Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Dr. Leslie
Weatherhead's
- Why Do Men
Suffer?
-
- Is Death a
Calamity?
AT Manchester I had the privilege of meeting an exceptionally brilliant
man with whom I had a conversation that lasted far into the night. The question that was
on his mind could be stated like this: "How do you know that the soul goes on; and
even if it does, why are we subjected to this terrifying experience of dying?"
A book which seeks to give help with the problem of suffering ought to
have a chapter on what have been called "the pains of death." For it is true to
say that he who has not contemplated the problem of death has never contemplated life
deeply. A working-class woman told a friend that she had listened to a youth of nineteen
criticizing the present world-order and religious situation.
This was wrong, and that was wrong. She silenced him with the following
surprising and seemingly irrelevant remark: "Young man, you will think differently on
many matters when you have stood by a deathbed." This was not a mere damping of
youthful ardor, but a very wise remark, for the fact of death is one of the hardest facts
of life and must be faced by any person who would make his view complete.
I therefore want to face now "this business of dying." I hope to write later a
few paragraphs about the vast subject of immortality; but first of all let us recognize
how many people there are who can contemplate entry into another world, with joy, but it
is the thought of the dreadful valley between, which daunts them. Even Bunyan dreaded it
and called it "a horror and a great darkness." I have had the confidence of so
many people who are brave in regard to suffering but terrified at the thought of dying,
that I would like to offer them some good news.
- Let us collect some evidence. Surely, it is a wise
way, in trying to face any particular problem, to collect all the available evidence, and
then, whatever deductions we make, they will be well based.
I give my own testimony first, because it is the least important, and I
want to say, at once, that in my experience as a minister and army chaplain, an experience
covering about twenty years, I must have seen scores of people dying, and I have never
known the actual moment of passing to be marked by any kind of terror or anxiety.
- It has always been a peaceful and beautiful thing.
Scores of doctors and ministers whom I have consulted say the same
thing. Of course, everyone will recognize that in a large number of cases unconsciousness
supervenes before death occurs. But when a person passes out with his conscious life
maintained until the end, the evidence is simply overwhelming that death is a beautiful
experience, though we have for so long been intimidated into an opposite belief.
I have seen people, for instance, who for many weary weeks could not
lift their heads from the pillow, sit up at the moment of death and stretch out their
arms, with a smile of utter rapture on their faces. I have heard people, again and again,
breathe the name of someone who had passed over before them.
- One friend with whom I sat, kept saying, almost under his
breath, "How beautiful it looks through the gates," and he gave one the
impression of a person pressing on to some unbelievably beautiful experience. He spoke
repeatedly of flowers.
My own sister, thought to be dying of pneumonia, told me that she
understood that they did not expect her to live, and she couldn't understand their tears,
for she was wrapped in an incredible sense of well-being, with marvelous music sounding in
her ears. At last she heard someone say, "She's going to get better," and she
felt distinct disappointment at being pulled back from a delightful prospect.
Convalescence, she said afterward, was sheer misery! She told me that she looked at her
loved ones with a kind of incredulous smile, as one who would say, "You may call this
getting better, but it is a very dull experience compared with the one I nearly
entered."
- I do not imply, of course, actual "gates of
heaven" or "music," but impressions which got through to human
consciousness in that form.
I will not occupy too much space with a large number of similar cases,
but I should like to quote two more.
A well-known journalist, Mr. W. C. Edgar, wrote an article in The Spectator (Feb.
11, 1928) called "The Adventure of Dying." He tells how he was advised to have a
very dangerous operation, although at the time, as far as he knew, he was in perfectly
good health. He thus went to the operation in a condition far different from the exhausted
body and mind of many patients. He had a local anesthetic, and as he lay on the table he
said to himself:
"I am going to bring to this occasion the instincts of my craft.
This is a very interesting event, in which I am going to take the leading part. I am about
to enter the famous 'valley of the shadow of death,' and few have returned therefrom to
tell the tale. My wits are all about me, I am not drugged into unconsciousness. I am able
to see and hear and reason clearly, and will be to the end. I am going to make careful
notes of this adventure and afterward set down all its details."
He then goes on to describe the sense of ebbing and flowing life, and
says,
- "I became absolutely convinced, beyond the shadow of
a doubt, that this life element in me was indestructible, and that whatever happened to
the body in which it had heretofore existed, it would survive and henceforth be
imperishable."
Then he makes a more striking statement still. He tells us that his bias
was in favor of going on into the unknown rather than returning to natural life. It was
only the remembrance of his family and friends, and loyalty to the efforts of the surgeon,
that made him exert himself in a powerful wish to live.
His physician afterward told him that his heart had been alarmingly
affected, and that several times he (the physician) thought he was about to go. They both
concluded that the heart action represented first the desire to slip away, and then the
powerful effort to remain living.
He says, "The absolute certainty that death was not the end but
merely a new beginning, was pre-eminent in my mind." He says another thing which will
be of interest to us:
- "Had I lived a blameless moral life, which I had
not, I could not have felt less remorse for the past. There was no regret for lost
opportunities, no reviewing of life's history, no concern whatever for reward or
punishment, only a strong abiding sense of calmness and peace, and that I was in the hands
of an infinitely benign Power which cared for me and would protect me from all that was
ill; a Power whose attributes were goodness and mercy. The whole scheme of life on this
earth, death, and the certain life to come, seemed to have meaning and purpose, to be
harmonious, natural, and, above all, beneficent."
That is a piece of disinterested evidence which is worth a very great
deal. May I add to that another piece of evidence, from a nurse who had charge of a very
difficult, bad-tempered, and irreligious patient, whom we will call Mrs. X. There is not
space here to give the whole story, but I will summarize it.
The patient had given a great deal of trouble, and when she felt the
approach of death, said, very angrily:
- "Why should I have to die? So-and-so does not keep
her house nearly as clean as I do. I have taken care of my husband and little boy and kept
my house clean, why should I die? I call it cruel of God. And I don't want anybody to say
any prayers, and I won't see the vicar, not if he comes ever so much, I won't."
The nurse said: "I did not know what to do. My heart ached for
her." Then the patient died. The nurse writes, "I will not dwell upon the
symptoms of death. They were all present. I closed the eyelids, straightened her hands
across her breast, put the sheets tidy and turned to the open window. I stayed there two
or three minutes. When I returned to the bed I saw a faint quiver in a muscle of the
throat. I told myself that it was nothing, but in another moment there was a tremor of the
lips. Horrified, I put a spoon with some brandy into the mouth of Mrs. X.
- She opened her eyes and said slowly, in a voice I had
never heard before, and solemn beyond description, "I have been dead and I am alive
again." Then she paused and added: "But all my dying's done. I have seen the
angels, two of them by our apple tree, more beautiful than I can tell." The nurse
added, "This was the more amazing because Mrs. X had no belief in angels nor any hope
of a further life at all."
The nurse gave her some medicine, and after she had drunk it she said,
"I am always going to do what they want." When the doctor came in she repeated
the same words and he laughed at her and said she had never been dead. She said to him:
"Don't laugh. It is all true. I have seen the angels and all my dying's done."
The nurse added, "When the spirit really left the body twenty-four hours later, it
was like the gentlest falling asleep of a little child."
Curiously enough, that nurse, afterward, went very near death herself. She said, "I
heard the doctor saying to another nurse, 'Can you still feel the pulse, nurse?' and his
voice sounded far off and of no consequence. Then he spoke louder and asked me to rouse
myself, and I heard my own voice answer, 'No, I don't want to.' I was with my father, who
had been dead some years, and I had seen the face of my dear brother who was drowned when
I was a little girl, but alas! the gates had closed against me and I had to come
back." I want the reader to notice the word "alas."
Nor does the evidence of the specialist conflict with this. The famous specialist, Sir H.
Thompson, says, "I venture to state as a known result of long and careful observation
of the phenomena which occur at the close of life, that a really painful death from
disease is rarely witnessed."
Sir Frederick Treves, at one time the King's physician, says in his
reminiscences, "What is termed the 'agony of death' concerns the watcher by the
bedside rather than the being who is the subject of pity. The last illness may be long,
wearisome, and painful, but the closing moments of it are free from suffering. Where there
appears to be a terrible struggle the subject is unconscious of it... death is the
ordinance of God. Not an untimely death, but death at some time or another is the will of
God. Sometimes it is hastened by human folly, ignorance, or sin; but it differs from
suffering in that many people go through life with little or no physical suffering, but no
one escapes death.
Imagine now, for a moment, the unborn babe within his mother's womb. If he had the power
to contemplate the life into which he was going to enter, would he not be terrified? In
that prenatal life he is warm and cosy and nourished, without effort of his own. What a
terrible, cold, friendless place this world would appear, could he dream of it, and how he
would dread the process of birth!
- Yet how beautifully God has arranged that process, for
when the baby is first conscious of anything his head is pillowed on his mother's breast,
his nourishment is only a few inches away from his mouth, there are arms which hold him
very tightly and there are eyes which smile lovingly into his own. If God guards so
carefully our entry into this world, will he be careless of our entry into another? Will
he not know that we are frightened and timid and lonely, and will he not have taken care
that the experience should be beautiful?
Indeed, I think the other life is so wonderful that we have no faculties
with which to assess or describe it. Can you imagine yourself rushing in from some
glorious sunset and trying to describe it to a man born blind? "It is scarlet and
yellow and gold," you say. But the words have no meaning to him. "Scarlet?"
he says. "What's that?" You could only say it was like the blare of a trumpet;
you could only describe the sense-impression he couldn't receive through one that he
could. Yellow, you might say, is like the smell of a lily and gold is like the feel of
silk. What sort of sunset would he imagine?
- We have no faculties to enter even imaginatively the
wonders of another life. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into
the heart of man the things which God bath prepared for them that love Him."
The analogy reminds me of a similar one used by Doctor Fosdick, and this
links us up with the second part of our question, "How do we know that life goes
on?" Doctor Fosdick imagines twin babes unborn within the mother, gifted with the
power of thought, one a skeptic and the other a believer, and both living without light
and without breathing.
- "The crisis of birth," he says, "tearing
them loose from the matrix on which their existence seems fundamentally to depend would
appear to them like death. As for picturing the world without it would be impossible. The
skeptic babe would say to the believer: 'You want to go on living, and so you think you
will, but that is not scientific. Existence depends on present circumstances and when
those circumstances go, life goes also.' The believing babe would say: 'I believe there is
something afterward. Nature has been at work developing some things that have no meaning
here, and nature is not irrational. We cannot picture the new life, but I am confident
that nature is not so senseless to undertake such a promising process with no end in
view."
So, just as the child within the womb might argue with unimaginable
precocity--that eyes and lips and ears involved seeing and tasting and hearing, so man not
only finds within himself a passionate desire for more and fuller life, but believes he
has powers, latent within him, which can only be expressed in a life wider than this. He
craves a world where justice is done, where righteousness triumphs, where loved ones are
rejoined.
- Unless nature is irrational even his power to dream of an
immortal life is some kind of argument for its probability.
The alternative is that this splendid achievement of nature which we
call man (man who would fiercely deny that he is no greater than any other form of organic
life), can be pushed out of existence by a germ so small that a million can sit on the
head of a pin. The whole rationality of nature is impeached if nature's final consummation
can be utterly annihilated by, say, a fall of coal, or an exploding shell, or a surgeon's
mistake.
But, says the skeptic, what is your answer to the view that when the brain dies we end our
lives completely? This you will remember was the argument of Sir Arthur Keith, who used
the illustration of a candle (though it is very dangerous to argue from analogies), and
said that when the candle is done, the flame goes out and when the body is done (and the
brain is part of the body) the soul is extinguished.
In his book Phantom Walls, Sir Oliver Lodge says: "The
image or illustration is quite a good one; but Sir Arthur did not follow it up as a
physicist would. He limited himself to the material particles of the candle, and to the
perceptible flame, just as an anatomist would. He did not bethink himself of what was
happening in space. The candle was not lighted without an object. Its object was to
illuminate something, that is to say, to emit light. And what is light? Not something in
the candle, but something which emanates from the candle and goes away into space;
something different from matter, though associated with it. The real function of a candle
depends on the properties of space; it is emitting something into space which, if space is
free and empty of matter, will go on forever. Just as we see the light of a distant star
or a nebulous cloud which has been traveling for eight hundred thousand years before it
reaches our eye -- for that is how we see, for instance, the great nebula in Andromeda,
quite visible to the naked eye on a dark night, we see it as it was eight hundred thousand
years ago -- so an observer, with a sufficiently sensitive instrument, could detect the
light of the Armada beacons still. Therefore I say the illustration is a good one; and
suggests, rather than negatives, the immortality of the soul."
I am rather fond of another kind of analogy. I imagine a man who is dumb but who is a very
beautiful violinist. Imagine that he cannot speak in words or even in signs; that he can
only play the violin. His violin is his only means of manifestation to the outer world.
Now, imagine that the violin represents a man's body which includes his brain, and that
the man represents the soul.
- You will then perceive what the old philosopher meant
when he said: "It is not true to say man is a body and has a soul. It is true to say
man is a soul and has a body."
At present we are like the man with the violin. He can only express
himself through it. Apart from things like telepathy, which we will leave out of our
survey for the moment, our body is our only means of manifesting ourselves in the world.
In order to convey a message to other people I must use some part of my body, my fist, or
my voice, or my eyes, and so on.
But supposing, in our illustration, that somebody smashes the man's violin. Why should we
suppose that the man himself is damaged? What is to prevent him finding some other
instrument which he can play? And why should we suppose that when a man's body is smashed
up or his brain injured or destroyed, that he does not go on and find some other means of
manifestation?
The illustration goes further. If a violin is damaged, then it may be
that only squeaks can be drawn from it, but the man remains untouched behind it. So in the
case of our friends who suffer the mental illness we call insanity. They cannot make
contact with us in a normal way, but they themselves are not idiots; it is only that they
have either inherited or developed a damaged violin. A player is distinct from a faulty
instrument.
For the philosophically minded I would say that this is in harmony with the philosophic
theory most widely held at the moment. No philosopher identifies the brain with the
personality. The three common theories are epiphenomenalism, parallelism, and
interactionism. The first thinks of consciousness as an epiphenomenon, something thrown
off by the brain in the course of its activities, but not the purpose of its activities.
The best illustration I know is that of sparks given off by the wheels of an engine as it
chafes the rails. The second theory, parallelism, suggests that every activity of the
brain carries with it a parallel activity in consciousness, and vice versa. But that does
not decide which is cause and which is effect. The third theory, interactionism, is the
one held by most philosophers; that the brain and the mind are certainly linked together
at present; that the two are interlocked in an extraordinary way, but that no one knows
what is the relationship between them.
- Certainly, no thinker would identify mind and brain. When
you say "I," you don't mean your brain any more than you mean your fist.
You use your brain with which to think. As a matter of fact, not a
particle remains today of the brain you had twenty years ago, and yet you would admit that
the things done twenty years ago were done by you, and that if there is either praise or
blame it must be charged up to you.
- If a man, therefore, says "How can I go on when my
brain is finished?" it is interesting to answer, "But you have had a dozen
brains and you are still going on."
The brain may be the instrument of our thinking, and, if you like, even
of our loving, but it is certainly not the source of either. Nobody who has ever seen a
human brain on the dissecting table can really believe that that white pulpy mass, as much
like sweetbread as anything, can, of itself, produce poems and symphonies and all the
glories of art and literature and love.
Pass to another piece of evidence which can be expressed quite simply and briefly. Either
God is a devil or he is good, or he is incapable of managing his universe. In other words,
he is either bad, good, or stupid. I cannot at this point take time to think those three
lines out very carefully or fully. If you are going to say he is evil, there are certain
things that might seem to support your theory. But I cannot myself believe that behind
lovely flowers, and a child's laughter, and a woman's love, and Chopin's music, and
Turner's paintings, and Browning's poetry, and deeds like Oates's, when that very gallant
gentleman went out into the blizzard to die -- is not holiness but a leering obscenity.
I find it equally hard to believe that God is stupid, that he has made a
universe which has run away with him. I agree that when he gave men free will he opened
the door to disharmony in his universe, and many things happen which are not his will and
which, for the moment, he cannot help. But ultimately I believe he is omnipotent, and
those who are tempted to think that he is stupid and defeated had better read one book by
Sir James Jeans and ask themselves whether this universe was made by a fool. The
alternative, then, is love, and I wish to put before the skeptic this picture.
I can remember, as though it were yesterday, standing in a little front parlor of a home
in Leeds. The blinds were drawn down. The dim light shone through them. A broken-hearted
mother and father were standing with me beside the coffin of their little child.
I can remember now how the light between the edge of the blind and the
window frame drew the gold from his curly head as he lay before us with a half-smile upon
his marble face. I believe that behind the shadows there was a pace, infinitely tender and
kind, and a voice that would faire have said to us all: "Suffer it to be so now. It
is part of the burden of the world's ignorance or folly or sin. You shall hold him again
in your arms, and come at last to see that nothing precious is lost."
That is what the three of us believed as we stood there. Do you believe
that behind the shadows there was the leering of a fiend, laughing behind his hand at our
fond delusion? Or do you believe that behind the shadows was the gummy, senseless,
slavering face of some immensely powerful imbecile? The only other alternative is that of
love and power and invincible purpose. The second point in the evidence for immortality,
then, is the nature and character of God.
The third piece of evidence is that of Jesus; not, I think, evidence of his resurrection,
for it is not safe to argue that because something happens to a unique person it will
happen to us; though that great fact does help. Someone, and Someone human, has broken the
barrier between death and life. That is immensely strong supporting evidence, but of
itself not sufficient to prove our survival.
But the evidence of Jesus which helps me most is his own certainty. He
is so certain that he does not attempt to prove. He does what, in his case, is more
convincing. He takes immortality for granted.
I will take only one instance where several could be taken. In the last
dread hour a dying thief hangs on the cross next his own. A dying thief. Not one of the
elect; not one supposed to have qualified for a reward hereafter. And this poor, smitten
wretch cries out to Jesus, hardly knowing what his words mean, "Lord, remember me
when thou comest into thy kingdom."
- Now note the answer of Jesus carefully. "This day
you shall be with me in the world of spirits." There is no argument, "If you are
good and repent, you shall go to heaven." What is much more impressive for our
present purpose is this. Jesus does not say, "I hope so." He says, "You
shall be there."
Now, either Jesus was sure or he was not sure. If he were not sure, he
would have said, "Well, I hope we shall meet again," or, "It is my faith
that we shall pass on to another life:" Either, then, he knew or he was not honest. I
challenge the skeptic with that.
And I imagine the skeptic turns now, and says, "But how did he know?" Forget for
the moment all your theology about the person of Christ, and look at it for one moment
like this: You and I are standing with Turner facing a picture. Turner is criticizing the
picture. To you he says: "Yes, it is a very good picture indeed. There is just that
one tint that is too strong, or there is just that one line that is not true."
And you turn to me and say, "How does he know?" I reply to
you, "Know? Surely, Turner knows what is good in a picture. If not, no one knows. He
is the master. This is his subject."
You and I are standing with Chopin listening while someone plays. When
the music is finished Chopin says to us, "Very good, but the full beauty is not
brought out when it is played so fast, and at one point he played a discord." And you
turn to me and say, "How does he know?" My reply is the same: "Know when
there is a discord--Chopin?"
We stand together with Shakespeare, who is criticizing a sonnet, and as
he puts it down he says: "That is not a sonnet at all. This is wrong and that is
wrong." You say to me, "How does he know?" and I reply, "If he doesn't
know, nobody does." I have only to mention the name "Shakespeare" and you
need no other evidence. The master is speaking on his own subject.
Forget, for the moment, all your theories about the person of Jesus. Is he a great
religious genius or not? I do not ask you to take Shakespeare's opinions on sermons, but I
do on sonnets. I do not ask you to agree with Turner if he speaks on politics, but I do on
paintings. I do not demand that you should agree with Chopin on mushrooms, but I do on
music.
And if you like to prove to me that Jesus Christ made mistakes in his
science or regarding the authorship of a psalm, I shall not turn a hair. A person who
lived in Galilee two thousand years ago and knew all modern science would have been a
monstrosity, not a perfect man. But when he is talking about religion, do you think he had
not got the evidence; do you think he had not contemplated all the possible adventures in
the history of the soul? Had not that amazing mind contemplated all the mysteries of life
and death? Did he know? If he does not know, nobody does.
A perfect man can know God and trust God in any age. But some of us have
thought, and thought, and thought, and are forced to a further conclusion, that the eyes
that on that dreadful day were turned in love and compassion toward the dying thief were
the eyes of God, and that whenever the Master spoke about his own subject, which was
religion, he revealed the eternal truth of God.
He could not tell us much. For we could not understand. We are fools and blind, and what
bit of vision we have is clouded with sin. But he lays a cool hand on fevered spirit and
tortured body and frenzied brain. His quiet eyes hold our agony and silence its outcry. He
whispers that God is love and all is well, and there is in his voice, no false comfort, no
shallow optimism, or easy lie. He himself has tasted death and qualified in the world's
dread school of pain. He cannot tell us much. We could not bear it. But when he says that
the final meaning of life is love, and a love which ultimately wins without the
annihilation of one, without the loss of the free will of one, without the loss of the
intellectual integrity of one, we find ourselves believing him, for truth was the very air
his soul breathed. "Why," he says, "if it were not so, I would have told
you."
- So, my friend, be of good cheer! When the long day
is over, you will walk in the scented dusk down the last valley; and not alone, for he,
the Companion of all men, has pledged his word to be with you.
And at the end of that valley, all hushed and quiet, "By velvet
darkness folded in," you will see, shining through the trees, the lights of home.
- One evening the lamps will be lighted for you in the
House of New Beginnings. And when you draw near to the house, you will hear music and
dancing.
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