(1877.)
dr. tulloch has the sense to perceive and the candor to acknowledge that even to those who have not any faith in god or immortality, death need not be terrible, and often is not; that they may be resigned or peaceful, and meet the inevitable with a calm front; that they may be even glad to be done with the struggle of existence. of course this is no news to us who have stood at the bedside of dying materialists and atheists, or are familiar with trustworthy well-authenticated accounts of the last hours of such persons. still it is encouraging to find a distinguished and influential minister openly recognising the facts, instead of distorting them with the old contemptible pious fictions, again and again repeated after being again and again refuted. but dr. tulloch considers that only the light of the higher life in christ can glorify death. it would have been well had he been more specific as to this higher life and the glory it casts on death. if they are as described at length in the only authoritative christian scripture on the subject, the book of revelation, it seems to me that the life is anything but high, and radiates anything but glory. however, tastes differ, and man is a queer fellow; and there may actually exist many people who would prefer to annihilation a sort of everlasting moody and sankey meeting, and would even regard this as celestial beatitude. concerning such i will only say with goethe, i hope i shan’t go to heaven with that lot! yet these are not quite the lowest of the low in our civilised christendom; or are there not many who look forward with complacency and even enthusiasm to a life beyond death, wherein they shall be largely employed in rapping tables, jogging arms and scrawling illiterate nonsense? dr. tulloch, in quoting st. paul, seems to forget that he was writing of himself and his fellow christians, to whom his words were thoroughly applicable; not of mankind in general, to whom they were not, and by the construction of the sentence could not be. “if in this life only we have hope in christ, we are of all men the most miserable;” we, the christians. and why would they be of all men the most miserable? clearly because, in obedience to the injunctions of their master, they had cut themselves off from this world that they might secure the next; had renounced wealth, honor, society, enjoyment, all interest in art, science, literature, all political and national aspirations, and had courted obloquy and persecution; so that if the next life should turn out to be a mockery, a delusion and a snare, they were of all men the most miserable, being the most miserably deluded. those poor simple early christians (on the showing, true or false, of the books all christians revere as sacred and divine), having only jesus and his apostles to instruct them, had not reached that lofty mercantile wisdom which made the late mr. binney one of the most popular preachers in our pious and mercantile country, when he solved the problem of how to make the best of both worlds. of other-worldliness they indeed had enough and to spare; but they lacked the large modern grasp which combines and intermingles it with an equal measure of this worldliness. “they didn’t know everything down in judee;” and st. paul, though fairly intelligent and cultivated for his benighted time, was in a deplorable need of some lessons from weigh-house chapel.
when the worthy principal says that men cannot find strength or comfort in what has been called the religion of humanity, and that they crave a personal life, is he aware that he has descended from the highlands of morality and truth to the lowest lowlands of paley and binney expediency? is he aware that he is moreover begging the question, making the monstrous assumption that men must get what they crave? i call this the childish lollipop attraction of religion, so absurd as to be really beneath the contempt of full-grown men and women. just as young ones would look forward to having the free range as long as they liked (which they would interpret for ever and ever) of shops full of sweeties, so those big babies, our dear simple christian brethren, look forward to their lubberland of eternal bliss, in singing glory! glory! glory! their claim to it is purely the infant’s, because they would like it. their mouths water, they lick their lips, they gurgle luxuriously with the foretaste: “oh, we shall be so ’ap-’ap-’appy! canaan is a happy place; we’ll go to the land of canaan!” and usually these beatific adult babies are creatures such as an intelligent man would be ashamed to bring into the world, much more a god. you can’t endure an hour of their society here, and they pester you to come and spend eternity with them! i am really sorry to find dr. tulloch in such company.
in conclusion, i ask the reader to note especially the preacher’s avowal that his faith in personal immortality has no warrant from nature, no warrant from science; nay, more, that the suggestions of scientific analysis “mockingly sift the sources of life only to hint our mortality.” there is indeed no temper of mockery in science, but its soberest deductions may well seem to mock with a terrible derision the inordinate greed and self-conceit of men, who, because they profess an unscientific and unnatural faith, have lost all sense of proportion between their infinitesimal selves and the infinite universe.
