are any fitter objects of benevolence than the poor sojourners in the world they have left. At all events it is to be presumed that the manner in which their faculties, or call them powers, are exercised, must be that which will make their existence most worth, if we may so express it, in the creation-most worth that they should exist as intelligent beings; and it must be that which will render most service and honor to the Lord of all. A thought is suggested as to one great difference between the service so rendered, of whatever special kind it be, and that which was rendered by piety in the mortal, and partly sinful life preceding. For if, as we must believe, death be to good men the end of all sin, and the emancipated spirit be constituted immediately and absolutely holy, then its activity being perfectly conformed to the divine law, will need no pardon. It will not therefore be under the economy of redemption, in the same sense as the very imperfect obedience in the mortal state. What a strange contrast this must make in consciousness and review! Another suggestion arises, in respect to those who have already been during an immensely long period, according to our measures of time, in that separate state. Their recollected mortal life must appear to them, in point of duration, most insignificant in their retrospect. What an unimaginable power of memory they must possess, if they retain it vividly in sight after so vast an interval, occupied, as we assume, with a continual and perhaps very various exercise of their faculties. But after ail our conjectures, imaginings, and almost impatient speculations, here we still are, in front of the awful impervious veil. How striking to consider, while we stand here, that one and another of our friends, with us just as yesterday, inquisitively conversing perhaps on this very subject, are now, are at this instant in the midst of reality; have experimental knowledge of two worlds, while we are yet confined to one. And next the consideration that we also shall erewhile, some of us very shortly, go into the light and amazement of that revelation. What an emphatic call to the utmost diligence and earnestness to be ready for the transition,—and what an intensely severe reproach to indifference, negligence, and absorption of the soul in temporal things, while consciously approaching every moment nearer to so portentous an event. My dear sir, you will believe that I am fully aware how little there is in these pages to any other effect than that of stimulating inquiry, and showing the impossibility of answering it. Still the thoughtful mind cannot, and ought not, to let the great subject alone. We must continue inquiring, till we obtain an answer elsewhere. I remain, my dear sir, J. FOSTER. P. S.-I read, slightly indeed, after its publication, Taylor's "Physical Theory of another Life," but, as far as I recollect, he takes no distinct account of the intermediate state, speculating almost exclusively, and very ingeniously, on the final state. The scriptural arguments (and the others) for the mutual recognition after death of those who have been friends on earth, are well brought together in one of Gisborne's Essays, in a small volume of which I forget the exact title. . . . . CCXIV. TO THE REV. THOMAS COLES. Stapleton, August 23, 1839. I have to thank you for your letter, written under circumstances of mournful interest, anticipations so soon to be realized. Then you could hold converse with the object of your affectionate solicitude; now it is silence and absence as complete as two different worlds can make it. How strange, how striking it is to reflect, that the loved person who was here in living communication but a few days since, is now in a realm invisible and unknown, and (wherever it is) unimaginably different from this, where he was and is not. How much within this so brief an interval he has attained to know which we know not, and could not know in even a sojourn on earth of a thousand years. How vast a movement forward, made in one moment, in the career of a human spirit! But what other movements, thus sudden perhaps, are effected by the progress of duration, in an eternal career! Any view of eternity is overwhelming to thought, but peculiarly to the thought that we, that this very soul shall exist for ever. Sometimes, even apart from the idea of retribution, it seems almost fearful. "How can I sustain an endless existence ? How can I prolong sentiment and action for ever and ever? What may or can become of me in so stupendous a predicament? What an accumulation of miracles to preserve my faculties, my being, from becoming exhausted and extinct!" How can there be an undecaying, ever new, and fresh vitality and animation, to go powerfully along with an infinite series of objects, changes, excitements, activities? While sympathizing with you under the mournful dispensation, I must congratulate you on that by which it is so happily alleviated, the delightful confidence that it is well with him who has departed. And the more cordial will be this consolation from the circumstance, that (as we heard it here) in the earlier stage of his illness, his mind was oppressed by gloomy apprehensions. How happy a change for him, as antecedent and preparatory to the still happier change accomplished in his final hour. You will have sometimes mused on what might have been, if God had willed it; how your son, thus brought under the full influence of religion, might have been appointed to a protracted life of Christian excellence and social usefulness. You can easily figure him as passing through many years of such a life, a pleasure to yourself and a benefit to others. But you know that the sovereign will had reasons for deciding otherwise, and that those reasons, if they could be made intelligible to you, you would absolutely and emphatically approve. It is probable that he, the subject of the decision, does by this time understand and approve them, and has a complacent confidence that you, not as yet understanding them, will devoutly acquiesce. How much he has at present the advantage of you, if he has a clear manifestation of that concerning which you are called to exercise submissive faith! CCXV. TO THE REV. JOSIAH HILL. 1839 There is nothing for me to say, save and except an expression of my gratification that we may now be confident of having you here, for a term, I hope, as long as the life of both us two. Which of us is to leave this dark world the first? On supposition that the GREAT BOOK should be placed before you, with intimation that, if you chose (being permitted) to open at such a page, you would read the year, the month, the day appointed for your entrance on another world, could you forbear? Suppose you had opened the volume where you would have just only to raise the next leaf, would you touch its edge, and, deliberating, decide to leave it still lying flat, the portentous page on the other side? I am supposing that you were assured, on the right authority, of exemption from divine inhibition, and therefore culpability. . . . . Thank you for sending the Watchman; some of it I have read, and do really mean to read all in it that relates to the question. I have read very little, hardly anything, of the long debates, filling one halfscore of columns after another of the Morning Chronicle. As to the whole affair that has raised so prodigious a hubbub, one cannot help feeling that it is worthy of all satire. A national education-there are millions of children and youth sorely wanting it; and there is a proposition for applying a miserable driblet of money to such a purpose-no less than £30,000, about as much as is paid out of the public purse to some two or three sinecurist placemen— not one-third of what is paid to the Queen Dowager; and what a combustion about it over all the land! It is a mighty engine constructing to be worked by the pope and the devil. Verily they have not been accustomed to work so cheap. They must have found out how to make a little go a great way. I wish they would be as moderate in all other departments of their receipts and expenditures; we should then be able to do without divers things, Methodism among the rest. Said Methodism has lent itself in aid of what we perfectly well know to be the real principle, and under but thin disguise, of the aristocracy and the great majority of the church, viz. a mortal hatred of the mental improvement of the mass of the people. They would rather (the Methodists I mean) that the miserable multitude should be left in their ignorance and barbarism (an ignorance and barbarism no longer, as formerly, inert, prostrate, and obsequious, but strongly rankling and fermenting into active mischief), than they should be educated in any manner not making the specialities of religion the principal thing. But, indeed, I observe, is for making quite a clear business of it-is for having no national education at all, since the government, he says, have not only no duty, but no right to take any concern in the education of the people. Duly tax the people, and punish them when they commit crimes, and there their business ends; for I do not see what business they have even to make laws for them, to tell them what is wrong; for law is always considered as a moral education, not less than a rule of punition. Where there is not downright hypocrisy, there may be affectation and cant. To hear this Methodist declamation, one might think that knowledge, cultivating good sense, as the opposites of brutish ignorance, vulgarity, and coarse sensuality, were of no value at all, unless as combined with-not the general principles of religion, but with a special creed. To read well, write well, to understand the language well; to be ready in arithmetic, to acquire some of the plainer principles of the most useful sciences, were utterly worthless ;-as well be without them, unless as interwoven throughout with the catechism. At this rate a boy should not be taught a mechanical art, or a trade, unless in immediate connection with detailed articles of faith. What a nuisance, therefore, are the thousands of private day-schools which are teaching these supposed useful matters. There is a large quantity of cant in all this. Nor was it to stand for anything that in the government's plan there was to be a clergyman at the head of the institution, to see to the religious instruction of the church pupils, and that an arrangement was to be made for the religious instruction, separately, of the dissenting portion of them. As to the Roman Catholic portion (or popish, I would name it), they are to be left in the pure savage state, unless their own party have adequate means and exertion to give them some little education. As to the real intrinsic character of popery (which shows itself when there is nothing to keep it under restraint as in Spain), I fully agree with But he admits that, practically, it is very greatly modified in this Protestant country; it is so, too, in France, a non-protestant country. But then, does not this, just in that proportion, modify and reduce the harm of its combination with the school-teaching in this country? Or would he allow himself to be taken for one of those dreamers who are apprehending the approach of such an ascendency of popery here as will set loose its real character into action? . . . . He has great real or pretended reverence for the established church. But what does the increase of popery say of the quality and efficacy of that church as a Protestant guardian? And, talk of popery! It is in the grand centre and vomitory of that church that popery is daily augmenting and threatening to inundate the ecclesiastical domains. P.S. I have hardly expressed with due strength the observation that and must wish that the Irish, and equally any other popish nation, should be left wholly and absolutely uneducated, abandoned literally to the savage state, since the intermixed popery vitiates the whole thing essentially. Perhaps they will reply, “No, our objection is to a Protestant state patronizing and paying for such education;" it comes in effect to the same. The Protestant state is to refuse because such education is absolutely bad, worse than nothing, and what, therefore, it cannot be wished that any state should confer or inflict on the people. They must deprecate that the Irish popish gentry should, from their own private means, support such an education. At any rate, supposing that they (these gentry) could not or would not, and that the people were so imbued with popery that they could not (as how should they?) yield to receive an expressly Protestant education, it would then be the duty of the Protestant state to teach them nothing (except their liability to be hanged), and leave them to become, as nearly as possible, like the beasts of the field. |