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Text extracted from opening pages of book: CAN WE BELIEVE IN IMMORTALITY? BY JAMES H. SNOWDEN, D. D., LL. D. Author of t( The World a Spiritual System; An Outline of Metaphysics, The Basal Beliefs of Christianity, The Psychology of Religion, etc. fork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918 All rights reserved T, 1918 BY THE MAOMILLAN COMPANY Set tip and electrotyped. Published, February, 1918 MY SON ROY ROSS SNOWDEN, M. D. WHO IS NOW DOING HIS BIT SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE If a man die, shall he live again? I know that my Redeemer liveth, And that he will stand up at the last upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see for myself, And my eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. JOB. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, even my Father's. On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all con tradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him. - CARLYLE. The heart has reasons which the reason does not know. It is the heart that feels God, not the reason. The primary truths are not demonstrable, and yet our knowledge of them is none the less certain. Principles are felt, propositions are proved. Truths may be above reason, and yet not contrary to reason. - PASCAL. If e'er when faith had fallen asleep I heard a voice, Believe no more/' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the godless deep, A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath, the heart Stood up and answered, I havefelt. TENNYSON. For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. PAUL. PREFACE The literature on the subject of immortality is enor mous. The question of a future life is one of the oldest and most fundamental in the history of human thought and goes back to the beginning. One of the most ancient books in existence is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and one of the oldest books in the Bible, Job, deals with this problem. All the bibles and litera tures of the world are full of it. The library shelves loaded with these books run back through the centuries and are lost in the mists of antiquity. William R. Alger's work entitled The Critical History of the Doc trine of a Future Life has appended to it Ezra Abbot's well-known bibilography of the literature of this sub ject and it contains nearly five thousand titles in eleven languages; and if it were brought up to date there would doubtless be added to it a thousand titles more. Are not these enough? Why any more? For the same reason that last year's leaves in the forest are not enough and it must put forth new leaves every year. Every subject is constantly advancing and must be con tinually written up to date. We cannot express our PREFACE thoughts in the ideas of the last generation any more than we can wear their clothes or breathe through their lungs. Alger's book itself is one of the profoundest, most comprehensive and most eloquent works ever written on this subject, yet it is nearly sixty years old and at many points is plainly out of date. This is strikingly indicated by a single and apparently trivial fact in the index of Abbot'sbibliography: it contains the name of Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather, but not the name of Charles Darwin, the grandson. A Copernican revolution has taken place since that date. The more recent books on the subject have their special points of merit, though some of them do not help much. The author has read the successive vol umes of the Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard in which a number of distinguished men, mostly psychologists, have given their views on this subject; and, as the sex ton of Christ church in Oxford said that he had heard the Bampton Lectures on th