is healthy to forget that good men are dead and gone, and to recall them only in the good they have left behind them; that it is natural to dwell on the fact of death only in connection with people whose activity was mischievous, in which case it is a healthy and consoling triumph to remind oneself that "the dog is dead,"—but that while all living force is apt to dwell in imagination on future forms of energy, the wish for a personal life surviving the energy of the body and brain is a morbid and distorted hope, of which wise men will take care to divest themselves as soon as possible. The desire for immortality, says the professor, so far as it is sound at all, is due simply to the abundance of our vital energy which cannot imagine non-existence:—"The martyr cannot think of his own end, because he lives in the truth he has proclaimed; with it and with mankind he grows into greatness, through ever new victories over falsehood and wrong. But there is another way [of excluding the image of death]. Since, when men have died, such orderly, natural, and healthy activity as we have known in them and valued their lives for, has plainly ceased, we may fashion another life for them, not orderly, not natural, not healthy, but monstrous or super-natural, whose cloudy semblance shall be eked out with the dreams of uneasy sleep, or the crazes of a mind diseased. And it is to this that the universal shrinking of men from death, which is called a yearning for immortality, is alleged to bear witness." Clearly in the only sense in which it is of any significance to use the phrase, here is in Professor Clifford's mind no such thing as a natural or healthy dread of annihilation, though he admits, in place thereof, a natural and healthy indisposition to anticipate the end of living and glowing energies. It is the attempt to picture a life different from the present, beyond the present, which to him is essentially hysterical and unhealthy. There is nothing good and true in ourselves which has not its sphere in this present life. What affects to be unsatisfied and out of proportion here, is only the sickly part of us, not the healthy.
It is curious to contrast with this enthusiastically expressed view of personal annihilation as the adequate and natural end of all human energy, the eloquent denunciation of the doctrine of an even partial annihilation which Mr. Baldwin Brown has just delivered in five lectures to his congregation at Brixton,[1] as a doctrine not only untrue to the gospel of Christ, but even insulting to the natural religion of humanity. Professor Clifford will feel it an indignity, we fear, to be compared with any man whose chief occupation it has been and is to preach faith in Christ to mankind; but yet Mr. Baldwin Brown seems to us to have the advantage of Professor Clifford in the simplicity and manliness of his eloquence,—besides that, to our minds, he knows very much better the difference between what is genuine and what is hysterical in the heart of man. The special object of Mr. Baldwin Brown's lectures is to confute a school that has lately sprung up, both in the Established Church and out of it, which preaches in one form or another that Christ offered immortality only to those who believed in him and obtained new life in him, and that for all others is reserved the fate of an annihilation which is as much due to the operation of natural laws as is the annihilation of the lower animals. Of course, this new form of doctrine is due in part to the horror felt for the old teaching about eternal punishments, in part also to the impression made on the minds of students of the Bible by a few passages here and there which seem to point to the final extinction of all evil spirits in spiritual death. But Mr. Baldwin Brown rejects the doctrine with a wholesome heartiness. He rejects it partly because it would introduce a doctrine of caste into Christianity, and put the broadest possible gulf between the elect souls with eternal life in them, and the souls in whom no such seed of life had been planted. "In place of a great human family of sorrow, struggle, and aspiration, amidst which, as the brother of the poorest and the saddest, the Saviour moved, they give us a few godlike, lofty forms,—or say that they give us, men complain that they cannot see them,—endowed with a nature that cannot perish, and like unto the angels, moving about as the Brahmins of creation, amidst innumerable creatures who look like them, speak like them, love like them, but are perishing pariahs born from the dust. To me this is simply a horrible picture of the great world of men." And so, no doubt, it would be to Professor Clifford. Both thinkers alike,
- ↑ The Doctrine of Annihilation in the Light of the Gospel of Love. By James Baldwin Brown, B.A. London: Henry S. King and Co.
