A new basis of belief in immortality / by John S. Farmer.

  • Farmer, John S.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new basis of belief in immortality / by John S. Farmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/132 (page 17)
    Of all forms of religious belief at present current in the world, Christianity undoubtedly enunciates this belief in the immortality of the race the most distinctly and emphatically. Those holding this belief claim its advent as the commencement of a new era in the history and destiny of the human world. Not, they say, that a future life was wholly unknown before Christ, Jout because he so practically demonstrated its reality by His teaching and miracles, sealing His testimony by a personal confirmation, that to all intents and purposes it was a new discovery. Thus, while admitting that glimpses of light had occasionally pierced the veil of the unknown—waifs and portents of a clime somewhere beyond in the realm of space—this school of thought considers such experiences to have been exceptional, confined to a few, and far from satisfactory, leaving the future more or less a vague hope. Conceding the reality and genuineness of the Christian evidences (which many in the light of present experiences can readily do), Jesus of Nazareth was the first (at least as far as western nations are con- cerned) to universalise the glad and welcome truth of the duality and continuity of life. His whole career was open evidence of the power of the life that lies beyond the body, and by His death and reappear- ance, an indestructible spiritual man, the veil of the future was raised, proving the dreams and aspirations of the race to be eternal verities. The first stage of man’s redemption would thus be gained in the absolute consciousness of new and larger developments of being. Through the vista of time he saw his tears transmuted into smiles, his pain to joy, the din of Vattle into the victor’s triumph, and the the Homan, the Egyptian, the Persian, the Indian, and the Arabian. It glows in the Zendavesta; it stands mountains high in the Vedas; Buddha lives in it in divine reverie; Brahma proclaims it in his Avataras; it is the very life-blood of the Scandi- navian Eddas. There All giiC(;«0(la to the will. Because the Ocireljor Now have descended Tu the old, holy earth. “If we go into nations that never had a literature, this eternal truth is walking there in all its strength. Tlio American Indians—North and South—had it ages before the white man arrived. The Red Men felt the inspirations of the (jreat Spirit in their forests, and snoko as inspired hy it at their councils. They declared that tho angels of tho Great Spirit walked as friends among their ancestors, Tho Mexicans prophesied of a people coming in a ship from the East to take from them their long- possessed sovereignty. Tho Australian natives refuse to go out at night because thcif, they think, the powers of darkness are in the ascendant. The Obi of the Africans speaks tho same language. The conviction of tho permanent continuity of the spiritual presses on tho earth-walls of humanity wherever spirit lives. ‘‘ Passing from the Bible to the book containing tho llnest writings next to the Bible, the Apocrypha, wo And tho same principle taking its easy, natural stand, as a perpetual ageut in human history. Jo.sci)hus takes it up wiih tho same soberas- surance as he takes up his pen. Wo have the miraculous deeds of the Maccabees; we nave the grand apparition of tho ilory horse, and the horseman, and tho radiant youths who punished the intrusion of Heliodorus into tho Tcmido of Jernsalem, We havo the inspired harbinger of woo and tho dread apparitions and prodigies of the siege of the great city, Tho fathers of the Church received the miraculous as part of their Gospel heritage. The Christian Church, Roman, Grecian, and Waldonsian, never for a moiAent doubted tho supethuman demonstrations of their religion. Every page of their several histories is freighted with tho miraculous.”—lKi//iam IlowiU in UUtof'y o/tiie HupematuraL