In this matter of immortality, people’s beliefs appear to go along with their wishes.  The man who is content with annihilation thinks he will get it; those that want immortality are pretty sure they are immortal; and that is a very comfortable allotment of faiths.  The few of us that are left unprovided for are those who do not bother themselves much about the matter, one way or another.

The question of human immortality is the most momentous that the mind is capable of conceiving.  If it is a fact that the dead live all other facts are in comparison trivial and without interest.  The prospect of obtaining certain knowledge with regard to this stupendous matter is not encouraging.  In all countries but those in barbarism the powers of the profoundest and most penetrating intelligences have been ceaselessly addressed to the task of glimpsing a life beyond this life; yet today no one can truly say that he knows.  It is as much a matter of faith as ever it was.

Our modern Christian nations profess a passionate hope and belief in another world, yet the most popular writer and speaker of his time, the man whose lectures drew the largest audiences, the work of whose pen brought him the highest rewards, was he who most strenuously strove to destroy the ground of that hope and unsettle the foundations of that belief.

The famous and popular Frenchman, Professor of Spectacular Astronomy, Camille Flammarion, affirms immortality because he has talked with departed souls who said that it was true.  Yes, monsieur, but surely you know the rule about hearsay evidence.  We Anglo-Saxons are very particular about that.

M. Flammarion says: 

“I don’t repudiate the presumptive arguments of schoolmen.  I merely supplement them with something positive.  For instance, if you assumed the existence of God this argument of the scholastics is a good one.  God has implanted in all men the desire of perfect happiness.  This desire cannot be satisfied in our lives here.  If there were not another life wherein to satisfy it then God would be a declever. Voila tout.”

There is more:  the desire of perfect happiness does not imply immortality, even if there is a God, for

(1) God may not have implanted it, but merely suffers it to exist, as he suffers sin to exist, the desire of wealth, the desire to live longer than we do in this world.  It is not held that God implanted all the desires of the human heart.  Then why hold that he implanted that of perfect happiness?

(2) Even if he did—­even, if a divinely implanted desire entail its own gratification—­even if it cannot be gratified in this life—­that does not imply immortality.  It implies only another life long enough for its gratification just once.  An eternity of gratification is not a logical inference from it.

(3) Perhaps God is “a deceiver” who knows that he is not?  Assumption of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of a God who is honorable and candid according to our conception of honor and candor is another.