The Hearts of Men

CHAPTER XXVII

WHAT IS EVIDENCE?

If you go to any believer in any religion – in any of the greater religions, I mean – and ask him why he believes in his religion, he has always one answer: "Because it is true." And if you continue and say to him, "How do you know it is true?" he will reply, "Because there is full evidence to prove it." He imagines that he is guided by his reason, that it is his logical faculty that is satisfied, and his religion can be proved irrefragably. And yet it is strange that if any religion is based on ascertained fact, if any religion is demonstrably true, no one can be brought to see this truth, to accept this proof, except believers who do not require it. The Jew cannot be brought to admit the truth of Christianity, let the Christian argue ever so wisely; nor will the Christian accept Mahommedanism or Buddhism as containing any truth at all, no matter how the adherents of these faiths may argue.

It is not so with most other matters. If a problem in chemistry or physics be true at all it is altogether true for every one. Nationality makes no difference to your acknowledging the law of gravity, the science of the stars, the dynamics of steam, or the secrets of metallurgy. If an Englishman makes a discovery a Frenchman is able to follow the argument. The Japanese are not Christians, but that does not in any way prevent them assimilating modern knowledge. Twice two are four all over the world, except in matters of religion.

This is a somewhat remarkable phenomenon. What is the reason of it?

I can remember not very long ago walking in a garden with a man and talking intermittently on religious topics. He was a man of great education, of wide knowledge of the world, a man of no narrow sympathies or thoughts. And as we went we came to a bed of roses in full bloom; there were red and white and deep yellow roses in clusters of great beauty, filling the air with their perfume. "To see a sight like that," he said, "proves to me that there is a God."

Proves! There was the proof.

I did not ask him how such roses would be proof of a God. I did not say that if beauty was proof of a God, ugliness would be proof of a Devil, for I know there is no reasoning in matters like that. The sight and scent awoke in his heart that echo that is called God. Not only God, nor was it any God, nor any Gods that the echo answered to. It was his God, it was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that came to him. He saw the roses, and their beauty brought to his mind the idea of God. That was enough for him. He had, as so many have, an absolute instinctive understanding of God, as clear to him as if he saw Him at midday – unreasoning because known.

"And for others," he said, "is there not ample evidence? How do you account for the world unless God made it? Have we not in the Scripture a full account of how it was made out of chaos? And has not He manifested Himself in His prophets? The truth is proved over and over again, by the prophecies and fulfilment, by the birth and death of Christ, by the miracles of Christ, by endless matters. It is so clear." And so it is to him and those like him who have in themselves the idea of God. They know. It seems humorous to remember that scientific men have thought they traced this to a savage's speculations on dreams. The speculation of a savage, forsooth, and this certainty of feeling. The Theist says: "How can you answer the questions of who made the world other than by God?" It is a question that rises spontaneously. Do you remember Napoleon the Great and the idealogues on the voyage to Egypt? They were ridiculing the idea of a Creator. And to them the Emperor, pointing to the stars above him, replied, "It is all very well, gentlemen, but who made all those?" But the Non-Theist replies that it would never occur to him to put such a question. To ask "Who made the world?" is to beg the whole question. That question which is always rising in your mind never does in ours. We would ask how and from what has the world evolved, and under what cause? "Your evidence is good only to you." The Hindu has perhaps the keenest mind in religious matters the world knows; does he accept it? Do the Buddhists accept it? Do keen thinkers in Europe accept any of this evidence? It is not so. If you have the instinct of God, then is evidence unnecessary; and if you have not, of what use is the evidence brought forward? Was anyone ever converted by reasoning? I am sure no one ever was. Religions are not proved, they are not matters of logic; they are either above logic or beneath it. To a man who believes, anything is proof. He will reason about religion in a way he would never do about other matters. He will offer as evidence, as absolute proof, what he who does not believe cannot accept as evidence at all. The religions are always the same. The believers know them to be true, and they cannot understand why others also do not know it. Their truths seem to them absolutely clear, capable of the clearest proof. And as to this evidence, this proof, there is always plenty of it. Any faith can if pushed bring evidence on some points that not even unbelievers can disprove, that is clearly not intentionally false, that if the matter were a mundane concern would probably be accepted. It is so, I think, in all religions, but here is a case from Buddhism.

In my book upon the religion of the Burmese I have given a chapter to the belief of the people in reincarnation, a belief that is to them not a belief but a knowledge. And I have given there a few of these strange stories of remembrance of previous lives so common among them. For almost all children will tell you that they can remember their former lives.

There is a story there of a child who remembered nothing until one day he saw used as a curtain a man's loin-cloth, that of a man who had died and whose clothes had, as is the custom, been made into screens. And the sight of that pattern awoke in him suddenly the knowledge that he had lived before, and that in that former life he had worn that very cloth. His former life was "proved" to him, and in consequence the fact that all men had former lives. There was proof.

When I was writing "The Soul of a People" I went a great deal into this subject of the former life, and I collected a great deal of evidence about it. I not only saw a number of people who said they could recollect these lives, but I came across a quantity of facts difficult of explanation on any other hypothesis. The evidence was honestly given, I know. But did I believe this former life, or has any European ever been convinced by that evidence? I never heard of one. Why? Because we have not the instinct. The Burman has.

They have the idea as an instinct, just as my friend held the idea of God as an instinct, and there were certain matters that awakened these instincts. They needed no more; the facts were proved to them and to those of like thought to them. But proof. What is proof? Proof, they will tell you, is a matter of evidence, it is a matter of cold logic, it arises from facts.

If that is so, why does not everyone believe in ghosts? Was there ever a subject on which there was more evidence than in the existence of ghosts? We find the belief as far back as we can go – the witch of Endor, for instance. We find the belief to-day. Not a year passes but numerous people assert that they have seen ghosts. Their evidence is honestly given; no one doubts that. The mass of evidence is overwhelming. The fact that certain people do not see them in no way invalidates the direct evidence. Yet the belief in ghosts is a joke, and a mark, we say, of feeble-minded folk.

I have myself lived in the midst of ghosts. One of my houses in Burma was full of them. Every Burman who came in saw them. Not even my servants dared go upstairs after dark without me. My servants are honest, truth-telling boys, and I would believe them in a matter of theft or murder without hesitation. I would certainly hang a man if the evidence of his being a murderer was as clear as the evidence that my bedroom contained a ghost. No absolutely impartial lawyer, judging the evidence of former life and of the existence of ghosts as a pure matter of law, but would admit that they were conclusively proved. The Burmans firmly believe both, considering them not only proved but beyond proof. No European believes in the former life, and with regard to ghosts the belief is relegated to those whom we stigmatise as the weak-minded and imaginative.

Is the explanation difficult? It does not seem to me so. For it is simply this. To believe and accept any matter it is not sufficient that there be enough evidence, the subject itself must appeal to you, must ring true, must be good to be believed. But with ghosts to most of us it is the reverse. That our friends and those we love should after death behave as ghosts behave, should be silly, unreasonable, drivelling in their ways, imbecile in their performances, should in fact act as if the next world was a ghostly lunatic asylum, is not attractive but the reverse. For a murdered man's spirit to go fooling about scaring innocent people into fits, and unable to say right out that he wants his body buried, strikes the ordinary man as sheer idiocy. And therefore men laugh and jeer. People who see ghosts may believe them; no one else will do so. Because they are not worthy of belief. If these be indeed ghosts, and they act as ghost-seers say, it is a deplorable, a most deplorable thing. And if it is a choice of imbecilities, we would prefer to believe in the lunacy of ghost-seers rather than in that of the dead, our dead.

But it is not only in matters relating to religion as the idea of God, or to the supernatural as in ghosts, that we reject evidence. We can do so also in matters that have no connection with each. For why do we refuse to accept the sea serpent? Numbers of absolutely reliable men declare they have seen it. And yet we laugh, or at best we say, "They were mistaken, it was a trail of seaweed."

All men who have lived to a certain age have learnt that there are certain facts, certain experiences not at all connected with the supernatural, which they dare not tell of for fear of being put down as inventors. They are curious coincidences, narrow escapes, shooting adventures, and so on. They have happened to us all. Who has not heard the tale of the general at a dinner party who related some such incident that had occurred to himself, and was surprised to see amusement and disbelief depicted on the faces of all around him. "You do not believe me," he said stiffly, "but my friend opposite was with me at the time and saw it too." But the friend refused with a laugh to bear witness, and the conversation changed. "General," explained the friend subsequently to his irate companion, "I know, of course, all you said was true. But what would you have? If fifty men swore to it no one would believe them. They would only have put me down as a liar too."

Just as the old woman was ready to accept her travelled son's yarns of rivers of milk and islands of cheese; but when he deviated into the truth she stopped. "Na, Na!" she said, "that the anchor fetched up one of Pharaoh's chariot wheels out of the Red Sea, I can believe; but that fish fly! Na, Na! dinna come any o' your lies over yer mither."

They are old stories, but they illustrate my point. On some matters we are ready to believe at once, on others no amount of evidence will change our opinions.

Indeed, we are too apt to assume that reason is our great guide in life. To think before you act may be wise – sometimes. But if in matters of emergency you had to stop and think first, you would not succeed very well. The great men of action are those who act first and think afterwards, and sometimes they even do the latter badly. There is the story of a man who was going abroad to be a Chief Justice, and who was addressed by the Lord Chancellor in this way: "My friend, be careful where you are going. Your judgments will be nearly always right, but beware of giving your reasons, for they will almost invariably be wrong." There are many such men.

What, then, is religious proof? If it is not founded on evidence that all can accept, on what is it founded? Why do men believe their own religion and accept the evidence of it as irrefragable, while scornfully rejecting that in favour of other religions?

The answer, I think, is this.

If you will take two violins and will tune them together, and if while someone plays ever so lightly on one you will bend your ear to the other, you will hear faintly but clearly repeated from its strings the melody of the first. For they are in harmony. But if they are not, then there will be no echo, play you never so loudly.

And so it is in matters of religion. If you are in harmony with any thought there will come the echo in your heart's strings, and you will know that it is true. But if you are not in harmony, then no matter how loudly the evidence be sounded there will be no echo there. All these ideas on which religions are built are instincts. They are of the heart, never of the head. Reason affects them not at all. These instincts are not the same with all. They vary, and so the religions that are based on them vary. They have nothing to do with reason, and therefore those of one religion cannot understand another. And they are not fixed; for the belief in the Unity of God only evolved, after many thousands of years, quite recently, and the belief in ghosts, universal among earlier people and now among the half-civilized, lingers with us only as a subject for amusement. There is no "evidence" in religion; you either believe or you don't.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE AFTER DEATH

It is two years and a half ago now that I passed through Westminster Hall, one of a great multitude. They went in double file, thickly packed between barriers of rails on either side the hall, and between where everyone looked there lay – what? A plain oak coffin on a table.

Within this coffin there lay the body of Mr. Gladstone, he who in his day had filled the public eye in England more than any other man. His body lay there in state, and the people came to see.

Emerging into the street beyond and seeing the ceaseless stream of people that flowed past, I wondered to myself. These people are Christians. If you ask them where Mr. Gladstone is now, they will, if they reply hurriedly, answer, "He is dead and in there"; but if they pause to reflect they will say, "He is in heaven. His soul is with God."

If, then, his soul, if he be with God, what are you come to see? Shortly there will be a funeral, and what will it be called? The funeral of Mr. Gladstone. But Mr. Gladstone is in heaven, not here. Surely this is strange.

"If there is anything I can do for you be sure you tell me, for your husband was my great friend." So wrote the man. And to him came her reply: "Sometimes when you are near go and see his grave where he sleeps in that far land, and put a flower upon it for your remembrance and for mine."

But if he, too, be in heaven and not there at all? If it be, as the Burmans say, but the empty shell that lies there? Why should we visit graves if the soul be indeed separate from the body? If he be far away in happiness, why go to his grave? To remember but the corruption that lies beneath?

Men use words and phrases remembering what they ought to believe. For very few are sincere and know what really they do believe. You cannot tell from their professions, only from their unconscious words and their acts.

What do these unconscious words, these acts, tell us of the belief about the soul and body? That they are separable and separate? No, but that they are inseparable. No one in the West, I am sure – no one anywhere, I think – has ever been able to conceive of the soul as apart from the body. We cannot do so. Try, try honestly, and remember your dead friends. What is it you recall and long for and miss so bitterly? It was his voice that awoke echoes in you, it was the clasp of his hand in yours, it was his eyes looking back to you the love you felt for him. It was his footfall on the stair, his laugh, the knowledge of his presence. And are not these all of the body?

Men talk glibly of the soul as apart from the body. What do they mean? Nothing but words, for the soul without a body is an incomprehensible thing, certainly to us.

And it is always the same body, not another. It is the old hand, the face, that we want. Not the soul, if it could be possible, looking at us out of other eyes. No; we want him we lost, and not another. It is the cry of our hearts.

And therefore, "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." Have you wondered how that came into the creed? It came into religion as came all that we believe in, never out of theory but out of instinct.

What is your feeling towards the dead? Is it envy that they have reached everlasting happiness? Is it gladness to reflect that they are no longer with us? Do we think of them as superior to us? Alas, no. The great and overpowering sentiment we have for them is pity. The tears come to our eyes for them, because they are dead. They have left behind them light and life and gone into the everlasting forgetfulness. "The night hath come when no man can work." That is our real instinct towards the dead. "Poor fellow." And you will hear people say, with tardy remembrance of their creeds, "But for his sake we ought to rejoice, because he is at peace."

We ought? But do we? Surely we never do. We are sorry for the dead. All the compassion that is in us goes out to them, because they are dead.

The Catholic Church has prayers for the dead. There was never a Church yet that knew the hearts of men as that Church of Rome. Prayers for the dead. Masses for the dead.

Our Protestant theories forbid such. But tell me, is there a woman who has lost those she loves to whom such prayers would not come home? How narrow sometimes are the Reformed Creeds in their refusal to help the sorrow of their people.

"In the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection." What is to arise? The disembodied soul? But you say it is already with God. What is to arise? It is the body. It is more. It is he who is dead – who sleeps; he whom we have buried there. Whatever our creeds may say, we do not, we cannot ever understand the soul without the body. Not a body, but the body. We believe not in the life of a soul previous to the body. They are born together, and they die together. If they live hereafter it must be together. For they are one.

Never be deceived by theories or professions. No one in the West has ever understood the soul without the body, no one can do so. The conception is wanting. We play with the theory in words as we do with the fourth dimension. But who ever realised either?

But with the Oriental it is different. He believes in the migration of souls. They pass from body to body. He can realise this – somehow, I know not – but he can. Those who have read my "Soul of a People" will remember that they not only believe it but know it. They are sure of it because it has happened to each one, and he can remember his former lives. This comes not from Buddhism, because Buddhist theory denies the existence of soul at all, nor from Brahminism. It is the Oriental's instinct. He does not, I think, ever realise a soul apart from any body, but he can and does realise a soul exhibited first in one body then in another, as a lamp shining through different globes.

Therefore, when a Christian tells him of the resurrection of the body he cannot understand. "Which body," he asks, "for I have had so many?" Neither can he understand a Christian heaven of bodies risen from the earth. His heaven is immaterial. It is the Great Peace, where life has passed away. That he can understand. For neither can he conceive a life of the soul without some body. When perfection is reached and the last weary body done with, then life, too, is gone – life and all passion, all love, all happiness, all fear, all the emotions that are life. They are gone, and there is left only the Great Peace.

Our heaven grows out of our instincts as his does out of his instincts. Our dead without their bodies would not be those we love, and hence our heaven, where we shall recognise each other and love them as we did. I did not understand heaven when I read books, but out of men have I learned what I wished to know. Reason alone can tell you nothing, but sympathy will tell you all things.