This is one of the points in which the ethical insight of Plato pierces deeper than that of the New Testament. Jesus, indeed, says but little of a life after death. When he mentions it, he does so in order to lay down a doctrine of salvation by righteous deeds, which is in stark contradiction to the credal theory of the Church.1 St. Paul, beginning with the notion of bodily resurrection, rises by degrees to the thought of ethical renewal. In this life he becomes a partaker of Christ's resurrection, by having "the same mind which was in Christ Jesus.” But in general the Church has insisted upon that side of the Pauline doctrine which the Apostle has in common with the apocalyptic Judaism of his time. Even to-day, there is much more discussion in the Church over the supremely unimportant question whether the body of Jesus left the grave alive, than over the means of attaining to that quality of character which makes the question of resurrection and continuance insignificant. The teaching of the Church should be that men may believe as their own judgment dictates about the question of personal immortality, but that they ought to rise above the desire for it. If it is to be, our concern should be to be worthy of it; but if not, our concern is the same. The last conversation of Socrates with his friends closes with the great myth of the Underworld, in which the ethical intuitions are reduced to pictorial form. At death, the genius of each soul carries it to its appropriate place in the heart of the earth, where it is judged according to its deeds. The indifferent characters are carried from the river Acheron to the Acherusian lake, there to 1 Matt. xxv, 31 ff. dwell in purgatorial penance until they deserve absolution from their sins. Afterwards they obtain the reward of their good deeds: But those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes-who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like such are hurled into Tartarus, which is their suitable destiny; and they never come out.1 Lesser criminals are plunged for a year in the Tartarean flames, after which they too pass to the purgatorial lake, there to remain "until they obtain mercy from those whom they have wronged: for that is the sentence inflicted on them by their judges." Those who have lived holy lives, and have duly purified themselves with "philosophy," "live henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer far than these, which may not be described." The fact that the two highest systems of ethics thus far evolved-the Platonic and the Christian-have both taught a doctrine of eternal punishment, is exceedingly interesting. Neither teaches, indeed, the barbaric doctrine of Tertullian, Augustine, and the other perverters who degraded Christianity into mediaeval Catholicism. Neither attaches this tremendous penalty to error of belief or to the misfortune of not having heard some true doctrine or experienced some magical sacrament which could have averted it. Both insist that only unrighteous deeds, and nothing else, can incur the dire judgment. Yet, even so, the myth remains shocking to us, until we divine the truth which it is meant to express. This is the deep sense which the greatest seers-Plato and Jesus— 1 Phaedo, § 113, ad fin. had of the qualitative degradation of the soul through evil deeds. Those who go into Tartarus for ever are the incurable. They are not sent thither by the arbitrary fiat of any judge. Through their own acts they have become incapable of any other destiny. If the good that man can attain in this life is an eternal one, then we may surely say (in myth) that the necessary consequence of its deliberate forfeiture is also eternal. The wilful loss of any opportunity for spiritual self-realization is an "eternal punishment." The doctrine is in this sense true, even though there be no life after death. Plato ends as he began—not with metaphysical speculations, but with the ethical application of the whole argument: Wherefore I say, let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth. In these arrayed, she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes.1 This is the thing that is more important than immortality. The yearning for that is commonly (though not necessarily, and not always) a disguised desire to escape death. But, in the words of the Apology, "the difficulty is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness." To him who cares only for that, the personal interest of the question of life after death is destroyed. The strongest inducement offered in the Phaedo to 1 Sections 114-15. belief in immortality is not any of its arguments, but the character of Socrates himself. He is so transcendently great in the hour of his freely chosen doom that he creates (as Jowett has said) "in the mind of the reader an impression stronger than could be derived from arguments that such a one, in his own language, has in him ‘a principle which does not admit of death."" It is hard to resist the feeling that the final destruction of such a personality would represent a sort of suicide of the universethrough the destruction of its noblest possible manifestation. We fall back, accordingly, on the intuition that if Socrates is not immortal, he is something better than immortal: he is eternal. His spirit lived again in Plato and Aristotle, and in lesser degree in all whom they have inspired. In the measure in which it lives in us, we shall rise with him above the fear of death and the craving for endless life, into the fairer mansion that is eternally open to the soul which is adorned in its own proper jewels. Yet to the end we must be content to wait and wonder whether the personal self-consciousness that was in him, and that which is in us, retains its selfhood and continues to live and act after this scene closes. The patient Sphinx disdains our questioning: We ask and ask: thou smilest, and art still, CHAPTER VIII RELIGION AND NATIONALITY RELIGION is an inexpugnable fact of human life. At times it seems to sway with resistless power the consciousness of individuals and the destinies of States and empires; at other times, again, its hold on men and polities seems almost ended. The strife of new philosophies, the emergence of convictions based on changing knowledge as to the make of the world, the ambitions of kings and "fierce democracies," the shifting of human attention from the gods to the economic forces that condition daily life-all these things by turns drive religion from the foreground of the collective consciousness; and at first glance this repression seems identical with extinction. It is not so in truth, however. The forces of religion are but driven underground, whence they again emerge for another time, if not within the life-span of the generation that has banished them-in new outbreaks of destroying and creating activity. We live in such a period of the seeming extinction of religion to-day. Here, as in every European country, except perhaps Spain and Russia, other interests are usurping its old-time supremacy. The collective minds of nations are given up to secular concerns. In nation after nation Churches are being disestablished. New commonwealths are arising which omit the name of God from their constitutions, and which exclude themselvesas this country did from the first-from the right and |