Does Death end all.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3826, 2 April 1881, Page 1

Does Death end all.

A lecture on this subject was given in the Free Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, by the Rev. Joseph Cook, Boston. Mr Cook having been introduced by Lord Provost Boyd, said:—

Was there no Thomas Chalmers, or Sir William Hamilton, anywhere in existence now ? No Dugald Stewart, or Hume, or Bobertson, or Burns, or Knox ? Did death end all with the Prince Consort, Wilberforce >B Milton and Shakespeare P Was there anywhere in existence now any Washington, Franklin, or Edwards? Were Bismarck, Tennyson, Gladstone, and Longfellow soon to go out of existence like throttled gas jets P These questions came home to men's bosoms and they were not unfit to be raised before a cultured assembly. The only thing in existence, according to one school of philosophy, is matter, and the truths which people had commonly taken, and with a good deal of reason, hs proving that there were two things in the universe —mi«d and matter—they were now taught were not truths at all. Socratei, before be died, told his friends to say of him that they buried his body only. If materialism were truth,, his h arers and he could not die so bravely as Socratei did, for hocrates believed that the relation of the soul to the body was that of a harper to his harp—they might destroy the harp and not necessarily destroy the harper. But materialism taught that the relation of the soul to the body is that of the harmony of the harp, but when you destroy the harp strings you destroy their harwouy. If that teaching were correct, there was no existence in the universe —no Paul, no Isaiah, or John or Jesus Christ. Burns was a fanatic when he sing his ode to Mary in heaven, if materialism were truth; Dante was a dreamer when he expressed bis hope of meeting Beatrice; we were all fanatics if we expected reunions with those who had been taken from us into what we were accustomed to call the ancestral spaces, out of which all souls come, and into which all souli haste. He wan not asking them to intensify their prejudice against the conclusions of materialism. If it were true that there was no judgment to come, we should need strength and civilisation in some new way, otherwise we should find by-and-bye that the hand of power would be put upon the throat of weakness. There was nothing that would keep human civilisation nlivo many centuries unless they invented some new motive to take the place of that constriininu; reverence which men had felt hitherto, even in their oaths when appeoling to things to come. He was not going to discuss the immortality of the soul but the,preliminary question, " Does death end. all ?" These were very different inquiries. It might be that death did not end all. but; that something else did. What he thought he could do wae to prove that drath.. does riot end all, and if he could show that, without opening the Bible, then he had a right to turn to the materialist and say, if death does not *end all. can you show what does, and if riot, can you raise a sensible obstacle in your mind to the acceptance of the biblical evidence which bus been received by so many billions, as provine that immortality is before us? In this inquiry he intended to shut the Bible for the sake of those wh'» cared not for it, but they would not tell him to shut Shakespeare and others wliom they could reach. They believed that Shakespeare was very nearly invaluable w\lien .he described great outlines of human nature, and wrote that in men's minds there was a contiutiou of "a bourne from which.no traveller returned," and that with this feeling, " conscience made con tvrds of a-; all " He whs not going to reason from any educated tendency, or to saj that immortality was before them because they hope*! it was. He would cast a«ide everything; like sentimenhiiism, and appeal to this organic in ate tendeius^y&f conscience to anticipate reward or '^iiiHhnient after death—a rcrv difl' rent Itl'iing from longing for immortality. 'I here was in us all this tendency of conscience, which made cowards of us in the expectation of reward or punishment. It might be said that this was a tendency of our religious education. Exercise strengthened the arm, but exercise did. not make an arm. If there was not this tendency in human nature, he did not think education would create it. He would pat Bishop Butler in the foreground of authorities oh the natural actiou of conscience..". Conscience!

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