The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future LifeAlger, William Rounseville
Religion
The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
Alger, William Rounseville
Future life -- Christianity -- Bibliography; Future life -- Christianity -- History of doctrines
Not by an intellectual doctrine, but by an instinctive
association, when not resisted and corrected, we connect the souls
of the dead in our thoughts with the burial places of their forms.
The New Zealand priests pretend by their spells to bring wandering
souls within the enclosed graveyards.33 These sepulchral folds are
full of ghosts. A sentiment native to the human breast draws
pilgrims to the tombs of Shakspeare and Washington, and, if not
restrained and guided by cultivated thought, would lead them to
make offerings there. Until the death of Louis XV., the kings of
France lay in state and were served as in life for forty days
after they died.34 It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring any
doctrinal significance from these customs. The same sentiment
which, in one form, among the Alfoer inhabitants of the Arru
Islands, when a man dies, leads his relatives to assemble and
destroy whatever he has left, which, in another form, causes the
Papist to offer burning candles, wreaths, and crosses, and to
recite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, in
still another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the pretty
playthings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, this
same sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelled
the Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter his
brave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw to
hang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave post. What
should we think if we could foresee that, a thousand years hence,
when the present doctrines and customs of France and America are
forgotten, some antiquary, seeking the reason why the mourners in
Pere la Chaise and Mount Auburn laid clusters of flowers on the
graves of their lamented ones, should deliberately conclude that
it was believed the souls remained in the bodies in the tomb and
enjoyed the perfume of the flowers? An American traveller, writing
from Vienna on All Saints' Day, in 1855, describes the avenues of
the great cemetery filled with people hanging festoons of flowers
on the tombstones, and placing burning candles of wax on the
graves, and kneeling in devotion; it being their childish belief,
he says, that their prayers on this day have efficacy to release
their deceased relatives from purgatory, and that the dim taper
flickering on the sod lights the unbound soul to its heavenly
home. Of course these rites are not literal expressions of literal
beliefs, but are
31 Andree, North America, p. 246.
32 Republic, book v. ch. 15.
33 R. Taylor, New Zealand, ch. 7.
34 Meiners, Kritische Geschichte der Religionen, buch iii. absch.
1.
symbols of ideas, emblems of sentiments, figurative and inadequate
shadows of a theological doctrine, although, as is well known,
there is, among the most ignorant persons, scarcely any
deliberately apprehended distinction between image and entity,
material representation and spiritual verity.
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