Old Teachings of King Zoser
" 'Tis true; 'tis certain; man though dead retains
Part of himself; the immortal mind remains."
These words, written by Homer three thousand years ago, remind us how that ages before the ferment of modern thought and all the crusades of our modern religions, men believed in immortality as we do now. If one were to push himself behind Homer into an age long anterior to his, and as ancient to him as his is to us, one would find men cherishing the same hope. Imhotep, the father of architecture in stone, builder to the Egyptian King Zoser, lived five thousand years ago, but for all that he believed in immortality as did Homer. And so with those to whom Imhotep looked back; and also with them in their turn; and so on to the beginning of things when the first half-wild hunter paused long enough in his search of meat to gaze wistfully across lovely valleys, where floating gossamers reminded him how frail and how fleeting is human life.
It is useless to try to prove by logic or by demonstration the immortality of man. We believe it, there is an end of it! And we do not believe it because we have proved it, but we try to prove it because we already believe it. It is a hope, a kind of inward certainty which finds its support not in this fact or in that, but in the cast and color of life as a whole. It rises up into our minds like an exaltation from all our thoughts, all our [124] [125] experiences, all our dreams, as the odor that drifts across a summer field distils from numberless unnoted plants. We are never so puzzled as when we are challenged to give a reasoned proof of this hope: and we are never so unreasonable as when we cease to believe it. Men everywhere and always have believed it not because priests have taught them or because scientists have found out the secret of it, but because life itself has taught them, and it is something that the universe itself is always whispering to them. The priests and the churches have not created the belief: it is the belief that has made the priests and churches, and no amount of ignorance, baseness, or superstition appears able to blot out that great hope. The cannibals cling to it, and we ourselves though we sleep in a gutter, hear it announced within, that whispering gallery which we call the soul.
"Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither."
It is impossible to form any mental picture of the future life. No two religions describe it in the same way, and some of them, ancient Buddhism, for example, have refused to describe it at all. Our modern spiritists who follow in the train of Sir Oliver Lodge, Conan Doyle, Camille Flammarion and their school, believe themselves to have received authentic news from the Beyond, but unfortunately they have never been able to agree as to the nature of things in that unknown realm. It appears that such descriptions as are given through the mediums, ouija boards and such other occult means of communication usually conform in a general way to the preconceptions of the spiritists themselves. The Eskimo spiritist is told that heaven is a beautiful place [126] full of icebergs and polar bears; the American Indian learns that it is a happy hunting ground; the Chinese spiritist-spiritism has been developed in China to a degree of respectability and perfection never attained elsewhere-is informed that heaven is a glorified China organized strictly in accord with the principles of ancestor worship. All this would indicate that if bona fide communications ever do penetrate the veil the conditions are such as to preclude the transmission of accurate or definite information, so that spiritists themselves are in like case with the rest of us who find that eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor hath it entered into the mind of man to conceive what the future life is to be like.
Nevertheless it is difficult to cherish even the thinnest hope of a continued life without trying to fashion some sort of conception of it, because the mind cannot otherwise handle the idea at all. Because we hold immortality as a belief we are compelled to think it as a thought, and it is this psychological necessity, perhaps, that has led men in every country and in all ages to make for themselves some picture of heaven. One should not try to quarrel with this, because one cannot do so successfully: man is so made that he must behave in this manner, and that is an end of it.
But it is for this reason, I believe, that we should be all the more careful that our thinking about the future life be strictly reasonable if our nature compels us to think out some conception of immortality, that same nature similarly compels us to fashion a conception that won't insult the intelligence or fly in the face of known facts. It is necessary to be reasonable while we reason about Eternal Life. It seems to me-and I speak here only for myself-that this principle in itself is one of the [127] teachings of Freemasonry concerning this subject. Our Fraternity leaves it to each individual to fashion his own conceptions of the Beyond, but at the same time, and by all the arts at its command, persuades its votaries ever to remain in the Light, to seek more Light, and to fear to walk farther than the Light can lead them: and this Light itself is, of course, nothing other than reason, and knowledge, and right thinking. When the subject passes beyond into the darkness of the unknowable it is better to cease pursuing it further, lest we fall into superstition.
It is better to remain agnostic about what the future life is like than to hold fast to unreason.
It is safe and wise to adhere to the principle that all reality is bound up together into a great unity-for the which reason we call it a universe-and that one part of this system does not contradict or give the lie to any other part. There is no good reason to suppose that death makes any profound change in the scheme of things. Death is a part of the universe and always has been and, it may possibly prove, always will be. It is reasonable to suppose that the universe will be the same after we are dead as it was before, and that therefore the "future life," as we call it (it is no longer "future" to those now living it) will in all essentials be of a piece with this present life. Why should we expect marvels, wonders, and impossibilities there when such things are not found here? What right have we to suppose that the experience of death will change our world out of all recognition, and transform ourselves into beings utterly different from what we are?
"What is human is immortal," said Bulwer-Lytton. Why is not the reverse also true? What is immortal is human. We are now in closest relation to an earth, out of the surface of which we labor to wrest our bread.
[128] Each and every one of us is the member of one race- the human-and of some one grand division thereof, in consequence of which we differ greatly in color, language, appearance, and a hundred other things. The race as a whole is equally divided between two sexes, the members of which are so unlike each other in many important respects as to cause one to believe that sexual differences extend into the inmost recesses of human nature, and are not to be put on or off by any possible change. We are each one organized in a physical body, and it is ceaselessly necessary for us to work, to strive, to endure, to eat and sleep, and to suffer. It may be that all these things will be carried over into whatever life, or lives, may be waiting for us beyond. They are neither superficial nor accidental and are so woven into the general scheme of things that it is difficult to understand how human life could know itself after death with all such things omitted.
In spite of one's self such a discussion leads into theology, the most irritating of all subjects, and the least appropriate to these pages. In a field where no landmarks are marked out for us we are necessarily forced to fall back on private opinion, a thing I have done throughout this chapter, and with the most cordial invitation to the reader to disagree if he is so disposed. I have no interest as a Mason in theological beliefs concerning the future life save to secure for ourselves a principle that will guarantee for us the full protection of the present life and all its values. It may be said that what a man believes about the future is his own private affair and should be respected as such. This is very true as long as the man's beliefs about the life to come do not seriously interfere with the life that now is, a thing that often happens. If my beliefs cause me to be illiberal, or [129] harsh, or unkind, or if they are such as to destroy. my happiness, then my beliefs become matters of concern to my fellows, and they have a right to challenge me thereon. It is true, as I remarked above, that Freemasonry leaves the fashioning of this religious belief to the individual, nevertheless the Fraternity's spirit and teachings are distinctly opposed to beliefs that lead a man into un-brotherly behavior or un-Masonic conduct. What Masonry has to teach concerning immortality is necessarily of a piece with its other teachings. If democracy, equality, charity, brotherly love, truth, kindliness, and honorable labor are good things now they cannot cease to be good things in the life to come. If such things are of God in this life it is hardly possible that they will cease to be divine in the next life.
If a man were to ask me point-blank, "What, in so many words, does Freemasonry teach about the endless life?" I should be hard put to make a reply. Freemasonry does not teach anything about it after the manner of an old-fashioned church catechism, but all its rites and ceremonies, its spirit and its laws are filled with immortality as the sky is suffused with light. Immortality is the motif of the Masonic symphony.
There is one word to be said in addition. In the great drama of the Third Degree there are things done and said that give one a new and enlarged conception of everlasting life. The initiate has it brought home to him that if there are some things which abide forever, so that they are undestroyed by all the deaths that are, it is possible to search out such things now, and to mould his life about them, and give them the place of control at the center of the heart, so that one can live the eternal life in the midst of time. This is not easily gained, as many a man has learned to his cost: there are ruffians at [130] the gates, lions in the path, and often it will seem to one who seeks this Royal Secret that his days are become a succession of deaths.
"He who flagged not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing-only he
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life."
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