The Annexation of Heaven

IT has been a favorite generalization of philosophers that superstition has been crowded out of the world by the increase of light in what had been dark places ; that as the ancients peopled the Cimmerian darkness with all manner of shapeless spirits, and these troublesome demons were driven farther and farther away as the known boundaries of the earth expanded, and that as our own ancestors in New England were troubled by devils and witches, the woods being full of them, but were dispossessed of the belief as the Indians were driven away and the woods cut down, so, in general, that the penetration of mysterious corners of the globe has not only rid mankind of one-eyed men, men with their heads under their arms, men with tails, and similar candidates for sideshows, but has freed the imagination from dire shapes that people the air and prefer midnight to noonday. When the last recess of Africa has been explored, when the valleys of the Himalayas have all been traversed, when Australia has been covered with a survey and the arctic and antarctic snows have yielded their last superficial secret, then, it is claimed, the human mind will have known the last footfall of ghost or spectre, and a universal light will have made impossible a lurking place for any superstition.

We are so near this consummation of mundane knowledge that we naturally look for signs of the accompanying spiritual deliverance. Was it in anticipation of their final expulsion that the world was visited, forty years ago or so, by a swarm of spirits, knocking at all doors for admission ? And, having found a welcome, do these visitors show a reluctance to leave the fireside? The stacks in our libraries preserve for the curious the records of human trembling, when men were huddled together in the centre of the world, within the borders of an encircling ocean ; has the place yet been filled which is to contain the record of human curiosity and admiration when Chinese, Japanese, and Corean visitors ceased to draw crowds, but unseen travelers from the undiscovered country were hospitably entertained ?

The question is the rhetorical form into which such speculation naturally falls. We have no mind to go farther than a question just now, or to consider at all that bulk of printed matter which concerns a commerce between the next world and this. Libraries may contain it, but literature knows it not. It is only when books which claim the proportions of art come before us that we stop to read them, and reflect upon their consequence to men and women, or their influence upon literary form and spirit.

When such books come not single spies, but in battalions, we ask what impulse sent them forth to visit us.

Three or four recent books are possibly a vanguard, and one may be taken as in some sort the leader of the file.

A Little Pilgrim ¹ has been long enough before the public to have acted as an incentive to writers disposed to like flight of imagination. It recites, in delicately chosen phraseology, the awakening of a soul after the sleep of death, and the first experience which was met by one who on earth had led a life of service and of heavenly spirit. Mrs. Oliphant, if we may use a name commonly attributed to the author of this little book, has taken the most favorable conditions for picturing the transition of life from this world to the next, and by a supposition of a heavenly life under earthly conditions has made it easier for the imagination to pass to an earthly life under heavenly conditions. What, she seems to ask herself, would be the emotion of a soul, always occupied with the good of others, when it was transferred to a sphere where this unselfish life is the normal and usual order ? The little Pilgrim therefore receives the notice of a change of outward nature with no sense of a shock, but with a tranquillity which springs from a previous adjustment of her spirit to this environment. The sensations corresponding to physical sensations are like the old, except that they are more subtle and refined. Light, sound, touch, fragrance, are still translatable into human speech, but the words used intimate a nicer shade of sense, and, in a single word, are gentler in their manifestation.

“By and by, as she came to full possession of her waking senses, it appeared to her that there was some change in the atmosphere, in the scene. There began to steal into the air about her the soft dawn as of a summer morning, the lovely blueness of the first opening of daylight before the sun. It could not be the light of the moon, which she had seen before she went to bed; and all was so still that it could not be the bustling, wintry day, which comes at that time of the year late, to find the world awake before it. This was different; it was like the summer dawn, a soft suffusion of light, growing every moment. And by and by it occurred to her that she was not in the little room where she had lain down. There were no dim walls or roof; her little pictures were all gone, the curtains at her window. The discovery gave her no uneasiness in that delightful calm. She lay still to think of it all, to wonder, yet undisturbed. It half amused her that these things should be changed, but did not rouse her yet with any shock of alteration. The light grew fuller and fuller round, growing into day, clearing her eyes from the sweet mist of the first waking. Then she raised herself upon her arm. She was not in her room ; she was in no scene she knew. Indeed, it was scarcely a scene at all; nothing but light, so soft and lovely that it soothed and caressed her eyes. She thought all at once of a summer morning when she was a child ; when she had awoke in the deep night which yet was day, early, — so early that the birds were scarcely astir, — and had risen up with a delicious sense of daring and of being all alone in the mystery of the sunrise, in the unawakened world which lay at her feet to be explored, as if she were Eve just entering upon Eden. It was curious how all those childish sensations, long forgotten, came back to her, as she found herself so unexpectedly out of her sleep in the open air and light. In the recollection of that lovely hour, with a smile at herself, so different as she now knew herself to be, she was moved to rise and look a little more closely about her, and see where she was.”

The new experience is tested by the familiar measures, and always the same external likeness is found, but with a deeper interior significance. She finds herself dressed in a robe she does not know, but it falls so pleasantly and softly about her, fulfilling thus all necessary conditions of dress, that she abandons further thought of it; she moves forward, “ walking in a soft rapture over the delicious turf.” She sees people coming and going, but suffers no disturbance from them. She questions about them in her mind, and hears an answer before she has asked a question. They have died, and the word suggests a similar question of herself.

“ Then she said, ’ Perhaps I have died, too,’ with a gentle laugh to herself at the absurdity of the thought.

“ ’ Yes,’ said the other voice, echoing that gentle laugh of hers, ’ you have died, too.’ ”

This word brings the little Pilgrim out of her confusion by the sharp decision of a clear fact; and thus, with a little agitation at the birth of a consciousness within her of another life, she passes into a full and contented possession of the abundance of that life.

The transition thus made, and her heroine fairly within the bounds — or shall we say the limitless expanse? — of another world, Mrs. Oliphant’s task is to resolve for her some of the problems which the new life would naturally suggest. There is no attempt at establishing the physical conditions of being; rather, body, light, air, are assumed, but everything is subordinated to the expansion of personality. Just as we go on our way without perpetually feeling of our pulse or counting our breath, so, Mrs. Oliphant delicately hints, her little Pilgrim was occupied by so much that gave exercise to her spiritual faculties as to make any mention of the corporeal functions incongruous. She was here ; she was there ; she had strength ; she had rest after weariness : what need to inquire closely into the operations of her physical nature, when it fulfilled all needed offices in leaving her personality free to act in response to its highest demands ?

There is, then, as the central figure in this little drama, a human person, who has lost no attribute of personality, but has gained in greater freedom and harmony. As on earth the little Pilgrim goes hither and thither in a service of love, so she fulfills the same service above, under conditions which magnify her power and increase her content. A few typical instances are taken of persons coming into the other world in a half-blind, bewildered, or lame state, who are at once the proper subjects for her gracious attention. It is to be noted that the operations of the drama are wholly in that other world ; there is no passage back and forth between this world and that. Only the memory remains to reproduce the past scenes, and lift them, in the light of a fuller knowledge, to a truer place.

Thus the little Pilgrim finds herself in a society. It is a society of souls, having relations to one another, and each expressing its own personality through natural media. As the little Pilgrim is a sort of heavenly nurse, so the painter paints, the poet rhymes, and the singer sings. It is, to tell the truth, a somewhat artistic circle into which the reader is introduced. One shocks one’s self by asking what the business man is to do ; and he may be told, perhaps, that in the spiritual world the circumstance of earth is of little account, and that the honest book-keeper or salesman is not even on earth dependent upon his ledger or his merchandise for the satisfaction of his soul. Very true; yet are not the canvas, the musical instrument, and pen, ink, and paper equally unessential ?

The fact is that the moment Mrs. Oliphant hints, even gently, at manual occupation a host of material questions obtrude themselves, and it is for this reason that we think her book becomes gradually involved in perplexity, even while she is enlarging the scope of the little Pilgrim’s experience. She hints at a home, but takes the reader no farther than a vine-covered porch ; detail of circumstance, once entered upon, brings a troop of difficulties with it, and detail of spiritual experience it is hard to give without some corresponding physical fact.

The one fact to which the book holds, and upon which it relies for the explication of all others, is the love of God, and the warmth of this belief imparts a certain glow and generous color to the entire poem ; for poem the book is, — an imaginative work, with a distinct attempt at keeping all the parts in subjection to the central idea. It is as if Mrs. Oliphant had selected a scheme of color, and took pains that her convention should not be disturbed. She has been reasonably successful in this, and has produced a work which, apart from its very tender illustration of a profound theme, may be viewed as a work of literary art.

It is as such that we are primarily considering these books before us, and therefore we must confine ourselves to this view of Miss Phelps’s Beyond the Gates.1 If Mrs. Oliphant’s book was a poem, this may be described as belonging to the class of literature which has had many excellent representatives, the travel-novel. In one aspect, it is a record of personal observation in a new country ; in another, it is the development of a personality through the experience of life.

The story is in autobiographic form, and its heroine is a woman who has led a life of vigorous activity and of suffering. She was a nurse in the hospitals during the war ; she concerned herself about the lives of factory girls ; she was the mainstay of an aged mother, a hearty younger brother who was at college, and a younger sister. Her father, a clergyman, had been dead many years. In her own more intimate experience, Mary, the heroine, had early loved a man who had married another, and she had averted her eyes, and so far as she could her thoughts, from him. She had not, as she says, an ecstatic temperament. Life she took soberly and with energy, and the higher things of life interested her in a rational way. She was not a devotee, but an honest believer in the truths of the Christian religion. “ I believed,” she says, “ in God and immortality, and in the history of Jesus Christ. I respected and practiced prayer, but chiefly decided what I ought to do next minute. I loved life and lived it. I neither feared death nor thought much about it.”

To this healthy-minded woman, untroubled by nervous disorders or a too active imagination, came a fever, and after the fever a stupor, in which she lay for thirty hours; but while in this stupor, when apparently almost lifeless, her spirit experienced a life of years spent beyond the confines of the body, and within the borders, for the most part, of heaven. The thirty hours served as the worldly time of a drama which involved elaborate processes and the lapse of years in the lives of those left on earth.

Mary’s first apprehension in this new state is of the presence of her father. He conducts her by easy stages,adapted to her childish condition in anew sphere, away from her earthly associations, until they are by themselves upon a moor, when he bids her rise; and with an effort she is conscious of a passage from the round globe into space. “ I use the words ‘ ascension ’ and ’ arising,’ ” she says, " in the superficial sense of earthly imagery,” and from time to time she explains how impossible it is to convey an accurate notion of what she sees and hears by means of ordinary language. Now that she has left the earth behind she is by herself for a while, becoming wonted to the new situation, and adjusting her confused recollection of former notions of heaven with the actuality. Her father comes to her aid, and helps her struggling thought to take adequate shape. Soon she begins to apprehend the life about her : she hears birds and the musical brook engaged in a harmonious Te Deum ; she slowly discovers that what we should call nature is in this heavenly place, sentient and worshiping. Then there comes upon her a revulsion of feeling, as she remembers the loss which has fallen upon those on earth, and she prays to return to them. This prayer is not granted, but in place comes a new conception of obedience to a supreme will, which she learns through her father.

“ ‘ It is not always permitted,’he said gravely. ‘ We cannot return when we would. We go upon these errands when it is Willed. I will go and learn what the Will may be for you touching this matter. Stay here and wait for me.’

“ Before I could speak he had departed swiftly, with the great and glad motion of those who go upon some business in this happy place ; as if he himself, at least, obeyed unseen directions, and obeyed them with his whole being. To me, so lately from a lower life, and still so choked with its errors, this loving obedience of the soul to a great central Force which I felt on every hand, but comprehended not as yet, affected me like the discovery of a truth in science. It was as if I had found a new law of gravitation, to be mastered only by infinite attention.”

The lesson once learned, she is permitted to revisit the earth, where she finds her cold body laid out for burial; comforts her mother, brother, and sister; attends her own funeral, with the arrangements of which she is quite well pleased; goes to the grave with the body, and remains after the sexton has hurried away. In the vigil which she keeps she becomes possessed of a full belief in the resurrection of the body, and returns to heaven. At first she meets no one ; then she is aware of a stranger by her, and the walk to Emmaus is repeated, except that the Presence is not revealed by itself, but by the disclosure of a young girl whom she afterwards meets, and who proves to be one whom Mary, when on earth, had tried, but with a consciousness of failure, to redeem from an abandoned life. This girl, nevertheless, had found her way to heaven through a love for Mary, which Mary herself had not suspected, and now, being an older resident, acts as her guide. They come to water, beyond which lies a city ; and Mary, fearing to walk upon the water, is drawn across in a nautilus shell by her more experienced and trusting companion.

Into this city they come, with its clean, well-ordered streets, in which are no old. or infirm, or beggarly people, but where are museums, libraries, art-galleries, and a hospital for hearts ; and at last approach a small and quiet house, “ built of curiously inlaid woods, that reminded me of Sorrento work as a great achievement may remind one of a first and faint suggestion.” The dog on the threshold rises, as they come forward, and meets them cordially. Her companion now bids her enter, but herself withdraws, and Mary enters the house, seeing no one, but hearing footsteps, until her father again appears. It is one of the heavenly mansions, which he has been getting in readiness for his wife; and in this revelation of heaven a home becomes a great and noble fact.

Centred in this home, she now takes up an active life, in which the parts correspond, though with infinite distance, with occupations below. Instead of working at Ollendorf, she undertakes to acquire the Universal Language. Instead of a symphony concert in the Boston Music Hall, with the bronze statue of Beethoven on the stage, she attends a great festival, at which Beethoven himself conducts the orchestra and chorus in the rendition, of an oratorio which he has composed; and even after the instruments and voices have ceased the leaves on the trees repeat the music. She attends a Symphony of Colors, among the managers of which is Raphael, and even, it is rumored, Leonardo. The spectators sit in the centre of a great white globe, upon the surface of which appear in succession colors and harmonies of colors. She goes to a meeting in the open air, at which she hears St. John the Divine.

Her mother now comes and joins the home, bringing word of the fortunes of those below. There arises now in Mary a great thirst for knowledge, which shall embrace all the unanswered questions of her earthly life, and shall be had by access to the spirits of the mighty who have died. She even begins to wonder if she may not visit a world which the creations of human imagination have peopled with their forms, and come to know Don Quixote, Dinah Morris, Juliet, Uncle Tom, Colonel Newcome, Sam Weller, and other famous heroes and heroines.

While in the midst of these speculations there rushes over her the remembrance of her lost love, and then, as the last drop in her experience, he comes. At first she fears to love him, but he informs her that his wife has not yet died, and has married again, and he is free. With this consummation of her desires she ends her heavenly vision, for her stupor now ceases ; she returns slowly to earthly consciousness as one wakes from a dream, and again is on the cold earth, but with heaven in her heart.

In a rapid outline of such a book, many facts, more or less necessary to the development of the story, must be omitted, vet we think we have not missed the argument of the work. There is, as the reader will have seen, a change in the character of the narrator. From being a healthy-minded, reasonable, cheerful, and sane woman, busy in the lives of others and honestly helpful, she is transformed by the exigencies of the story into a person of ecstatic temperament, ejaculatory, even at times hysterical. In this respect there is not the consistency which was to be observed in A Little Pilgrim. Heaven has wrought a great change ; and though Mary comes into the fuller apprehension of truths which she had before dimly perceived, one cannot help thinking that the expansion of character is not in the direction of a large, holy life.

In another respect the book differs from A Little Pilgrim. The field of action is no longer exclusively another world, but there is a movement back and forth ; and indeed, after the character is fairly at home in the celestial city, heaven itself becomes in its detail a sublimation of earth. Is it to be said that this is the case with the revelation of St.John the Divine, who describes walls and gates and pavements ? But the book of Revelation is fundamentally an ethical book, and this is fundamentally an æsthetical one, having to do chiefly with sensations. In the approach to the celestial city, Miss Phelps incorporates many fine conceptions. Her expansion of the sentiment of the soul lingering after death is rich and suggestive, and there are single sentences which have a penetrating power, as where she says, " When I felt the spiritual flesh, when I used the strange muscle, when I heard the new heart-beat of my heavenly identity, I remembered certain words, with a sting of mortification that I had known them all my life, and paid so cool a heed to them : ’ There is a terrestrial body, and there is a celestial body.’ The glory of the terrestrial was one. Behold, the glory of the celestial was another. St. Paul had set this tremendous assertion revolving in the sky of the human mind, like a star which we had not brought into our astronomy.”

Yet the heavenly city itself is a new earth, and we think that Miss Phelps’s conception should be classed rather with the Utopias of imagination than with the heavens. The vague background of landscape and architecture, which in A Little Pilgrim seemed to give projection to the figures passing in front, becomes in Beyond the Gates a very positive foreground, and one scarcely sees divine personages except in the distance. We are given very marked space in which to limit our conception of eternity.

The fiction of a dream answers Miss Phelps’s purpose in enabling her to account for the adventures of her heroine. Mr. Baker,1 who also adopts the autobiographic form, does not concern himself with any such slight concession to probability, but boldly carries his character from earth to heaven, and narrates his earliest experience there. He saves himself by calling his story a parable, as the story of Dives and Lazarus is a parable; and uses the first person in telling it, in order, we suppose, to gain directness, and because it is a revelation of personal consciousness. In this case a hero, and not a heroine, is the chief actor, and the manner of his passage into the other world has significance. He is a physician, who saves the life of a ragamuffin from the attack of a mad dog, but receives in the encounter a wound, which is healed for the time, but, according to the law of the disease, is liable to a fatal issue even so late as a year after. Not only he, but his family, his friends and neighbors, are aware of the terrible fate which overhangs him. At first he receives the homage of all men ; then his heroism becomes an old story, and those who admired now shrug their shoulders; but the man and his wife never lose the sense of the ever-present shadow. So, finally, when the end comes, and the heroic physician perceives that he is to undergo the terrible sensation of a consciousness in which he will lose his personal dignity and become a brute, a vile animal, he braces himself to meet the ordeal; provides against all contingencies, and then enters the dark valley through this most hideous gate.

We do not know, nor greatly care, how accurate is Mr. Baker’s pathology of hydrophobia; the scene portrayed by him is so offensive that most will hurry over it, merely glancing at it to take note of the intensity with which a strong man feels a degradation of nature which has come through strictly physical means. The contrast is in the calm which succeeds the violence, the perfect naturalness of the other world into which he passes. " If there is any way,” he says, “ in which I could convey the idea of the absence of anything to astonish, to thrill, to move one a grain out of the even tenor of waking life, I would use it to make plain the fact that never in my life had I felt more quietly and completely at home with myself and everything than I did in that waking moment. So when I was with my Lord, it was exactly as when Peter and the rest were with him upon the sea-shore, the grateful odor of the broiling fish upon the air.”

As in Beyond the Gates, so here the hero lingers beside the dead body which he has left, and considers the matter of comforting the mourners, but is also conscious of a Will which holds his own in perfect subjection. “ A goodly part of the pleasure to me in this was due to the perpetual sense I had of divine control; but it was merely the control of rhythm upon music. I had long ago resolved, for instance, that if I could, after death, I would surely give my wife some token of my continued existence and nearness to her. Now I had none of that desire, though I knew I could have done so had I wished. Two things withheld me. First, such fullness of life streamed through me that I could not conceive how any one could doubt that I was still living. Besides, I knew it was not the will of God I should show myself to her in any way; and how can I express the compelling influence upon me of that adorable will ? To differ from it was simply inconceivable. Even to desire to differ from it was as if a wren perched upon a clock tower should think to alter with claw and beak the motion of the hands and works there. It was as if a baby should fancy arresting the revolution of the earth upon its axis by planting infantile feet upon and bracing itself against it. Yes: the will of the Father was the shoreless breadth and beauty and unfathomed current of things, the Gulf Stream of all movement; and it was in my going with it lay to me the entire power, as it did the pleasure of all movement, of myself, and of everything. It was this irresistible setting in of the ocean of existence in one way and my entire surrender to it which gives me, as it does all in heaven, my unobstructed power to go and to come, to do and to be.”

The revelation of heaven attempted by Mr. Baker’s parable scarcely goes beyond the exchange of thought upon the new life which his hero holds with friends, new and old, whom he discovers about him. He also attends a concert, and he expands the conception of many mansions, but the reader is not granted a minute inspection of place and scenery. The parable is forgotten ; as soon as the heavenly company is fairly reached, the book becomes a discourse upon a life which has been freed from human limitations, and has entered upon unbounded possibilities. As in A Little Pilgrim, the absorbing idea is of personality retained, enlarged, and made glorious through the redemption made by a Person. To the other conceptions Mr. Baker has added that of sacrifice as a way of approach.

Do these books, then, give us reason to think that we are to see a new domain of literature, — that heaven is to be annexed to earth in literary art ? It is doubtless true that when a great theme absorbs the minds of men the literature and art of the day will in some sort bear witness to it ; and speculations on a future state are likely to affect the imagination of poets and painters; even novelists may be thus affected. It is equally true that art, whether in painting or in letters, has laws which are supreme, and that in any portraiture of heaven the essential condition of success must be in obedience to these laws. Nothing could be more suicidal than a lawless picture of heaven. The keynote struck with different degrees of intelligence by the three writers whom we have cited is the union of divine and human personality. They perceive that this makes heaven, but in striking their chords they for the most part forget this, —Mrs. Oliphant least of all, — and wander off into themes which are not variations, but separations.

There was a time when art in painting essayed a similar result. No one can look at the Adoration of the Lamb in Ghent, by the brothers Van Eyck, without seeing that art, in taking its theme from the revelation of heaven, was not afflicted by an anxious curiosity, but chose the centre of heaven as the centre of its representation of heaven, and wrought with all the power which had been given to the executing hand. The change of interpretation from that day to this does not alter the relation of art, whether literary or pictorial, to the subject. If there be a profounder conception of the divine harmony than that which satisfied the Van Eycks, if the eye of the modern believer is no longer contented with the symbol of the lamb, but is eager to look beyond symbols to a reality which knows no surer expression than a Person, then it becomes the business, whether of art or literature, to be as truthful to current belief as the Van Eycks were to the belief of their day, and at least as reverent.

It would be idle to inquire at the end of a paper why art has relinquished these themes, or to pursue the speculation whether some other form of art, as music, may not hold them in reserve. It is enough to say that if literature is ever to engage in the occupation of the other world it must first believe in it, and then use its imagination to expand the known properties. If it merely hauls into boundless space the baggage of this world, it is pretty sure to lose its way, and reach no definite end. For forty years or so we have had by our doors a mass of printed matter, which is witness to the struggle of human minds after a spacial and temporal representation of the life after death. All this while there has been a rapid movement in theology and philosophy, which tends to destroy the delusive notion that eternity is merely a prolongation of time. These books which we have cited have caught a breath from the higher philosophy, and it is that which gives them any value. Nevertheless, they are still shackled by the materialistic conceptions of heaven, the pagan notion of elysian fields in the future. If the religious imagination is ever to produce a work having heaven for its theme, and yet obedient to the gospel of hope, it will not make it its first business to secure a suitable other world in which to set up its figures of humanity.