William Rounseville Alger

“ Each side enlists its allies, until all are ranged in opposition, from Jormungandur, the serpent of the deep, to Heindall, the warder of the rainbow, gods and brave men there, demons, traitors, and cowards here. Then sounds the horn of battle, and the last day dawns in fire and splendor from the sky, in fog and venom from the abyss. Flame devours the earth. For the most part, the combatants mutually slay each other. Only Gimli, the high, safe heaven of All Father, remains as a refuge for the survivors and the beginning of a new and fairer world. ”

“ If the boon of a future immortality be not ours, therefore to scorn the gift of the present life, is to act not like a wise man, who with grateful piety makes the best of what is given, but like a spoiled child, who, if he cannot have both his orange and his gingerbread, pettishly flings his gingerbread in the mud.
The future life, outside of the realm of faith, to an earnest and independent inquirer, and considered as a scientific question, lies in a painted mist of uncertainty. There is room for hope, and there is room for doubt. ”

“ Hell is a wrong, diseased condition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness and retribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day tortures a sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, its indwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it may reside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision with delight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmonious blessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powers and relations. ”

“ Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstition on the cope of the sky, picture of contending fiends and angels, fiery rain, a frowning God, and shuddering millions of victims! Away forever, and leave the blue space free for the benignant mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to our fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend your aid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benign battle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, every free mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer. ”

“ The pangs of three terrible days and nights, equal to the agonies of nine thousand years, will purify all, even the worst of the demons. The anguished cry of the damned, as they writhe in the lurid caldron of torture, rising to heaven, will find pity in the soul of Ormuzd, and he will release them from their sufferings. A blazing star, the comet Gurtzscher, will fall upon the earth. In the heat of its conflagration, great and small mountains will melt and flow together as liquid metal. Through this glowing flood all human kind must pass. ”

“ So man runs his busy round of toil and pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, following the sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallid populations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer is succeeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams of enterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks in maturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozen in the channels of age, and above their sepulchral beds the leafless branches creak in answer to the shrieks of the funereal blast. ”

“ Crawling as an almost invisible bug in a heap of carrion, he can still think within himself, holding fast to the law of righteousness and love, "This is the infinite ladder of redemption, over whose rounds of purity, penance, charity, and contemplation I may ascend, through births innumerable, till I reach a height of wisdom, power, and bliss that will cast into utter contempt the combined glory of countless millions of worlds, ay, till I sit enthroned above the topmost summit of the universe as omnipotent Buddha." ”

“ The man who goes into the dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs of immortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it, is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs under Rome, was buried by the caving in of the sepulchral roof, and thus lost his life, while all the time, above, the great vault of heaven was stretching, blue and breezy, filled with sunshine and sentient joy! ”

“ The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It is the most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth the pelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breast in agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wings above them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they were brought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in history to brood over the ashes of departed ages, dropping the tears of her grief and faith into the future to restore her deceased children to life and draw them together within her embrace. ”

“ While the pen is forming these words, the announcement of the death of Dr. Kane saddens the world. Alas that the gallant heart no longer beats, the story of whose noble generosity and indomitable prowess has just thrilled the dull nations of men of meaner mould! Who even though standing before a telescope under the full architecture of the heavens can believe that that maiden soul of heroism and devotion is now but an extinguished spark, that the love, honor, intelligence, self sacrificing consecration which enswathed him as with a saintly halo have all gone out? ”

“ Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain, belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temporal fates that rule there; but reason, imagination, love, will, belong to another, and, immortally fortressed there, laugh to scorn the fretful sieges of decay. ”

“ Has God moulded the dead clay of the material universe into gleaming globes and ordered them to fly through the halls of space forever, and has he created, out of his own omnipotence, mental personalities reflecting his own attributes, and doomed them to go out in endless night after basking, poor ephemera, in the sunshine of a momentary life? It is not to be imagined that God ever works in vain. Yet if a single consciousness be extinguished in everlasting nonentity, so far as the production of that consciousness is concerned he has wrought for nothing. ”

“ Comes not death as a means to bear him thither? Accordingly as hope rests in heaven, fear shudders at hell, or doubt faces the dark transition, the future life is a sweet reliance, a terrible certainty, or a pathetic perhaps. But living in the present in the humble and loving discharge of its duties, our souls harmonized with its conditions though aspiring beyond them, why should we ever despair or be troubled overmuch? Have we not eternity in our thought, infinitude in our view, and God for our guide? ”

“ Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in the will, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vain aspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in the imagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hell of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays. There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the melancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentless nevermore. ”

“ They did not conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, making immortality desirable for its endless novelty, but imaged it to themselves as a circle, making an everlasting individual consciousness dreadful for its intolerable sameness, an immense round of existence, phenomena, and experience, going forth and returning into itself, over and over, forever and ever. To escape so repulsive a contemplation, they made death break the fencing integument of consciousness and empty all weary personalities into the absolute abyss of being. ”

“ There is also a classic representation of death as a winged boy with a pensive brow and an inverted torch, a butterfly at his feet. This beautiful image, with its affecting accompaniments, conveys to the beholder not the verity, nor an interpretation, of death, but the sentiments of the survivors in view of their bereavement. The sad brow denotes the grief of the mourner, the winged insect the disembodied psyche, the reversed torch the descent of the soul to the under world; but the reality of death itself is nowhere hinted. ”

“ Truth is the harmony of mind with the divine order; beauty, the harmony of taste with the divine symmetries; good, the harmony of volition with the divine ends. Everything that secures these for us is an avenue into the peaceful city of bliss. To be in heaven is to be a transparent medium through which the qualities of objects, the reflections of phenomena, the vibrations of aboriginal power, pass in blessed freedom, without deflection or jar, and on which the mysterious attraction of the Infinite exerts its supreme spell. ”

“ Doubtless many a one has at times felt the stupendous truths of astronomy thus palsying him with a crushing sense of his own nothingness and burying him in fatalistic despair. Standing at night, alone, beneath the august dome studded from of old with its ever blazing lights, he gazes up and sees the innumerable armies of heaven marshalled forth above him in the order and silence of their primeval pomp. Peacefully and forever they shine there. In nebula separated from nebula by trillions of leagues, plane beyond plane, they stretch and glitter to the feet of God. ”

“ Then my soul cannot be annihilated unless the will of God is so far annihilated. But God is infinite being, and there is nothing outside of or counter to infinite being to destroy it. All evil is but defect or negation. I am only in so far as I am positive reality. Nothing of me, therefore, can ever perish, except my imperfections; and the thought of the perishing of imperfections is a thought of joy. Welcome, then, be the approach of death which shall cleanse and dislimit me into unimprisonable divineness of being, the crystalline sphere of pure intelligence and immortality! ”

“ Thought, throwing off many restrictions and accumulating much material, began to grow free, and began to grow wise. And so, before the calm, steady gaze of enlightened and cheerful reason, the live and crawling smoke of hell, which had so long enwreathed the mind of the time with its pendent and breathing horrors, gradually broke up and dissolved, "Like a great superstitious snake, uncurled From the pale temples of the awakening world." ”

“ The exuberant prodigiousness of the Hindu imagination is strikingly manifest in its descriptions of the rewards of virtue in the heavens and of the punishments of sin in the hells. Visions pass before us of beautiful groves full of fragrance and music, abounding in delicious fruits, and birds of gorgeous plumage, crystal streams embedded with pearls, unruffled lakes where the lotus blooms, palaces of gems, crowds of friends and lovers, endless revelations of truth, boundless graspings of power, all that can stir and enchant intellect, will, fancy, and heart. ”

“ Cleaving to evanescent things, men feel that they are passing away like leaves on waves; filled with convictions rooted and breathing in eternity, they feel that they shall abide in serene survival, like stars above tempests. Turn from every obscene sight, curb every base propensity, obey every heavenly vision by assimilation of immortal things, sacred self denials and toils, disinterested sympathies and hopes, accumulate divine treasures and kindle the mounting flame of a divine life, and at the same time consciousness will crave and faith behold an illimitable destiny. ”

“ We cannot tell what force is. We can conceive neither its genesis nor its extinction. Over that obscure environment, into the immense empire of possibilities, we must bravely fling the treasures of our love and the colors of our hope, and with a divine impulse in the moment of death leap after, trusting not to sink as nothing into the abyss of nowhere, but, landing safe in some elysium better than we know, to find ourselves still in God. ”

“ We are made to love and depend on each other. The longer, the more profoundly, we know and admire the good, the more our being becomes intertwined with theirs, so much the more intensely we desire to be with them always, and so much the more awful is the agony of separation. This, what is it but great Nature's testimony, God's silent avowal, that we are to meet in eternity? Can the fearful anguish of bereavement be gratuitous? can the yearning prophecies of the smitten heart be all false? Belief in reunion hereafter is spontaneously adopted by humanity. ”

“ The soul, on being divested of its earthly envelop, is borne aloft. The clouds are composed of the souls of lately deceased men. They fly over the heads of armies, inspiring courage or striking terror. Not yet freed from terrestrial affections, they mingle in the passions and affairs of men. Vainly they strive to soar above the atmosphere; an impassable wall of sapphire resists their wings. In the moon, millions of souls traverse tremendous plains of ice, losing all perception but that of simple existence, forgetting the adventures they have passed through and are about to recommence. ”