PAGE 13
A Difficult Case
by
Ewbert was still not so sure of that. He had thrown out that hasty suggestion without much faith in it at the time, and his faith in it had not grown since.
“I’m glad,” he began, but Hilbrook pressed on as if he had not spoken.
“I guess we’re built like an onion,” he said, with a severity that forbade Ewbert to feel anything undignified in the homely illustration. “You can strip away layer after layer till you seem to get to nothing at all; but when you’ve got to that nothing you’ve got to the very thing that had the life in it, and that would have grown again if you had put it in the ground.”
“Exactly!” said Ewbert.
“You made a point that I can’t get round,” Hilbrook continued, and it was here that Ewbert enjoyed a little instant of triumph. “But that ain’t the point with me. I see that I can’t prove that we shan’t live again any more than you can prove that we shall. What I want you to do now is to convince me, or to give me the least reason to believe, that we shan’t live again on exactly the same terms that we live now. I don’t want to argue immortality any more; we’ll take that for granted. But how is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death taken away?”
Hilbrook’s apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of Frankenstein’s. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not forsake him or deny him.
“I don’t know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on this matter,” he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.
“You didn’t go to the Book for the point you made against me. But if you go to it now for the point I want you to make for me, what are you going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different from the life we have here? I accept it all,–all that the Old Testament says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on this point?”
“Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is everything to me.”
“It isn’t to me!” cried the old man. “We are in the keeping of the divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly happy? It’s because we’re not conditioned for happiness here; and how are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience, there just as we do here.”
“There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,” Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.
“Like what?” Hilbrook demanded. “I’ve been trying to figure it, and I can’t. I should like you to try it. You can’t imagine a new passion in the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear! You can’t add to them or take away from them.” The old man dropped from his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. “I wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven’t been over the whole ground. Maybe there’s some principle that I’ve missed.” He hitched his chair closer to Ewbert’s, and laid some tremulous fingers on the minister’s sleeve. “If I’ve got to live forever, what have I got to live for?”