VISITORS to one of the famous galleries of Munich are sure to pause before a large canvas by Richter, on which the artist has wonderfully portrayed a most stirring scene. It is the moment when Egypt's mighty monarch has alighted from his chair and stands amid the swarming workers upon the pyramid which is to be his final resting-place. He is looking out upon a monument of human achievement which has astonished the centuries, but which is yet more impressive as the symbol of that universal longing for immortality which "springs eternal in the human breast," and which is as vast and inclusive as human history. The tremendous energy and activity with which the work is being advanced is shown in every part of the picture, while upon the face of the royal visitor, as he views the already towering heights of stone, there rests a look of supreme satisfaction. He is thinking perchance of the unfading renown that will attach to his name as the builder of this world-wonder, and yet more surely of that mummied repose in its deeply hidden heart which is to insure everlasting life and peace for his soul.
It is no doubt true today, as in all times, that there are those who have experienced such a horror of disease, or such despairing doubt, that they can gladly think of their death as an unbroken sleep; and it is not at all difficult to find those, and some, like Harriet Martineau, of cultured and refined nature, who have been led by the logic of their material beliefs to regard life as a product of physical organization, and who, therefore, have come to accept, with apparent equanimity and content, the conviction that death ends all. But of the great majority of mankind in all the ages, whether pagan or Christian, it is certainly true that they have been at one with the heart of Tennyson, when on his eightieth birthday he wrote to his dear friend Lushington, "I have always kept my faith in immortality." Their conviction is very much more, withal, than an undefined longing; it is the profoundest assertion of their conscious being. As a distinguished teacher (Prof. G. Louis Dickinson—Ingersoll lecturer at Harvard College, 1910) has recently said: "To me, in my present experience, the thing that at bottom matters most is the sense I have of something in me making for more life and better. ... If necessary, under criticism 1 will give up any particular terms in which I may try to describe it; I will abandon anything except Itself. For It is real. It governs all my experience! and determines all my judgments of value."
This hope for an ideal life such as human experience cannot supply, a hope that impelled Cheops to his prodigious deed and enabled Socrates to drink his cup with calmness,—the persistence of this hope is a prophecy of mighty moment, and the fact that it is shared by practically all normal people renders it for many the ground of assurance. They can but believe that it speaks for its own fruition in the purpose and plans of God. Such a hope and faith is buttressed by that consciousness, to which every noble man awakens, of a capacity to be and to do which this life at its best does not enable him to utilize. No one attains his ideal under the handicap of human experience. The potentialities of consciousness do not come to their own. The circuit of a man's life is manifestly not rounded out to the fulness of its possibilities, as is that of the beast, for he has only begun to understand something of the splendor and amplitude of man's abilities when the flesh fails him and he passes away. The "quest of good" has hardly been entered upon before the belief of weakness begins to blight the blossoming of life's bud. Here the thought of the incongruity of any assertedly divine plan which ends in manifest defeat asserts itself, and it begets the insistent protest that men have a further and fairer chance. This conviction is additionally intensified by the manifest incompleteness of the administration of justice in this life. The reward of virtue and the righting of wrongs call imperatively for the continuance of identity, and while this human sense has been molded into every phase of retributive superstition, the basic impulse remains as an appealing witness to the righteousness of our "eternal hope."
