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Project Gutenberg's The Destiny of the Soul, by William Rounseville Alger

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Title: The Destiny of the Soul

A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
Author: William Rounseville Alger
Release Date: August 19, 2006 [EBook #19082]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL ***

Produced by Edmund Dejowski
THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL.

A CRITICAL HISTORY
OF THE
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE,

BY

WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.
TENTH EDITION,
WITH SIX NEW CHAPTERS, AND
A Complete Bibliography of the Subject.

[Note: bibliography not included here]

COMPRISING 4977 BOOKS RELATING TO THE NATURE, ORIGIN, AND
DESTINY OF THE SOUL. THE TITLES CLASSIFIED AND ARRANGED
CHRONOLOGICALLY, WITH NOTES, AND INDEXES OF THE AUTHORS AND
SUBJECTS.

BY EZRA ABBOT,
PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION IN
THE DIVINITY SCHOOL OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1880

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United
States for the District of Massachusetts.

Copyright 1878, W.R. Alger
ELECTROTYPED BY JOHNSON & CO., PHILADA.
University Press: John Wilson & Son,

Cambridge.
PREFACE TO THE TENTH EDITION.

THIS work has passed through nine editions, and has been out of
print now for nearly a year. During the twenty years which have
elapsed since it was written, the question of immortality, the
faith and opinions of men and the drift of criticism and doubt
concerning it, have been a subject of dominant interest to me, and
have occupied a large space in my reading and reflection.
Accordingly, now that my publisher, moved by the constant demand
for the volume, urges the preparation of a new edition introducing
such additional materials as my continued researches have gathered
or constructed, I gladly comply with his request.

The present work is not only historic but it is also polemic;
polemic, however, not in the spirit or interest of any party or
conventicle, but in the spirit and interest of science and
humanity. Orthodoxy insists on doctrines whose irrationality in
their current forms is such that they can never be a basis for the
union of all men. Therefore, to discredit these, in preparation
for more reasonable and auspicious views, is a service to the
whole human race. This is my justification for the controversial
quality which may frequently strike the reader.

Looking back over his pages, after nearly a quarter of a century
more of investigation and experience, the author is grateful that
he finds nothing to retract or expunge. He has but to add such
thoughts and illustrations as have occurred to him in the course
of his subsequent studies. He hopes that the supplementary
chapters now published will be found more suggestive and mature
than the preceding ones, while the same in aim and tone. For he
still believes, as he did in his earlier time, that there is much
of error and superstition, bigotry and cruelty, to be purged out
of the prevailing theological creed and sentiment of Christendom.
And he still hopes, as he did then, to contribute something of
good influence in this direction. The large circulation of the
work, the many letters of thanks for it received by the author
from laymen and clergymen of different denominations, the numerous
avowed and unavowed quotations from it in recent publications,
all show that it has not been produced in vain, but has borne
fruit in missionary service for reason, liberty, and charity.

This ventilating and illumining function of fearless and
reverential critical thought will need to be fulfilled much longer
in many quarters. The doctrine of a future life has been made so
frightful by the preponderance in it of the elements of material
torture and sectarian narrowness, that a natural revulsion of
generous sentiment joins with the impulse of materialistic science
to produce a growing disbelief in any life at all beyond the
grave. Nothing else will do so much to renew and extend faith in
God and immortality as a noble and beautiful doctrine of God and
immortality, freed from disfiguring terror, selfishness, and
favoritism.

The most popular preacher in England has recently asked his
fellow believers, "Can we go to our beds and sleep while China,
India, Japan, and other nations are being damned?" The proprietor
of a great foundry in Germany, while he talked one day with a
workman who was feeding a furnace, accidentally stepped back, and
fell headlong into a vat of molten iron. The thought of what
happened then horrifies the imagination. Yet it was all over in
two or three seconds. Multiply the individual instance by
unnumbered millions, stretch the agony to temporal infinity, and
we confront the orthodox idea of hell!

Protesting human nature hurls off such a belief with indignant
disdain, except in those instances where the very form and
vibration of its nervous pulp have been perverted by the hardening
animus of a dogmatic drill transmitted through generations. To
trace the origin of such notions, expose their baselessness,
obliterate their sway, and replace them with conceptions of a more
rational and benignant order, is a task which still needs to be
done, and to be done in many forms, over and over, again and
again. Though each repetition tell but slightly, it tells.

Every sound argument is instantly crowned with universal victory
in the sight of God, and therefore must at last be so in the sight
of mankind. However slowly the logic of events limps after the
logic of thoughts, it always follows. Let the mind of one man
perceive the true meaning of the doctrine of the general
resurrection and judgment and eternal life, as a natural evolution
of history from within, and it will spread to the minds of all
men; and the misinterpretation of that doctrine so long prevalent,
as a preternatural irruption of power from without, will be set
aside forever. For there is a providential plan of God, not
injected by arbitrary miracle, but inhering in the order of the
world, centred in the propulsive heart of humanity, which beats
throb by throb along the web of events, removing obstacles and
clearing the way for the revelation of the completed pattern. When
it is done no trumpets may be blown, no rocks rent, no graves
opened. But all immortal spirits will be at their goals, and the
universe will be full of music.

NEW YORK, February 22, 1878.
PREFACE.
WHO follows truth carries his star in his brain. Even so bold a
thought is no inappropriate motto for an intellectual workman, if
of 00

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