sage of Tennyson and the reason for the powerful appeal that the best of his poetry has made to the spiritual sufferers it was designed to help.

By the word "soul" we do not mean a diaphanous, transparent, attenuated form within our physical frame. That notion is indeed a superstition. Yet, as in the case of all other superstitions that live, it has an element of truth in it which keeps it alive. There is within us something nonmaterial, indissoluble, absolute; something by reason of which a sacredness attaches to each human being and the reality of which we ascertain by appeal to experience and, chiefly, the experience of pain, physical and moral pain. We may well shrink from the presumptuousness that would offer an explanation for the terrible sufferings to which hosts of human beings are subjected, but we should lose one of the finest spiritual values of our earthly experience did we fail to derive from pain evidence for the fact that we are spiritual beings in essence, that man is a soul and has a body. Such is the mighty conviction we are empowered to extract from pain. Given the world as it is and the existence of evil an unsolved problem, we are yet blessed in being able to turn pain to such sublime account, making it the re

vealer of a soul, a spiritual self within us that can say to pain: "You can have no power over me save as I supply the weapons."

It is, then, foundations for faith in the survival after death of the soul, the spiritual self, that we are to consider. And the reality of soul is made known through experience of physical and moral evil, of disease and remorse, more, perhaps, than through any other source.

Let us begin by examining a group of three minor foundations, still popular in certain quarters, but perhaps less entitled than any others to keep their hold on modern thought. These three minor bases are: (1) the universality of the belief in a hereafter; (2) the instinctive desire for a future life; (3) intuition, or immediate awareness of immortality.

Our attention will be directed, next, to the Christian basis with its four hundred million and more adherents. Then will follow consideration of a group of three foundations identified with modern occultism: spiritualism, psychical research, and theosophy, and finally (and engrossing our thought to a greater degree than any other), the foundation in moral experience and the practical relation it bears to the ethics of personal life.

FAITH IN A FUTURE LIFE

I

THREE MINOR FOUNDATIONS

We begin our series of studies in foundations for the faith in a future life by examining a group of three which, for convenience, we shall call minor foundations.

1. The alleged universality of the belief in a life beyond death. Man has always looked upon death as a way station rather than as a terminus. Yet his conception of the hereafter has not always been tantamount to personal immortality, i. e., conscious, active, joyous existence. Consequently we cannot support the faith in such a future on the basis of its universality. The truth is that this conception of the hereafter is not and never was universal. Read the Old Testament with reference to this subject and see how persistently the Hebrew held to the belief in Sheol, that "land of thick darkness, without any order and where the

light is as darkness.'' 1 Thither the souls of all the dead, good and bad alike, departed and there, in a colorless, shadowy, ghostlike, purposeless existence, they passed their days, a state that could not be characterized as "life, so void was it of all that the heart of man desires. Certain passages in the Hebrew Bible there are, which seem to suggest personal immortality, but on closer study it is found that these refer only to the present life. With the single exception of a passage in the book of Daniel, a very late book, written about 165 B.C., the prevailing view of the hereafter is negative and gloomy. And all the more remarkable is the absence in the Old Testament of any faith in conscious, joyous, active life beyond death, when we recall the contact of early Hebrew civilization with Egyptian life, dominated as the latter was by a highly developed, fully organized, realistic conception of a life to

come.

3

True, the question may be raised whether, after all, there was any such contact of Hebrew with Egyptian civilization in pre-monarch

1 Job 10: 20.

2 Daniel 12: 2.

3 See the quotations, confirming this statement, cited in Professor Toy's "Judaism and Christianity," pp. 379 ff.