e clay has no right to say to the
Potter, "Wherefore hast Thou fashioned me thus?" or "Why am I a man, and
not a beast?" But as regards the Creator's dealings with the human race,
inscrutable as His designs are to mortal intelligence, the moral nature
of man demands certain conditions in the conditions of his Maker, higher
and better than his own; and the idea of a partial immortality seems to
me repugnant to the highest human conception (and we have none other) of
God's mercy and justice, and that simply because all men, no matter how
little advanced in the scale, appear to have some notion of _a_ Divinity
and a Deity of some sort, to possess a _germ_ of spiritual progress
capable of development beyond the term and opportunities afforded by
this existence; and if, as I believe, the progressive nature belong to
all, then it seems to me a moral inconsistency to allow its
accomplishment only to a few. If you say that whole nations and races
formerly and now, and innumerable individuals in our own Christian
communities, hardly achieve a single step in this onward career of moral
development, I should reply that the progress of the most advanced is
but comparative, and far from great, and that chiefly on this account
the belief in a future existence appears rational, indeed the only
rational mode of accounting for our achieving so much and so little--our
advancing so far and no further here. The boon of mere physical
existence is great, but if there were none greater, we should not surely
possess faculties which suggest that to make some of His moral and
rational children immortal, and others not, was not in accordance with
the perfect goodness and justice of our Father. This life, good as He
pronounced it to be, and as it surely is, would not be worth enjoying
but for those nobler faculties that reach beyond it, and even here lay
hold of the infinite conception of another after death. To have given
these capabilities partially, or rather their fulfilment unequally,
seems to me a discord in the divine harmony of that supreme Government,
the inscrutability of which does not prevent one seeing and believing,
beyond sight, that it is perfectly _good_. To have bestowed the idea of
immortality upon some and not others of his children, seems to me
impossible in our Father; and since (no matter how faint in degree or
unworthy in kind) this idea appears to be recognized as universal among
men, the fulfilment of it only to some favore