THE BREAKING OF DREAMS My soul was sick with grief when from on high With words of love that I can ne'er repeat, Then silent, waited, as for some reply. Grief sealed my lips; then spake the voice to me : See how yon star out of the darkness gleams! Yea, all the blessed Dead bright vigil keep, For yonder comes the breaking of earth's dreams." R. E. H. WE IV. The Breaking of Dreams E may look at death from several points of view. Let us take two. First, there is death as a physical fact-the final result of the general impairing of the mechanism of the body as it passes from the vigour of life to the decay of old age, or else the more or less sudden failure of some vital function of the body brought about by decay or accident. Be the remote cause of death what it may, the proximate cause in every case is said to be the stoppage of the circulation of the blood, putting an end to the exchange of matter and energy which are the characteristic accompaniments of life. If man has no soul in the theological sense of the word-death is the end of man. His body goes to corruption, and with the body his mind also perishes. The world may continue to cherish his memory for a time, and his works may still influence society, but the man himself has perished. In all ages many have thus thought of death, and nowhere perhaps is this sad creed more beautifully portrayed than in the words of the deutero-canonical book entitled "The Wisdom of Solomon." "We are born at all adventure: and we shall be hereafter as though we had never been: for the breath in our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our heart: which being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish as the soft air, and our name shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall have our works in remembrance, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist that is driven away with the beams of the sun, and overcome with the heat thereof. For our time is a very shadow that passeth away; and after our end there is no returning for it is fast sealed, so that no man cometh again." This, we are told, said the ungodly "reasoning with themselves, but not aright.”1 It is quite unnecessary to prove that this is not the way in which the holy Scriptures, taken as a whole, would have us look at death. Throughout the Bible there is scattered everywhere the teaching that death is not the end of our life, but the gate by which we leave one form of life and enter upon another. If it is the dark valley over which the shadow hovers, it is, after all, only the valley through which the soul must pass in order to reach the eternal hills on whose heights the sunlight ever rests. The question we have now to consider is whether the moral condition of the soul is altered by the death of the body. Does death change not merely the environment of the soul but also its moral condition? Does 1 Wisdom ii. 2-5. the next life grow out of this life and continue it, or, is death a transformation of the soul in such wise that at its entry into the new mode of life the moral condition of the soul is at once entirely changed? In trying to answer this question we may first of all look at death as it is in itself—a merely physical fact. From this point of view there seems no reason at all why death should alter the moral condition of the soul. All that death appears to do is to separate the soul from the body. The character, the active and passive habits, intellectual and moral, that have been formed during the soul's life of union with the body, can hardly be altered by the death of the body. If they are not altered, then the life after death must be a continuation, a development of the life begun here on earth, and the determination of the direction of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth must be the purpose of our present state of existence. As far as can be seen by the light of reason there is nothing in the death of the body that would tend to alter the habits and moral state of the soul. The tendency of intellectual and moral habits is to develop and become more and more deeply rooted. The illtempered man who never checks himself becomes unbearably disagreeable; his natural irritability develops into habitual anger and even violence; and-given time -may result in a maniacal self-destroying frenzy. The intemperate man becomes more and more sensual, until body and soul seem to sink together into an unfathomable depth of degradation. The slothful, the irreverent, the proud, the unmerciful, the ungrateful, and the selfish are all tending towards a moral state that becomes their character. An impulse continually yielded to becomes a habit, and habits are not usually altered in a moment. It is true that the choice of another line of conduct is always potentially within reach, but experience teaches how seldom it is that a long-continued habit is speedily eradicated. Can we reasonably suppose that death can mechanically, as it were, alter the whole drift of the soul's life? Is it not more reasonable to suppose that what a man was before death, that he is immediately afterwards, and that the future life is a continuation of the soul's existence under new conditions? The same, of course, holds good as to those who during life have tended towards righteousness, or rather who have not consciously chosen unrighteousness. They will also be the same after death as before.1 This, however, is only one aspect of death. There is another which is more hopeful. Granted that death itself cannot alter the intellectual and moral attitude of the soul, may not some change be effected by the new conditions of life to which death introduces the soul? If the environment of the soul after death were the same as during life the argument against death affecting the soul would be very strong. But what is the case? For the first time in its experience the soul, 1 Rev. xxii. II. |