New Orleans Republican., 1875-01-24
Life and Work in Another World.


Involves and the Divine Purpose in It."
The drift of the discourse may be gathered
from the following summary:
The physical aud moral evils involved in
the worlds growth came down directly into
the lineage Of mankind. These roots
stretched through all the strata and grew
up into the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, of which if man eat he draws
smiles and tears with the object OF fostering
only the best life; nature invented the pro-
cess OF death. The strongest and not the
weakest are petted by her relentless forces,
so that her motto might have been, In the
midst of lite am in death" There was no
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty 10
Animals in prehistoric times, and nature
preserves the same Indifferent temper. The
deerepid and sick among animals are left to
die or TO be killed and eaten, and the
procuring of food depends on continual
stratagem, and death swallows all.at last,
and NATURES motions exist on the digest-
bility of her creatures. Development NAV
be called continuity of mutual swallow
ing Your Heavenly Father teedeth them
upon each other many animals can exercise
a touching patience under pain, and man,
the highest, with his capacity for turning
griets 10 the advantage of mis- soul, has in
vented tragedy TO tell and set them forth.
We sorrow not as men without hone. We
know that Hamlet has reached a land
that undiscovered country-where his vir-
tues serve him better, and as we go home
from the play we feel as if We had followed
him. We are lifted and better equipped TO
bear
The whips aud scorDs of time
The oppressors wrong, the proud name con.
tumely.
Thepangs of disprized love the laws delay,
The insOlence Of Office and the spuru
That patient merit Of the unworthy takes.
Heaven helps US. Heaven that is power.
less to prevent fate from rushing, with
bloody sword in hand, into our seat Of life.
Heaven that wouldn't lit a finger 70 abate
the wild night in Lear
heavens
II Won do love old men, IL your sweet sway
Allow obedience il you yourselves are old,
Make 1t your cause; send dewn and take my part.
No answer. Not word. Bleak, pitiless
silence. But the thunder clears our at
mosphere. We enjoy such nights as these
that pity neither wise men nor fools. Ma
ture does not drift toward pity. Her wealth
er is the bath that tempers the steel. Like
as father pitleth his children so the
LORD; for ''he knoweth our frame, he re-
membereth that we are dust" Is there any
sOlace in attributing an abstract pity to
Overrulirg power, which does not give 10
men any concrete applications of it! When
the pinch comes man finds that the'tender
text bellies its pretensiOns. Love of life
and surety of death; functions invented TO
suffer and be- extinguished; no process,
accident, or circumstance ever held at bay
by any Difference for the wishes of the per
son interested; each cause with its due
consequence; the potato bug destroys a
peoples Jod and nothing interferes to
help. Men and women are held as cheap
for rotting as the foed before them Is
there in any region of this universe any
invisible pityl Held dumb there in the
bosom of some immutable powerl Sympa-
thy is mans own discovery. Yet mans
suffering as a victim is larger than his
efforts to neutralize the effects of famine,
plague and storm. A thousand years are
as year to nature, but, unfortunately, not
to man. An intelligent creator must have
fOreseen that the survival of the fttest
depended on the demise of the unfit; that
the Increasing circumstances of misery
must at last pass into the structure of man.
kind and operate to produce treacheries,
riv8lTies, wars. The first struggle was for
food. Leave the stomach empty too long
even BOW, and virtue, hand in hand
with amusement, vanIshes. 1t was not
the fall of man, but the rise of man
that brought sin into the world. The
weakness of the race was killed out, is
killed out or reduced by the death OF the
weak. 1t is all to the end Of the develop
ment of an immortal personality. o. A IA
nous German naturalist avows that he is
immensely troubled at the possibility of a
future existence, and Buddha saw no other
way to eXtinguish evil and taught his fol
lowers to long for "nirvana," either non
existence or loss of personality. His alter
native was, a bad world or none al all.
Ours is, the development of immortal per-
soAality by collision with bad worlds or a
sneaking into the suicide of nonentisy: We
prefer to stay IN existence and take chances,
considering that deity has been taking the
chances eternally, Shall mortal man be
| more exempt than God You can't con-
ceive of universe absolutely good.
If deity had shruhk from the act OF
creation, anticipating the development of
| evil, he would have declined the glory OF
| goodness Theology has invented desperate
/ schemes to relieve him of the creation of
evil, even going so far as to invent devil
| without saying who created him. Man
created with liability to do evil, evil is an
eternal consequence of the act of creation.
How can we avoid seeing it If evil is in
| the matter created 1t must have been In the
| deity, from whom the mater was evolved.
But there can be no duAlism or elemental
| strife in a creator. How many acts, bepefi
cial in themselves, become disastrous by
1 their circumstances. But the creative mind
/ knows not the word disaster. It is invented
| by those who, in search of greatest happi.
nees, come across the greatest woes. Look
at nature'e pOis0ns. Can an infinite father
deal in pOisonsl That's theological
1
man. We are not responsible for the fact,
and our disasters do the universe no harm;
it fattens on them, and is poisOn-pnoOf
The coats of your stomach may be honey.
oombed with acid, and it wont impair the
divine digestion. Our soul can never be-
come the infinite one who includes and re-
eOnciles the antitheses of good and evil
You and lit is past praying t0r-are finite
| II for sixty years or more we maintain a
soul on this limitation, how can it ever be
otherwise, save on the conception of mir
vanai In sixty years-that atom Of eter
nity-we can't originate q heaven and q
| hell. To do either would battle finite capao
ity forever. Theology may wish or ima 9nt
it otherwise. But there Is no real advant
age in human astenpt to whitewash the
Great First Cause. Ii leads 10 mentai
bewilderment and ever has the weakness
Of being contradicted by the facts, DEATH
can not change the sOups character
Its power is strictly limited to the
material atoms OF the body. Good and evi
will be mingled there az here. Imagining
limbo Of confinement and torture fol
criminals IN the next world is a cheap effor
Of fancy. So are the sheep and the goats
II no line can be-drHwn here 10 can't else
where and II any man has enough in hin
20 survive death be must come into contact
with bis follows as before. Not till aftel
death shall we see anything deserving to bi
called the solidarity Of mankind. Popular
visions Of the New Jerusalem have beeE
chiefly qnaFried out Of tho Book Of Revela
tiOns. The SpiFitualists have something o