A Churchman’s Thought about Death.
By Editor
[The following extracts we copy from an article in the Independent. Its author was, of course, a firm believer in the immortality of the soul. But his views of death are different from those of most of his belief, and more scriptural than those of any writer whom we remember to have read, who believed in the separate existence of spirits. The modern portraiture of death as a friend, as “the gate to endless joy,” as “the voice that Jesus sends, to call us to his arms,” is as unscriptural as can be; for the Scriptures always treat death as an evil, as an enemy, as the result and fruit of sin. “They that hate Me love death.” These are the words of “wisdom.” Life—blessed thought of life! the Life-giver will soon come and destroy “the last enemy, death;” and redeem his people from the bondage of corruption. Oh! what a glorious hope! Review.] We often “wish we were dead:” sometimes in haste; sometimes in disgust at a passing worry; sometimes, no doubt, with a devout aspiration, wishing “to depart and to be with Christ.” If we oftener considered what it must be to be dead, we might be less hasty, more reconciled to the trials of life, and more devout in our aspirations. The Church makes Good Friday a great fast, because then Christ died; and Easter Even a great vigil, because then Christ was dead; and Easter a great feast, because then Christ rose again from the dead. Our mortal life is a common day—neither feast nor fast—unless we choose. Our death is our fast-day. Our vigil is kept in the place of departed spirits, and our resurrection is our first taste of the consummation of joy and felicity. Everything that has been ours before of spiritual enjoyment was a foretaste, an earnest, not wholly imaginary, but not wholly real, not full, not satisfying. In itself, death is simply horrible. Nobody who conceives of it aright can possibly be enamored of the thing itself. There is some physical and psychological truth in the modern theory that all suicides are insane—a theory which does not take away the guilt of suicide, unless it can be shown that the insanity was the visitation of God and not the fault of the man, as it is no excuse for murder to plead drunkenness unless it can be shown that the drunkenness was involuntary, that the man was drugged. . . A great many people have a general idea that when they are dead they will have relief from all their old troubles, and exemption from all new ones. Perhaps they will, for no man knows what it is to be dead except dead men. But I cannot think so of death. If this be so, it is more blessed to die than to live. Death is no natural evil, and our natural love of life is a hallucination. We might still decline to commit suicide for moral and religious reasons, but we might take any honest chance of dying that offered. We might contend for the privilege of nursing small-pox patients, or court death in any philanthropic cause, and be not foolish, but wise, in doing it. But when an unaccustomed ache in my body stirs up an apprehension in my soul, and when, nevertheless, I do not at once run to a physician nor settle my estate because my sober judgment and experience bid me wait and see if there be need, I know that I am not hypochondriacal, and yet I know that I have had a warning of an evil that must befall me sooner or later. One third of me never can desire to die. My body and its physical instincts, so far as animal consciousness goes, must revolt against dying and must struggle against it to the last gasp. Organized matter cannot desire disorganization, if it can desire anything. As an animal, nothing can tempt me to die. I must be forced into dying or trapped into dying. My animal nature may submit to death from exhaustion or in obedience to a master, whoever has mastered it; but, if it had its freedom of choice, it would live. And another third of me, my intellectual nature, is unwilling to die. I may be impatient of the clog and burden of this flesh, as impeding my intellectual progress. I may be sleepy when I desire to study, or my vital force may be engaged and preoccupied—in digesting food or exercising muscles. I may lose time which I grudge from study, in the mere act of locomotion necessary to bring me to the object of my study. But I know that if I cheat nature of her dues, I shall have to repay her, by an enforced rest or by an untimely death. And when I am thus brought face to face with the question whether it be not better to die and get rid of this flesh, that my mind may have everything its own way, there is no intellectual algebra that can determine for me the value of that unknown quantity, “the state of being dead,” as an intellectual advantage, and no pharmacy that can assure me of the medical use of dying as a specific for intellectual ills. I must be a great enthusiast in intellectual experimentation before I experiment on myself with drugs of unknown power; and I can hardly claim to be scientific if I take my premises for granted and then die to prove my theory! I prefer to stay in the body and know what I can do, be it little or much, rather than to go out of the body; to find myself in fact what a German transcendentalist affects, and to have no resource but to evolve truth out of my own inner consciousness. And I am sure that my immortal spirit has a natural horror and loathing of death. And, if you tell me that that is because I am a sinner, I say, No!—at least, not entirely; for Christ had and showed the same feeling, and he knew no sin. Indeed, it is because I am spiritually enfeebled and brutalized by sinning that I can suffer as little as I do in view of death. If I had Christ’s sinlessness, I should suffer Christ’s agony and bloody sweat at the thought of dying. (I mean all of it that was of human origin. There was a divine element in that sacred mystery that was Christ’s only.) That righteous man dreaded death with an intensity of human dread that no sinner is sensitive enough to feel. Body, mind, and spirit naturally, instinctively, and rationally, yea, religiously hate and abhor death and shrink from it. “All that a man hath will he give for his life.” Intelligently to “wish we were dead” is unnatural and monstrous; or it is the crown of our religiousness that we can desire to depart and to be with Christ, even though we must depart by death. The state of being dead is nothing to be coveted or foolishly bespoken for ourselves. These wonderfully made bodies will be dishonored and defiled and slowly resolve into earth. Having been organic since Adam, who was the only “son of the soil,” it is a terrible humiliation that befalls every scion of this aristocracy of matter when its rank, hereditary for 6,000 years, is disfranchised by the tyrant Death, and itself becomes the sport of worms and of creatures which it “would have disdained to have set with the dogs of its flock.” If there be any such thing as “animal consciousness”—“the spirit of the beast, which goeth downward”—appertaining to organized matter, that consciousness must suffer keen disgrace and shame in the state of being dead unless it be true that our physical part is also capable of religion after its sort. . . . . . . . . —Rev. John Vaughan Lewis.