Inventing Afterlives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death

Yet how did the Christian afterlife loose its hold? And how, letting go, did it reframe the way people thought about their lives, so that Twain and Shaw, mocking the old Christian afterlife imagery and expectations, use their new versions still to articulate what they value most deeply? The next world was transformed by the forces revolutionizing this one: the intellectual, material, commercial, and imperial growth that set in after the 1720s, removing resignation to traditional limits, imposing capitalism’s deep disciplinary effects, diminishing the secular power of the church, shifting political power from an irresponsible court to an answerable parliament.1 Newton’s intelligently designed universe undergirded confidence in the continuing progress of human knowledge; Locke’s psychological and epistemological revolutions motivated enquiries into the sociable human mind that turned God into an aspect of man’s newly benevolent nature.² Alexander Pope sneered in the 1740s at the tendency to “Make God man’s image, man the final cause,” forgetful that he had modeled the process a decade earlier in his Essay on Man: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;/ The proper study of Mankind is Man.” A kinder, gentler, more benevolent God argued for the fulfillment, not the vanity, of human wishes, and the insatiable human desiring mocked by satirists and Epicureans, pitied by Buddhists and Stoics, became proof positive of human immortality.

These changes were not the work of skeptics, but of clerics pushed along by religious laypeople, often women unencumbered by responsibility to theological orthodoxy (like Elizabeth Phelps’s The Gates Ajar [1870] a century later irritated Twain into inspiration³). Some changes came from below, popular culture moving into mainstream theological acceptance, as the dead are put back in contact with the living and the realm of the dead opens to include friends and family, a paganism unimagined even by Peter Gay. More startlingly, the cleric-wit Laurence Sterne turned the Christian heaven into a place for literary play as if it were pagan Elysium or Hades. Adam Smith discovered the psychological structures that underlie afterlives’ invention, though he did not recognize that he had done so. He also reframed the Christian afterlife as a place where human potential frustrated in life, is fulfilled, anticipating Twain’s heaven by a century. Shifting its grip on the afterlife, Christianity found others grabbing hold, too.

What we today call “afterlife” was for the eighteenth century the future state toward which human life moved. When Samuel Johnson defines the adjective “future” in the Dictionary (1755), he uses the definite, not an indefinite, article to designate what all come to: “That which will be hereafter; to come; as, the future state.” In Johnson’s Dictionary, what seems a simple definition is sometimes a tendentious assertion. Christianity’s future state was firmly in place, but no topic was more bruited or debated than “a future state,” threading its way through poems, plays, sermons, novels, histories, disquisitions, discourses. Samuel Bowden felt obliged to prefer “hereafter” over “here” in his essay on health: “Next to the peace and welfare of our minds, our connection with a future state, and our happiness hereafter, there is nothing of greater importance than our health….”4 A future state illustrated the progress of grammar, as when George Harris attacked using apostrophes with a participle: ‘I had almost forgot to mention another Instance in which s is used as an Abbreviation, without the least Pretense for it: for Example, The Doctrine of a future STATE’s being universally taught.”⁵ When Samuel Johnson expressed a preference for an eternity of torment over annihilation, his anxious interlocutor thought he gave too much credence to annihilation’s possibility.⁶

The future state that most people expected altered beyond recognition over the century. No one noticed. The raptures of a God-centered heaven and the terrors of eternal punishment for the wicked some pushed gently aside in favor of progress that never ends, happiness that always increases, and human relationships that fulfill and sustain without disappointment forever and ever. Theorists moved God from the center of the afterlife experience and replaced him with their friends and relations; they challenged the perpetuity of hell, and they insisted that human nature required an afterlife to fulfill human wishes, the better to accommodate human desire. God’s nature guaranteed the innovations, his benevolence demanding better treatment for creatures he had once threatened with damnation. With effort, perseverance, and passion they created for themselves—and us—what Roy Porter describes as “a basically secular life with the comforts of religion superadded.”⁷ They remodeled our mansion in the sky to suit the new occupants.

So thorough was their work that even Porter forgets that religion once offered much more than comfort. It fostered guilty terrors, scrupulous anxiety, fear of eternal tortures, certainty of damnation, and complex metaphysical disquisitions, still visible in James Boswell’s dreams and Samuel Johnson’s and William Cowper’s waking hours. As late as 1757, David Hume could smile in the penultimate paragraph of his Natural History of Religion: “The comfortable views, exhibited by the belief of futurity, are ravishing and delightful. But how quickly vanish on the appearance of its terrors, which keep a more firm and durable possession of the human mind?” Boswell embodies the contest. His first, horrific memory, he wrote Rousseau in 1764, was of eternal punishment, an idea he owed to his Calvinist mother. But at eight, about 1748, he acquired a tutor who promised after this life happiness, knowledge, meetings with the great men of the past and one’s friends. The tutor was a product of what D. P. Walker memorably called “the decline of hell,” a decline that in turn provoked reaction.

Methodists and evangelicals sought to restore the traditional discomforts of religion. Others regarded desire and aspiration as signs of absence, not proofs of presence. Skeptics wondered with David Hume where the dead of all the universe’s planetary systems would be housed.8 It was too late, however, altogether to undo the complacency of a prosperous people who expected the next life to deliver even more happiness than they enjoyed in this. The men and women of the eighteenth century put in place the afterlife their grandchildren debunked, Marx as the opiate of the people and Freud as an illusion he hoped had no future.

Death itself was called into question, twice. For the first time since Gilgamesh—or the gospels—men challenged death’s inevitability. A member of the English House of Commons assured the public in 1700 that it was no longer necessary to die. His book was burned, but he wasn’t. Christ’s having died on the cross, John Asgill argued, was indeed a full and complete sacrifice—men and women could now go directly to heaven without needing to pass through death.⁹ Within a hundred years, a secular thinker posited that the progress of mind would soon make dying unnecessary. If, William Godwin argued towards the end of Political Justice (1793), people could overcome sleep and stay cheerful, death (and sexual generation) would end. No longer would human inquiry have to start all over again every thirty years.

Unlike Asgill, Godwin was somewhat embarrassed to make the claim. His chapter title provides no clue (“Of the Objection to this System from the Principle of Population”), while Asgill’s book flaunts his. Godwin also invoked a prestigious source at several removes—Benjamin Franklin, as retold by Dr. Richard Price and confirmed by Price’s nephew. Conjecturing sublimely, Godwin reports, Franklin once affirmed that mind would “one day become omnipotent over matter.” And if mind could rule over matter, why not that mind tangled in us over that matter that somehow also composes us?10 Franklin’s and Godwin’s intellectual heirs still ask that question, and Godwin’s improbable project engages many thinkers today.¹¹ Asgill has no takers.

A successful lawyer as brash and full of projects as his fellow bankrupt Defoe or any of Swift’s “moderns,” Asgill was expelled from two Houses of Commons, first the Irish, then the English, for asserting his “Whym…at a time when the rest of Mankind are so deeply engaged in Secular Affairs.” What got him into trouble was not his attack on death, “this Custom of the World to die,” but his scriptural argument.¹² “Custom it self, without a Reason for it is an Argument only to Fools”: Asgill observed that Jesus had promised “that Man by him may live for ever,” and then added, dangerously, “And this is that Magnetick which hath drawn the World after him.” That phrase was the first the Commons challenged in 1707.¹³ It turned revelation’s eternal life from a divine truth into a human motive and a mechanical device, working of necessity, deforming will. That move Asgill did not intend. His aim was God’s truth, not his own. If it is only my idea, it will “sink, and fall, and die; But if it be his that I think ’tis, it will kindle it self like a Firebrand from one to another, till it hath set the World in Arms against Death.”¹⁴

Alas, the world only waited for Asgill to die. The year after the book appeared (1701), the director of Nouvelles de la République des Lettres queried from France, “They say that Mr. Asgill the immortal man is dead; try to find out and if he is please let me know, it’s a piece of news worth printing.”¹⁵ Taking Asgill’s question seriously, Henry Grove explained in a funeral sermon (1727) why God had not simply abolished death on his first incarnation.¹⁶ Debtors’ prison saw Asgill die (1738), and there is no record of his last words. The outmoded custom of the world to die continues.

Neither Asgill nor Godwin meditates on afterlife—since the one requirement for reaching the afterlife is to die. Godwin readied himself for departure by proposing monuments to great men in an Essay on Sepulchres.¹⁷ Unlike Godwin’s compensatory fame, Asgill’s enthusiasm for eternal life before death seems quaint and a little absurd. Still, he answered anew a question Protestants had been struggling with for two hundred years and that deists’ indifference to detail laid to rest.

When did the afterlife start? At death, or at the resurrection to the Last Judgment? Catholic souls had long arrived at hell, purgatory, or heaven to await their resurrected bodies.18 Purgatory sixteenth-century Protestants had expunged as unattested in scripture, but scripture did not say what happened when the body died. Jewish scripture, as Isaac Watts observed, had no concept of a soul separate from the body or “person.” Early Christians did not expect to wait long before the general resurrection at Christ’s return.¹⁹ John Jortin mildly lamented, “The intermediate state between death and the resurrection is a subject of inquiry, upon which the scriptures have not said so much as one would wish.”²⁰ With scripture indecisive, even Luther and Calvin had disagreed.

For Luther, souls slept or died until the Last Judgment. Calvin, like God, knew they went at once to heaven or hell, but God alone knew who went where. His God knew the final disposition of souls before they were born, circumventing the Lutheran problem that scripture does not mention two judgments, so how can a soul be assigned a place without a judgment? Others argued an intermediate state, not fully heaven or hell, but very close, until the Last Judgment.²¹ Isaac Newton knew the soul slept until resurrection; Isaac Watts insisted on an intermediate state; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe reported seeing no intermediate state in his heavenly vision.²² Real questions to which people needed answers, the Athenian Oracle and other papers obliged, with a steady diet of explanations.²³ Edward Young’s wandering Protestant soul flitted about the cosmos while the body slept, playfully undetermined but awake, until it rejoined its body:

Questions about where or when troubled deists not at all. Many confidently affirmed expectations of immortality, some probably to avoid imputations of atheism, others as part of their creed.25 In English deism’s founding document, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s (1583–1648) De Veritate (Paris, 1624), future rewards and punishments appear among the five “Common Notions,” along with a supreme creator-being, divine providence, gratitude expressed through prayer, and the immortality of the soul.²⁶ Charles Blount claimed immortality in his Religio Laici (1783), replying to Dryden’s (1782). When John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, translated Seneca’s “After death nothing is, and nothing death,” Blount found self-contradiction: Rochester’s “mighty Genius is a most sufficient Argument of its own Immortality.” Anthony Collins died (1729) with hopeful expectations on his lips, according to reports: “I am told that his dying words were to this effect, ‘I have endeavoured to serve true Religion and my Country, and I hope that I shall go to a place where I shall find others that have done the same.’ ”²⁷ Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph (written at the ripe age of twenty-two) promised he would appear in “In a new/And more beautiful edition/Corrected and Amended/By/The Author.”²⁸ Voltaire, not ruling immortality altogether out when Boswell came inquiring in 1764, said, “it may be, but he knows nothing of it.”²⁹ Tom Paine assured the world (1795) that “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”³⁰ Equally hopeful were Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Morgan, and Joseph Reed.³¹

Tougher John Toland expected “never to be the same Toland more,”³² and Dr. Samuel Garth’s bedside manner was legendary. He comforted a dying actress panicked over her sins by telling her “to rest contented [for] upon his honour there was neither a God nor future State.”³³ Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (pub. 1754) reduced theism’s tenets to a supreme being, a moral order, and a created world. A future state reason could neither affirm nor deny, as some Christian apologists also argued.³⁴ (If a future state could not be proved from nature or reason, it followed that the only access to immortality was through revelation, annihilating deist pretentions to immortality.³⁵) Still, Bolingbroke disliked Lucretius’s bumptious certainty that the soul was mortal and considered that, on balance, he would rather be immortal than not: “[H]aving tasted existence, I might abhor nonentity.”³⁶ Let Lucretius parse the probability of abhorring one’s own nonentity.

Even the first avowed English atheist had immortal hopes: “For my part I firmly wish for such a future state, and though I cannot firmly believe it, I am resolved to live as if such a state were to ensue” (1782).37 Bishop Butler in 1736 revived the soul as [butter]fly, noting the analogy with the “Change of Worms into Flies, and the vast Enlargement of their locomotive Powers by such Change.”³⁸ The most scandalous French materialist made the bishop’s metaphor prettier, more sentimental, and less maggoty. Julien Offray de la Mettrie (La Homme Machine, 1747) smiled at a caterpillar’s lamenting his fate amidst the scattered skins of his peers, unable to imagine metamorphosis. Existence after death was no more imaginable to living machine-men than becoming a butterfly to a caterpillar, but equally natural and, implicitly, happy.³⁹ (A Margaret Atwood heroine observes that butterflies die.⁴⁰) If deists and atheists had such hopes, Christians would not be far behind. Christianity had already improved the afterlife by creating one, as 2 Timothy said, quoted again and again: Jesus had “brought life and immortality to light” (2 Tim. 1.10, KJV).

Deists thought they had their afterlife from reason and nature, but Dryden knew better. If Aristotle had been unable to demonstrate the soul’s immortality, Charles Blount had not reached it by pure ratiocination: “ ’Tis revelation what thou think’st discourse.”⁴¹ Dryden had in mind, alas, not deism’s unconscious appropriation of scripture, but the tradition that Noah’s descendants had handed down an afterlife after the flood. By the 1770s, what Dryden should have meant is in common circulation, in Francis Blackburne (1772) and a dialogue of the dead between Mr. Hume and Dr. Dodd (1778). Bishop William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738–41) contributed by advancing the view, controversial to some, not all, that the Jews had neither needed nor had a future state since they were under the direct care of divinity. Christian redesign pushed beyond deism on two fronts: a heated, controversial, conspicuous attack on hell’s eternal punishments, and a stealth enlargement of the pleasures of heaven that displaced God and welcomed the family.

People noticed the attack on hell. During the civil wars, the digger Gerard Winstanley and Cromwell’s chaplain Jeremiah White had challenged perpetual torments, anticipated by Fukansai Habian.42 Their antithesis, Charles II of the barren wife he would not divorce and twelve ennobled bastards, assured a future bishop, “he was no atheist, but he could not think God would make a man miserable, only for taking a little pleasure out of the way.”⁴³ Charles’s poet laureate John Dryden endorsed Origen’s heretical hope that even the devil would finally be saved in the preface to Absalom and Achitophel (1681), but spoke of “everlasting punishments” in Religio Laici (1682) where the topic carried its full theological freight. Dryden’s friend and theological consultant, John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury, regarded questioning eternal torments as improper for public discussion (1690) but thought God was not required to impose eternal punishment; he could remit, if he would.⁴⁴ In Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), a lying Christian swears by “eternal torment in the world to come” should he violate the oath he does not intend to keep.⁴⁵ John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) gave the wicked only death, not eternal torture, and readers noticed the omission, often disapprovingly.⁴⁶ In Robinson Crusoe (1719), Friday, under Crusoe’s Christian instruction, concludes that the devil too will at last be saved. “Well, well, says he, mighty affectionately, that well; so you, I, Devil, all wicked, all preserve, repent, God pardon all.” Crusoe is dumbfounded, and Defoe never attempts to give him a better argument, though he expostulates in Crusoe’s Serious Reflections.⁴⁷

Against such growing, grudging resistance, Sir William Dawes, baronet, preaching before King William in 1701 devoted a sermon to The true meaning of the Eternity of Hell Torments. There would be no mere annihilation for the wicked; they were to suffer. Nor was hell merely banishment from God’s presence; it meant active infliction of pain. Nor would there ever be any release: the wicked would not be punished for a time and then annihilated, but punished forever and ever eternally. Dawes’s five sermons between 1699 and 1701 addressed the certainty, greatness, eternity, true meaning, and objections (answered) to eternal hell-torments, a topic the future archbishop of York considered pressing, so many objections having been raised against hell’s eternal tortures. Dawes’ careful, lucid, dispassionate reasoning did not staunch the opposition. It overflowed into happiness for all.

A passionate protest against Dawesian orthodoxy, Thomas Burnet’s posthumously published De statu mortuorum et resurgentium tractatus (1720) found three translators as “Concerning the State of Departed Souls,” Matthias Earbery, answering the heresies in notes (1727), Thomas Foxton (1729) and the redoubtable John Dennis (1730, 1733, 1739).48 Tertullian and other church fathers had ranked watching the tortures of the damned high among the pleasures of the blessed in heaven. Burnet (1635?–1715) rejected such pleasures in the name of man and God: “Human Nature abhors the very Name of eternal Punishments which sets before our Eyes a Spectacle of insatiable, implacable Revenge; and this for no Manner of Profit or Hopes of Amendment…Reason, the Nature of God, and the Nature of Things, cry out loudly against it….” For Burnet, “the Nature of God” opposed a doctrine the New Testament endorsed. Abraham tells Dives he can have no cooling water in hell (Luke 16.19–31). Burnet demanded “some commodious Explication of the divine Passages, that both human Rights and divine may not at once be violated….”⁴⁹

Answering Burnet’s call, numerous divines explicated away eternal punishments, finding “eternal” a word of multiple significations and variable duration, while others testily restored the obvious reading.⁵⁰ In 1739 Edmund Curll sent the work again into the world with a brash new title, proclaiming Hell Torments Not Eternal. Argumentatively Proved, from the Attribute of Divine Mercy. God could not be less good than men thought themselves to be, who dreaded seeing friends and acquaintances in the pit.

The good headed for another place. As Peter Walmsley observes of the immensely popular Practical Discourse Concerning Death (1689, 23 editions by 1739), William Sherlock “tells his reader that ‘We are traveling to Heaven,’ never stopping to explore other options.”⁵¹ When Sherlock explored “other options,” fewer readers followed. A Discourse concerning the Happiness of Good Men, and the Punishment of the Wicked in the Next World (1704) reached only a fourth edition by 1726; A Practical Discourse Concerning a Future Judgment (1692) reached only a tenth by 1731. Evidently the word punishment in the title could cut even Sherlock’s editions by 75 percent, while judgment reduced them 50 percent.

In the 1730s, Alexander Pope twitted the saints lolling on painted chapel ceilings and the smooth sermons that “never mention Hell to ears polite.” His ladies laugh at hell and gush, “But ah, how charming if there’s no such place.”⁵² The Swiss deist Marie Huber, happy to see even the devils in heaven, thought hell useless: “Everyone is persuaded, that he himself is not of the number of the Wicked, whose Portion shall be in the Lake of Fire and Brimstone.”⁵³ Catherine Trotter Cockburn’s niece read Huber enthusiastically, incurring a gentle check from her aunt (1744), pleased by the idea “of the whole creation being happy at last,” but uneasy over equal happiness for the wicked and the virtuous.⁵⁴

Even Samuel Johnson closed an Adventurer (#107, 1753) with the observation that involuntary errors, would not be held against the dead at their judgment: “what is beyond we can only conjecture…. [yet] we can repose with comfort [on] the care of Providence, whose eye takes in the whole of things, and under whose direction all involuntary errors will terminate in happiness.”55 Fred Parker finds Johnson’s last line “a fragile, almost perfunctory gesture, too close to a conventionally pious signing-off to function as the true conclusion of such a substantial essay.”⁵⁶ Not recognizing the hopeful assertion of happiness as a new gesture, he regards it as the tired old one it has since become. He also fails to notice Johnson’s implicit exception for voluntary errors. They presumably “terminate” in the opposite of happiness, misery, and suggest Johnson’s (unfulfilled) demands upon himself.

By the late 1730s, eternal happiness was breaking out all over. Le Clerc’s letter to Bayle, published in the Life (1734), insisted that God subjected even the “impenitent” only to “moderate punishments, before he puts them in possession of eternal happiness.”⁵⁷ Pierre Cuppé’s “new system,” translated in 1743, promised to do away with hell once and for all, insisting That All Men shall be Saved, Or, Made Finally Happy (full title: Heaven Open to All Men. Or, A Theological Treatise, in which, Without unsettling the Practice of Religion, Is Solidly Prov’d, By Scripture and Reason, That All Men shall be Saved, Or, Made Finally Happy.)⁵⁸ A minister formerly in Virginia promptly denounced it as “atheistical.”⁵⁹ That “foolish book” was embraced by “our debauchees” above the Gospel, grumbled L.T.K. in the Gentleman’s Magazine a decade later.⁶⁰

David Hartley (1705–57) turned the desire for happiness into its “probability,” equally derivable from computation and from scripture. The second volume of his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations (1749) proudly announced the ultimate end of eternal hellfire and torture, though not without great punishments for the wicked until then: “Sect. V. Of the final Happiness of all Mankind in some distant future State. It is probable from Reason, that all Mankind will be made happy ultimately, 419–25…. from the Scriptures…. 426–437.” Reason and computation precede Scripture, which both crowns the end and comes in second, attached to the real proofs. Neither the world nor Hartley was yet prepared for an easy happy ending, however.

Hartley’s preface reassured his readers that the wicked would be very severely punished in the next world: “I do most firmly believe, upon the Authority of the Scriptures, that the future Punishment of the Wicked will be exceedingly great both in Degree and Duration, i.e. infinite and eternal, in that real practical Sense to which alone our Conceptions extend.”61 Others annihilated hell and the wicked, reserving happiness for the good. Word spread north, to Scotland. Alexander Robertson of Struan rejoiced over the death of one malevolent neighbor and stamped on his “native Dirt,” expecting gleefully that he was where “Proud LUCIFER takes Care of thee.” But by 1752 even he had had “A Morning Thought”:

Justice, the divine attribute supporting eternal punishment, was becoming something always already there in this life, as it had been for Socrates, Plato, and the Old Testament, and something people took charge of themselves. The failures of justice in this life had been—and remain—a powerful argument for the next. In the 1680s, one doctor of divinity required God to administer justice to keep His job description. If there were no judgment, argued Dr. Anthony Horneck, there was no God. A God who did not judge was imperfect and therefore no God at all.⁶³ The ill distribution of justice in this life demanded another where retribution and recompense would have their place. “[V]irtue,” Dryden observed, “is generally unhappy in this world, and vice fortunate: so that ’tis hope of futurity alone that makes this life tolerable, in expectation of a better” (1685).⁶⁴ The prosperity of the wicked beyond any social control makes this life “[in]tolerable.” That unhappy conclusion suggests a sense of powerlessness relative to life’s distributions.

Such powerlessness fades in the next century, after two political revolutions strengthening parliament relative to the monarchy (1689, 1714), the epistemological triumphs of empiricism (1665, 1672, 1687, et seq), and economic innovations ranging from Gregory King’s demographics to the Bank of England (1694), the national debt, and the first stock bubbles (1720). The uncontrollable, God-given hazards of agriculture were challenged by the manipulable, human-driven hazards of rapidly expanding commerce. Satirists and reformers, “projectors,” addressed the endemic injustices of a complex social order (sometimes, like Jonathan Swift, they were the same person). The epic project updating Paradise Lost declared “Happiness! Our being’s end and aim!” affirmed “An honest man’s the noblest work of God,” challenged “The right divine of kings to govern wrong,” and insisted, over and over, that “Whatever is is right” (1733–34, Pope, Essay on Man, IV, 1, 248; I, 294, IV, 394). Meanwhile, the poet’s other works found fault almost everywhere.

By the 1740s, philosophers as various as Catherine Trotter Cockburn, David Hume, and Lord Bolingbroke, Pope’s “guide, philosopher, and friend,” objected to the constant linkage of virtue and misery, vice and happiness. Hume and Cockburn agreed that happiness favored virtue in this life, and Bolingbroke objected, as did Cockburn, to whining about “[t]he imaginary unjust distribution of good and evil.”65 Anticipating the philosophers, Alexander Pope made a distinction Adam Smith echoed: If virtue lacked “a Coach and Six” (1734), perhaps virtue had not been engaged in coach-and-six-getting practices: “ ‘But sometimes Virtue starves while Vice is fed.’/ What then? Is the reward of Virtue bread?” (Essay on Man, IV, 170, 149–50). Smith explains: Virtue receives the reward appropriate to it—love and esteem—but we tend to wish it honors, riches, etc., the rewards properly speaking of business and industry, not virtue.⁶⁶ Smith’s course in natural theology at Glasgow taught that God intends human happiness in this life, and his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) reaffirmed the view, restricting God’s intention to “mankind, as well as all other rational creatures.”⁶⁷

In perhaps the most subversive of all his moves, David Hume suggested that as much justice as was to be found in this life established the limits for the justice to be expected from God. To suppose otherwise was to go beyond the evidence available.⁶⁸ It is easy to overlook what Hume suggests—that the amoral, unjust world in which we live shows us the face of God. From him we can expect no better than he has already given. If what we see of this world is what we get in heaven, mind the gap. Such a view erases hope from futurity, but returns justice to this world as responsibility. It is also what God told Job about himself from the whirlwind.

Justice had become something one should do something about. As Philip Almond suggests, imaginary reforms in the afterlife precede reforms in the worldly judicial system, and play dialectically back and forth.69 The Adventurer opined in 1752 that eternal punishment and the gibbet were equally useful, and one does not want to get rid of either.⁷⁰ Eternal punishment Henry Fielding (1707–1754) thought undeniably scriptural, but diabolical.⁷¹ As a novelist, he reformed the afterlife in the 1740s. In the 1750s as a magistrate, he proposed a parallel reform in this world’s penal system. Fielding’s Journey from This World to the Next (1743) kept the Bottomless Pit, but sent no one into it, though a thousand years earlier it swallowed the perpetrators of a massacre. Hanged felons expecting hell’s worst, Fielding’s Elysium welcomes at once to eternal happiness. A decade later, as Westminster magistrate, Fielding proposed concealing Tyburn’s entrance to eternity. Hangings should be hidden inside Newgate to diminish the festival visibility of punishment. Like his Bottomless Pit, the threat remained, but out of sight.⁷²

Rigorous proponents of both eternal punishment and the gallows found themselves insensibly shrinking both. Hanging a man for robbing another of a small sum which the man robbed can well spare, setting one man’s life, his all, against a pittance, Jeremiah Seed (1700–1747) knew was out of proportion. Still, it was necessary to counter crime, which “tends to render Property, and what is valuable in this Life, precarious, and to subvert the Peace of Society.” So he limited the numbers of the eternally condemned: “It may be likewise presumed, that the Number of the Damned will bear no more Proportion to that of the Blessed throughout the whole Creation; than a Workhouse or a Prison does to the whole Extent of a large Kingdom.”⁷³ Tidily reversing the biblical expectation that many are called, and few chosen, Seed also exchanges the broad and narrow ways. The saved have moved into a comfortable majority. By the 1760s, punishments in the future life had to be justified as not contrary to Christianity, but a necessary sanction in a “well-policied state.”⁷⁴ Hell never goes away, but its conditions are contested. Of the century’s principal religious visionaries, John Wesley’s “Methodist poison” was accused of reviving hell’s terrors,⁷⁵ while Emmanuel Swedenborg’s “comfortable views” horrified Wesley.⁷⁶

Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visionary tracts began turning up in London in Latin after his vision there in 1745, with translations from 1769. Swedish baron and scientist, Swedenborg (1688–1772) published works on metallurgy, geology, and trips to heaven that appear regularly in the libraries of members of the Royal Society and the universities.77 Having talked to a hundred thousand or so dead, he reported that the dead retained their governing passions, a body and senses, occupying beautiful houses and mansions and streets. Dead, they found themselves “living men as before, and in a similar state of mind (for immediately after death every one’s state of life is the same as when he left this world, but is successively and gradually changed either for heaven or hell) they were affected with a new kind of joy at their being alive, and said that they could scarce believe their senses; and yet wondered at their former hebetude and blindness with respect to a future state….”⁷⁸ Conjugal love flourished, with God arranging child-free marriages (251). Death takes nothing away but thoughtless matter; all vital power belongs to the spirit, which already in the body is joined with the world of spirits, though most remain unaware of their society (288, 303). William Blake briefly joined the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in 1789, and Swedenborg’s mystical analogies and correspondences are lovingly treated in McDannell and Lang.⁷⁹ As to hell, the evil choose to go there, as the good choose to go to heaven. The wicked would not enjoy heaven, argued John Norris’s discourses and Philip Doddridge’s sermons long before, quoted by Laurence Sterne in his.⁸⁰ To the sneer that heaven would be hopelessly dull, just like church, the authorized response was that the complainant would never have a chance to find out.

Passionate revivalist for hell, John Wesley was frantic to dissociate his orthodox views from Swedenborg’s “brainsick” visions, with which his Methodists were often unkindly linked.⁸¹ Worst for Wesley is hell’s decline in Swedenborg: “For, first, he quenches the unquenchable fire. He assures us there is no fire there: only he allows that the governor of it, the Devil, sometimes orders the spirits that behave ill, to be ‘laid on a bed of hot ashes.’ And, secondly, he informs you, that all the damned enjoy their favourite pleasures. He that delights in filth, is to have his filth; yea, and his harlot too! Now how dreadful a tendency must this have, in such an age and nation as this?”⁸² Hell quenched, the new benevolism extends to the next world, sympathetically averse to tortures, eternal or quotidien.

Hell revives as mercy’s oil spreads, but within a fundamentally altered discursive context that includes sentimental softening, derisive scoffing, parodic play, and paralyzing terrors. By 1791 the evangelical Hannah More was struggling to restore hell, original sin, damnation, and judgment and to disabuse her contemporaries of their “unwarranted assurance of salvation,” their illusion that held “every body to be in a safe state.”83 The “decline of hell” had been noted, and deplored.

While hell drew the attention as heaven opened to “all men,” heaven cautiously, surreptitiously began to give men and women more of what they wanted from this life in the next. Swedenborg had his converts after 1750, but the significant action took place within orthodoxy itself, protected by the extremes of Swedenborgianism and Methodism. The afterlife laid claim to self-consciousness, human relationships, reunions with loved ones, including dead children, and self-directed, intellectual activity. One by one, these arrive to take their place as if they had never been absent. Ultimately, human desire (craving) becomes in itself proof of heaven. Always a physical place, heaven’s reality was now confirmed by the human mind. The century snaps shut when Adam Smith turns the next world into a psychological projection from this one.

At the close of the seventeenth century, heaven’s raptures were intense and beyond description, everyone agreed. The available imagery was largely biblical—songs, music, angels, light, divine presence, crowns, glory. Poets saw their dead mounting, flying, carried or greeted by angels, and almost heard the heavenly choir warbling or swelling in anthems of praise, but then the brightness of the vision hid them from sight.⁸⁴ Milton, discoursing on his blindness, limns heaven as light, ambrosial odors, song, and language (Paradise Lost, Book 3). That the glories of heaven were to the living as the beauties of the earth to a blind man was a common trope in sermons. God and death were the oculist that would open human sight to the utterly unimaginable.⁸⁵

These ecstasies focused on the soul’s encounter with God and ended in that encounter. The rapt soul, lost in contemplation of the ineffable beatific vision, joined the company of angels and “just men made perfect,” whoever they might be. Bunyan sees Christian and Hopeful disappear into the New Jerusalem, newly dressed and blending into the singing throngs (The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678). In the glory of God human memories vanish into an eternal moment. When Christiana and her four sons—and their wives—follow some years later in Part Two (1684), she dreams of her husband on the other side of the river, but not of his arriving to greet her. She goes to meet the Prince. Peleg Morris, lolling in Jesus’s embrace, lives “for ever on his numerous Charms.”86 The experience of heaven was worshipful and contemplative, God-centered, human-relations erasing, atemporally transcendent, and closed to human sight. Thomas Emlyn, preaching his first sermon after his wife’s death in 1701, rivets the living dead in a vision of eternal stasis before God, Dante simplified, de-intellectualized, made purely amorous: “Where Infinite Beauty unveils its face to open view, Where it amazes, ravishes, and overcomes Myriads of attentive Spectators; Its attractive Charms, draw and fasten all their Eyes, so that they never look off from that amiable Object; they always behold him: Where they need no Books of Devotion to warm their Hearts; One view of his ineffable Glory is instead of a thousand Arguments, and wraps them up in the flames of ardent admiring love.”⁸⁷ Such visions never disappear, but they recede in favor of visions in a newer style that accommodate the progress of science and the primacy of human relationships and, especially, self-consciousness and self-knowledge.

The new glories of science and progressive knowledge were the first element added to the traditional Christian afterlife. Unlike the cosmic visions of Plato, Cicero, and Virgil, where knowledge was revealed complete, these visions emphasized the progressive unfolding of continuing knowledge to the individual (later fundamental to Swedenborg). In the late seventeenth century, the delights of increased natural knowledge in the next world still count for less than the resolution of troubling theological questions. By the first decades of the eighteenth century, theological agonizing has been replaced by more general intellectual curiosity about the cosmos to be gratified in the next world. In such thinkers as Thomas Burnet and Sir Isaac Newton, the older theology-first pattern still holds, while the more popular and accessible Micrographia (1665) of Robert Hooke points out another direction, moving from theology to natural knowledge. Moving into the next world, science for the first time realized its own potential for infinite progress.

Theorizing in Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681) that the flood caused the present irregular, mountainous, malformed world, Thomas Burnet maintained that at the millennium the initial perfect, egg-shaped world of Paradise would be restored. Burnet had biblical warrant in Isaiah, set to music in Handel’s Messiah, 1742. When the valleys will be exalted, the mountains made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plane, the world will again be round and smooth as an egg. Burnet’s blessed will spend their time in “ ‘Devotion and Contemplation’, the ‘publick devotions’ being very splendid and sometimes culminating in a visible appearance of Christ in the sky.” The questions to which they long for answers will include whether Satan and the souls in hell can hope for salvation.88 Although Burnet gloried in “being exalted above all the Planets…view[ing] the boundless Ocean of the Universe, and innumerable Globes of Worlds, floating along the vast Stream of the Sky, each fill’d with its proper Inhabitants,” he was more concerned with the fate of sinful souls in the afterlife. He challenged eternal punishment, as we have seen, and demanded a better “Explication of the divine Passages.”⁸⁹

So, too, Newton’s discoveries turned him from natural philosophy to theology, to the study of the prophecies of Daniel and the structure of the tabernacle as a model for the universe.⁹⁰ A mortalist who held that the soul dies or sleeps until the trumpet sounds for the Last Judgment, Newton argued the sleep would seem only an instant. He also suspected the awakening was coming sooner than anyone anticipated. Eliminating the only biblical evidence against mortalism, Newton noted that Dives and Lazarus was a parable and re-pointed Christ’s words on the cross to the Good Thief, “I say to you today you shall be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43; Dives 16:19–31). Usually read as a promise that the thief and Jesus will be in paradise today, the statement Newton observed makes better sense pointed as “I say to you today.” Jesus himself, after all, would not be in paradise for more than a month (forty-four days), according to the same gospel author (Acts 1:3, 9–11). Anti-mortalists often argued that deferring judgment until the resurrection put it too far off to deter bad behavior. Surely God would forget about misdeeds in all that time, the hypothetical atheist reassured himself.⁹¹ Newton, however, had evidence that the last trump would soon sound.

The book of Daniel promised that at the end time “knowledge shall be increased.” When had knowledge ever increased as much as the late seventeenth century, crowned with Newton’s own Principia Mathematica (1687) and Opticks (1672, 1704)? If the structure of the universe had been revealed to Newton, as it had been, then the end foretold in Daniel was near: “seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Dan. 12:4). Taking the application personally, Newton turned back to the book and set about decoding Daniel.92 Intellectual progress led Newton back to specific theological questions to which he sought another key, like the one he had discovered for the cosmos.

By contrast, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) adapted a biblical metaphor to abandon biblical for natural, secular knowledge. Newton’s antithesis, Hooke’s concern is this world, not the next, and he makes an equally startling claim for the progress of knowledge. Human efforts will re-create paradise. Telescopes revealed new worlds at a distance; microscopes things near but hitherto invisible. On every scale, he observed, “there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open’d, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the antient Astronomers were utterly Strangers…” Then, in a very curious metaphor, he proposes reversing the curse of Adam and the sin of Eve by humanity’s own intellectual efforts. “And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.”⁹³ Re-enacting the steps of the fall—behold, contemplate, taste, [share]—man achieves his own salvation by his own actions via “natural knowledge.” Such knowledge is ethically neutral: it is not the moral knowledge of good and evil once forbidden. The biblical metaphor leaves theology behind as man remakes his own paradise.

In the afterlife, Hooke’s progressive knowledge was most influentially elaborated by Joseph Addison, as Jacob Sider Jost observes.94 In periodical essays in The Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian (1709–1714), Addison and Richard Steele pursued immortality. Mingling moral and intellectual improvement, Addison (1711) proposed “the perpetual Progress” of the soul to “the Perfection of its Nature, without ever arriving at a Period in it.” This unfinishable business continues from this life into the next, ever in motion, ever drawing nearer to Godhead. In endless “Accessions” as the Soul adds “Virtue to Virtue, and Knowledge to Knowledge,” it ever more closely resembles God himself, without quite ever becoming God, “like one of those Mathematical Lines that may draw nearer to another for all Eternity, without a Possibility of touching it.”⁹⁵ Both the metaphor and perpetual progress resonated.

Swedenborg developed a similar image in his Divine Providence, 1764. As man becomes more and more conjoined to the Lord, his conjunction nearer, his wisdom and happiness greater, he himself becomes at once more his own and the Lord’s. Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of Chester, admired Addison on the “perpetual progress of the soul towards perfection” as late as 1783,⁹⁶ and the 1793 English Review preferred Porteus and Addison to a less gifted writer on the future state: “We could not avoid the recollection of Bishop Porteus’s more persuasive eloquence on this animating subject. Nor could we help recurring to the beautiful papers of Addison on the restless nature and progressive advancement of the powers and faculties of man in the scale of perfection.”⁹⁷ God, it may not be noticed, has slipped from view as man advances, like the moon at midday.

In Thomas Tickell and Henry Grove, frequent contributors to The Spectator, Addison found writers ecstatic before the “spacious firmament on high” and its role in the afterlife. Henry Grove (1684–1738), a dissenting minister Samuel Johnson esteemed, Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s biographer, rejoiced in the possibilities for understanding the natural world created by an eternity of investigation. Passionate for new discoveries, the devout Grove inadvertently transforms whole-souled worship into a balancing act, hierarchy into equilibrium. When he finally collapses in awe before his God, Grove has just been extracting from His brain His cosmic plans. Tonson, the bookseller, included Grove’s Spectator #635 (1714) in his Addisonian compilation Evidences of the Christian Religion (1730).⁹⁸

Hearing no hymns sounding among the spheres, Grove moves through the stars as rapidly as Milton’s angels (or Twain’s Stormfield racing comets). A later writer will affirm technically that the new body acquired in death is not subject to gravity, “we shall transport ourselves from one world to another, with a celerity perhaps equal to that of light.”99 To all the scientific questions with which God had taunted Job from the whirlwind, about things he did not know and never could know, Grove expects answers:

[I]t pleases me to think that I who know so small a portion of the Works of the Creator, and with slow and painful Steps creep up and down on the Surface of this Globe, shall ere long shoot away with the Swiftness of Imagination, trace out the hidden Springs of Nature’s Operations, be able to keep pace with the heavenly Bodies in the Rapidity of their Carreer [sic], be a Spectator of the long Chain of Events in the natural and moral Worlds, visit the several Apartments of the Creation, know how they are furnished and how inhabited, comprehend the Order and measure the Magnitudes, and Distances of those Orbs, which to us seem disposed without any regular Design, and set all in the same Circle, observe the Dependance of the Parts of each System, and (if our Minds are big enough to grasp the Theory) of the several Systems upon one another, from whence results the Harmony of the Universe. In Eternity a great deal may be done of this kind.¹⁰⁰

Indeed, a great deal may be done in eternity. Grove turns to God only after his explorations of the cosmic system are accomplished, acknowledging God as the greatest joy, though now indistinctly known. Grove wants natural knowledge, and when he collapses in rapture before the divine presence, he has just been picking God’s brain. He has been seeing what God sees, not seeing God:

All created Glories will fade and die away in his Presence. Perhaps it will be my Happiness to compare the World with the fair Exemplar of it in the divine Mind; perhaps to view the original Plan of those wise Designs that have been executing in a long Succession of Ages. Thus employed in finding out his Works, and contemplating their Author! how shall I fall prostrate and adoring, my Body swallowed up in the Immensity of Matter, my Mind in the Infinitude of his Perfections! [emphasis added].¹⁰¹

Being swallowed up, ordinarily the first event on arriving in heaven, is deferred by Grove for some time. The resurrection is curiously out of sight, his “Body” confounded with “the Immensity of Matter.”

Characteristically, women authors often advance innovations, including the progress of mind, before their male counterparts. Mary, Lady Chudleigh in 1710 had already promised Sophia, the electress of Brunswick, that in the future state, “Knowledge, in all Probability, will be everlastingly progressive.” Noting that clouds are made of water, “the liquid Plains of Air,” she too expects to range “thro’ all the Realms on High,” “Where something new would still delight,/ Something my Knowledge still improve.”102 Joseph Boyse in Dublin in 1724, discoursing on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell, anticipated Twain’s pleasures in meeting the inhabitants of other worlds, perfecting “our souls in rational and intellectual powers…[and enjoying] the most vigorous Exercise of those perfected Powers on the most noble and agreeable Objects.” Unluckily for contemporary prejudices against Irishmen, he also observes that progress in knowledge will at last become easy, no longer tedious and disappointing.¹⁰³ Bishop Butler hoped to increase his acquaintance from human beings to “other Orders of virtuous Creatures, in that future State.”¹⁰⁴

Scientists enlisted. Joseph Priestley saw evidence for a future state in the positive circumstances of this one: “things are evidently in a progress to a better state. There is some reason, therefore, to expect that this melioration will go on without limits.”¹⁰⁵ Charles Bonnet promised that “our eyes will then unite in themselves the qualities of microscopes and telescopes,” and Newton smile at his own accomplishments as if they were those of a child.¹⁰⁶ Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel (1830) features strange tubular creatures who exceed us in knowledge, and so on to Twain and his eight-legged blue creatures. As William Kenrick has it in 1759, science is Jacob’s ladder, “Reaching, its foot on earth, to heav’n.”¹⁰⁷

Not only did the soul progress in knowledge and towards perfection, but the soul’s progress itself argued for the existence of a future state. If this progressively improving being simply fell unfinished into annihilation, what, Addison asked, was the point? “Are such Abilities made for no Purpose?…can we believe a thinking Being, that is in a perpetual Progress of Improvements, and traveling on from Perfection to Perfection, after having just looked abroad into the Works of its Creator, and made a few Discoveries of his infinite Goodness, Wisdom and Power, must perish at her first setting out, and in the very beginning of her Enquiries?”108 As Eliza Haywood explained, in The Female Spectator (1745–46), whether a future state offered two places, one happy and the other miserable, or “a Multiplicity of Worlds” to travel through, everyone agreed “from the Nature of God, and the Nature of our own Ideas, this Spot we now inhabit is but the first Stage the Soul has to make in her eternal Progress.”¹⁰⁹ Henry Home, Lord Kames, agreeing that human improvement knew “no assignable limits,” proposed that even abstracting from revelation, “there is great probability, that the progress begun in this life will be completed in some future state.”¹¹⁰ The Gentleman’s Magazine affirmed in 1800, “this constant progression towards perfection, is a strong argument for futurity.”¹¹¹ If God’s justice continued to require a compensatory, retributory future state, man’s nature and desires began to put in a stronger claim.

If God is good and great and just, he will not have created a useless, frustrated, unhappy creature. Addison found evidence for immortality in the soul’s hopes and feelings: “its Passions and Sentiments, as particularly from its Love of Existence, its Horrour of Annihilation, and its Hopes of Immortality.”¹¹² The hope itself was evidence. Benjamin Martin concluded “with certainty” a future state, “from natural inclination and desire of immortality and an unavoidable concern for what is to come hereafter, implanted in all men.” Man was “designed for a better and more worthy State of Life, than the best he can enjoy in this World.”¹¹³ David Hartley swelled the chorus, arguing from the desire for immortality and the horror of annihilation: “All other Appetites and Inclinations have adequate Objects prepared for them: It cannot therefore be supposed, that this Sum total of them all should go ungratified.”¹¹⁴

As the ill distribution of justice in this world required another, more just world to come, so the ill-adaptation of man to this world meant that there had to be another to which he was better suited. William Kenrick (1729/30–1779) anticipated John Stuart Mill’s complaints, that man sacrifices “ease, health, and life…to pursuits that are of no use to him merely as an animal; but, on the contrary, serve to promote the intellectual perfection of his species; hence [these are] apparently intended for the enjoyment of a state of existence, to which those faculties are adapted.” “[C]ertainty of a future state” is ours.115 Catherine Macaulay Graham (1731–91) invoked the powers of imagination, ranging over past and future, which could so easily have been spared “if they had not been necessary principles of knowledge and action, to render man capable of a more enlarged and more uninterrupted happiness in a future state of existence.” Otherwise, “those faculties of the mind,…on a state of positive mortality seem to have been given as a curse, rather than a blessing….”¹¹⁶ The British Apollo may have put it best, as early as 1740. Asked what proof there was of a future state from “reason or the nature of the thing?” the oracle replied firmly, “We may gather the immortality of the soul, from our very desire of an immortal state…. [I]f we shall not enjoy that immortality we so earnestly pant after, we, tho’ the noblest workmanship of the Almighty Artificer, are of all creatures the most miserable. For if the soul perisheth with the body, what has our Creator done, but tortur’d us with desires that shall never be satisfy’d; rack’d us with wishes that have no foundation, and tantaliz’d reason with fruitless longings.”¹¹⁷ St. Paul (1 Cor. 15:19: If the dead are not resurrected, “we are of all men most miserable”) merges with a psychology he never imagined, and God’s morality demands human immortality.

Samuel Johnson concurred. His Adventurer #120 feels the psychological pains suffered in this life, tentatively opens to the gratifications of the next, and feeds the illusory expectation that whatever is will someday be right:

It is scarcely to be imagined, that INFINITE BENEVOLENCE would create a being capable of enjoying so much more than is here to be enjoyed, and qualified by nature to prolong pain by remembrance and anticipate it by terror, if he was not designed for something nobler and better than a state, in which many of his faculties can serve only for his torment, in which he is to be importuned by desires that never can be satisfied, to feel many evils which he had no power to avoid, and to fear many which he shall never feel: there will surely come a time, when every capacity of happiness shall be filled, and none shall be wretched but by his own fault.¹¹⁸

A few skeptics declined to sign on to the argument that wishing made it so, regarding the wish as grounded in an insight into God’s purposes that they were unwilling to claim. So Aaron Hill (1685–1750) was willing to leave the future life “among the SECRET ‘THINGS which belong unto GOD;’ having, in this Case, no sufficient Foundation on which may be built any thing more certain than Conjecture, which may perhaps, afford Means of wishing, but none of proving.”119 William Kenrick also acknowledged that wishing does not make it so, “Whate’er in hope be heaven’s intent,/ This is, my friend, no argument.” Unlike Hill, he did not rest there, but moved to a peculiarly unattractive version of the butterfly argument:

Although England’s first atheist, Matthew Turner affirmed merely skepticism, not rejection, of the amiable possibility of eternal life, he did hold Priestley’s syllogism of wishes “inadmissible or inconclusive.” Priestley proposed, as item 27, “A wish produced by nature is evidence of the thing wished for, but a future state is wished for, therefore there is evidence of a future state.”¹²² The atheist was not convinced. Ultimately, desire breaks loose from God, and in his notes to Hellas (1822) Percy Shelley affirms of the “inextinguishable thirst for immortality” that the mind is its own, but also its only, evidence: “this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being”¹²³ (emphasis added).

Human wishes had once been highly suspect in affairs of the afterlife. The Commons had reacted with horror, hostility, and expulsion to Asgill’s suggestion that Jesus’s promise of eternal life was the “Magnetick which hath drawn the World after him.”124 John Boys recognized the sensual appeal of the ancients’ Elysium by contrast with the “spiritual” gratifications of the true afterlife (1661). Sir Robert Howard warned in 1694 that heathen priestcraft had made the next world resemble this, so as to control men’s minds, a practice continued by the church of Rome to this day: “the Notions they taught concerning the Other World were made sutable to what is seen and familiar to us in this that they might be more easy for Mens Digestion.”¹²⁵ Muslims in particular indulged their alleged sensuality in “Turkish Pleasures” and “impure delights.”¹²⁶ In Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1722), a dead Muslim woman enjoys multiple delightfully fulfilling sensuous experiences (Letter 141). The episode is the most original in the volume.

As late as 1734, Pope sympathizes with the Indian who expects to be restored to the life of which Christians have deprived him (epigraph above). The Indian hunts freely in eternal fields, his dog by his side, his liberty restored. What Pope allowed, and praised, in the Indian, he mocked in the desiring, bibulous Christian: “Go, like the Indian, in another life/ Expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife….” (Essay on Man, IV, 177–78). The bottle lets us know how much to disapprove, but is the wife as unlikely and unsuitable for heaven as the dog? An Anglican dean in 1871, cited by McDannell and Lang, perhaps remembered Pope when he condemned a soothing novelistic afterlife as “worthy rather of a Red Indian’s expectation, than of a Christian’s.”¹²⁷ The attractive promise of eternal life comes second in Gibbon’s list of five causes for Christianity’s success in spreading through the Roman empire.¹²⁸ What changes is orthodox acceptance of wishes.

At his most advanced, Addison had suggested, and Tickell reformulated as a “maxim,” complete gratification of desire: “Our Happiness in this World proceeds from the Suppression of our Desires, but in the next World from the Gratification of them.”¹²⁹ Yet Addison still had desires he knew would not be gratified because they would no longer be desires, for example, hankering after literary immortality, “when his Body is mixed with the common Mass of Matter, and his Soul retired into the World of Spirits” (emphasis added).¹³⁰ Immortality still means losing individuality and human ambitions to achieve perfect happiness. Clerics pushed further.

Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, repudiating the tentativeness of Pope’s Essay on Man, demanded wishes be fulfilled without specifying which.131 Others turned the restless, endless, dissatisfied desiring mocked by Lucretius and Juvenal, cured by the Buddha, into a source of happiness in the next world. Such dissatisfaction is often assumed to be a new discovery owing to capitalism. It is a very old discovery attributable to leisure and hierarchical divisions of labor. What is new to capitalism, and the eighteenth century, is the positive revaluation of insatiability. By 1783, the bishop of Chester thought it unreasonable that we should “be for ever in search of happiness, without arriving at it, either in this world or the next.” So he supposed the soul was assured, through God’s moral perfections, of “another state of existence, where it will find that satisfaction it looks for here in vain; and where hope will at length be swallowed up in enjoyment.”¹³² It remained for Hugh Blair, Presbyterian divine, friend of David Hume, tossed and gored (but also admired) by Samuel Johnson, to note the conflict between repose and activity, God and progress, perfect, immobile content and the actual conditions of human happiness.

Blair shifts heaven towards the human need for activity, rejecting for the next world the end of our wishes and the perfect enjoyment of repose (the exhausted laborer’s desire). “Our enjoyment consists in pursuit, not attainment. Attainment is with us, for most part, the grave of pleasure. Had we no object to excite fresh activity, and to impel us to new toils, human life would quickly stagnate in melancholy indolence.”¹³³ Restlessness, dissatisfaction, insatiability, familiar satiric objects throughout the centuries, the basic psychology of consumer capitalism: these evidence futurity’s active blessings. Blair has turned Johnson’s “hunger of imagination that preys incessantly upon life” into a proof of eternity and the character of its happiness.

Yet certain gratifications remain unnamed by Addison, blanks unfilled by Young: reunions with friends and loved ones, children or spouses. The Spectator prized the male friendships hinted by the Odyssey’s afterlife, but did not notice familial ones. Addison rejoiced that Achilles appears with Patroclus, delighted that friends continue to know each other in the next world (Od. 11.576, IX, 412; Tatler # 154), but he praised Fenelon for his account of the inner raptures of the blessed, not their relationships with others.¹³⁴

The period lacked no concern for dead children. Fathers and mothers lamented dead infants and older children in verse and diaries. Steele turns a one-month old drowned in a cold-water bath into a guardian spirit overlooking others’ welfare, living out the time he would have lived.135 Happy to be dead, he remembers his mother only as “a fine young Lady,” but he communicates with Mr. Tatler, not with any members of his own family. Addison ignores the fate of dead infants in his assessment of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6 (Tatler, 1710, #154). Although he echoes Milton’s “Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth/Unseen,” this world and the next do not communicate. A novel’s heroine from 1757 explains why: “There can be no Certainty that we shall know one another in a future State.”¹³⁶

An afterlife without friends, relations, and beloved now seems unimaginable. Dante found Beatrice. Yet she turns away from him to the vision that then swallows Dante up too. Revelation-instructed Protestants absorbed in worshiping God in a theocentric heaven neither look for their friends on arrival nor concern themselves with their still living friends below. As the best-selling William Sherlock put late seventeenth-century orthodoxy, “Good Men will have no Friends, no Relations in the other World, but those who are truly good, who are Members of the same Mystical Body of Christ, the Children of God.”¹³⁷

In 1727, Jonathan Swift entertained no hopes as his friend Stella (Esther Johnson) lay dying. The dean of St. Patrick’s lamented to his friend Alexander Pope, “I have often wished that God almighty would be so easy to the weakness of mankind, as to let old friends be acquainted in another state; and if I were to write an utopia for heaven, that would be one of my schemes. This wildness you must allow for, because I am giddy and deaf.”¹³⁸ As a priest condoling the bereaved, Swift suggested no consolations for loss except loving less and never promised that loved ones would be restored to sight or consciousness by a loving, commiserating God. A generation later, when Henry Fielding’s Mr. Allworthy fantasies meeting his dead wife never again to part in Tom Jones (1749), some neighbors suspect his sanity and sincerity, others his religion (Bk I, chap. 2).

Yet as Stella lay dying, a widowed female dissenter, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, was writing Swift’s utopia. As Lady Chudleigh anticipated Addison and Mary Astell corrected John Norris, paralleling love of our neighbor with love of God, Rowe created an afterlife as visionary, and more influential, than Swedenborg’s. What she called “Fairy-Tale” in 1728 would be adopted as orthodoxy by Anglican and dissenting divines in the 1760s, scriptural warrants duly found.

In Friendship in Death: Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living, Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) confidently answered—in fiction—the intensely painful questions believing Christians barely dared ask themselves in 1728. Will we see our loved ones again? Will we know them in the next world? Are we present to them in this? Are they still with us, though departed? What of my dead child? Is my child saved or damned or lost forever? Will I see my baby again? All but the last, which (childless) she does not consider, Rowe wipes away. We will see our dead, and they watch us now; human love animates the heavens, and a dead child is happier than if he had lived. Rowe’s curious text answered every question, soothed every loss, and addressed every desire, except that for reunions with dead children. That demand she left to the fathers of young dead daughters.

Published anonymously in 1728, the year after Stella died, with a bearded scholarly male as frontispiece, Rowe’s book reached a second edition within the year, and “almost sixty” editions by 1800.139 A well-known poet, she concealed her authorship through several editions. A volume of verses as “Philomela” had appeared in 1696, and in 1720 Alexander Pope affixed “On the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe” (as “Upon the Death of Her Husband” by Mrs. Elizabeth Singer), to the second edition of his Eloisa to Abelard. Her biographer observes that the Bibliothèque Britannique in its account of Friendship in Death “were not only ignorant of her name but mistook even the sex of the writer.”¹⁴⁰ Its last edition, before its late twentieth-century revival as a woman’s text, was 1808.¹⁴¹ Victorians did not require Rowe’s reassurance: her work had been done.

Comical and classical letters from the dead to the living had long been popular.¹⁴² Rowe’s abandon Elysium and Hades for the Christian heaven. Eight of her twenty letters embrace heavenly amorous passions. A lover weaving garlands awaits the death of his beloved; another looks forward to reunion with his wife. A young woman confides to a female friend that she has taken up with her living friend’s dead, golden-lute-strumming brother, “your charming Brother, gay as a Cherubim.” Love unrequited or unspoken on earth blossoms: “Hope and languishing Expectation are no more, and all Desire is lost in full and compleat Fruition” (37–38). As Peter Walmsley observes, Milton’s angels are Rowe’s source for human lovers who “embrace with a pleasure more intense than earthly coupling: ‘union of pure with pure/Desiring.’ ”¹⁴³ “[T]he Almighty” is deferred to the third letter, from a child to his mother. Only in the seventh and fifteenth letters does divine vision, ultimately beyond description, outrank reunions with loved ones. A dead husband assures his wife that reunion with him will be “much the smallest Blessing of this Place” (45). Two letters undertake the stellar and scientific explorations enjoyed by Rowe’s biographer-to-be, Henry Grove.

Missing from Rowe (as from that later visionary Emanuel Swedenborg) are reunions with dead children, although the third letter features a dead child. Rather than promising reunion, however, Rowe reproduces the inscriptions on infant tombstones. The child is happier than the grieving parents left behind. Now far advanced in knowledge and wisdom, the child advises his mother to stop mourning. He is no longer the lost bouncing baby the mother would reclaim.144

Before Rowe, Queen Anne had been consoled for the death of William, Duke of Gloucester, her last surviving, eleven-year-old child, by Mary, Lady Chudleigh and Edward Young. Chudleigh royally peoples heaven: the child recognizes Charles I, his grandfather the martyr; Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots; and his aunt Mary II, “the fair Maria”: “All these the lovely Youth carest,/And welcomed him to their eternal Rest.” Chudleigh promised herself reunion with her dead mother-in-law, and the enjoyment of “new…unexperienced Charms” not in divine, but “in her Mother’s, and her Daughter’s Arms,” her body laid in “long Tranquility” beside “their dear Relicks.”¹⁴⁵ Marking a gender difference, Young carefully defers meetings to the Last Judgment, when orthodox theology allows them, and limits the encounters to Charles I and Anne’s spouse and children. Young’s Poem on the Last Day, named in Rowe’s dedication of Friendship in Death, sees Queen Anne sailing beyond the third heaven, until the “Heaven of Heavens” opens and angels receive her.¹⁴⁶ The judge of all compares her grandfather Charles I’s “Scarlet of a circling Wound” with his own wounds, while Anne gathers the nuclear family:

Giles seems to have been actively seeking such poems, in which mourning fathers furnish a genre later associated with women. Charles Dickens, looking for material to recommend to mourning friends, found only Fielding’s episode and embellished it. The daughter Fielding embraces Dickens describes as making a wreath for her dead daddy at the moment she is found. Boswell’s daughter Veronica performed a service neither Fielding nor Dickens imagined. Asked by her father what she would do if she were to die and go to heaven and see her father shut out in the bleak wastes beyond the heavenly city, she said she would go to God and ask him to let her father in. Boswell was greatly relieved.¹⁵⁰

Whether friends would know each other in heaven remained controversial, finding its tipping point and turning over into theological orthodoxy only in the 1760s. Rowe ended her volume with the devastating Thoughts on Death Translated from the Moral Essays of the Messieurs du Port Royal, unidentified as Pierre Nicole’s (published 1671–78). For Walmsley, Nicole marks a “startlingly different” view of the afterlife contrasted self-consciously with Rowe’s own.151 Another interpretation is possible. Nicole explains why Rowe wrote her book: what she felt and what she sought to allay by writing. He lays out the agony of separation and the necessary dependence of the self on others ripped apart by death.

Nicole catches the imbrication of self (soul) and other. Self is annihilated when its other vanishes, its propensity for love unsupported. When the soul loses what it loved, “[S]he loses all, finds nothing, all sinks under her, all vanishes, and disappears for ever…. ’Tis a terrible Fall of the Soul, by a sudden Removal of all its Supports;…’tis an infinite Void, by the Annihilation of all that fill’d it…’tis a dreadful Desolation, by the Want of all Consolation; ’tis a cruel Rupture, which violently rends the Soul from every Object of its Love.”¹⁵² Human souls are not made to be alone. The soul always needs some “foreign Support. It was form’d to know and love, but finding nothing within sufficient to satisfy these Inclinations, it is forced with some other Objects to fill the Void it finds in it self.”¹⁵³ For Nicole as for Rowe, divine love makes up all losses, but Rowe reaches out, restoring those lost.

In his Complaint: or, Night Thoughts (1742–46), Edward Young approaches Rowe’s “fairy tale” communication with the dead. In interrogatives, he hopes for “hovering shades…their silent, soft address, /Their posthumous advice, and pious prayer?”¹⁵⁴ Such intimations authorized Samuel Johnson’s careful wishes for his dead wife’s attentions and presence in 1752: “if thou hast ordained the souls of the dead to minister to the living” (emphasis added).¹⁵⁵ When Rowe died, she assured several friends she would see them in heaven, and hoped to be the first to greet the countess on her arrival, but said nothing of meeting her husband or her father, under whose stone she asked to be buried.¹⁵⁶

E. Derek Taylor has brilliantly laid out how complex and ambiguous a destination is the heaven in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). Wavering between an afterlife that was all beatific vision and one where friends knew each other, Sarah Chapone badgered Richardson as to what doctrine he held, and Richardson did not answer. Although he had twice printed Rowe’s Friendship in Death in the 1740s, Richardson’s novel craftily intimates both that God is all in all and that individuals meet again never to part. Clarissa withdraws from the world to die, creating from strangers a community of virtuous souls. The “just men made perfect” one meets in heaven are not the people one has known and loved in this life. Yet again, Clarissa writes of meetings beyond the grave in what become, once she dies, her letters from the dead to the living.¹⁵⁷

Eliza Haywood in her History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), urging deaths be accepted with “perfect resignation to the decrees of providence,” is more willing than Richardson to entertain “a wild idea.” The dead may do what Rowe’s do, watch us now and wait for us, planning to meet us on our arrival: “though it may seem perhaps a wild idea, in supposing a possibility that he may be still a witness of our actions, be pleased at our remembrance of him; and, at the hour of our dissolution, even be appointed our conductor to the celestial mansions….”158 In these careful formulations, the dead themselves are not represented as the goal. The reunion is not the end; the dead merely lead the way further in to heaven, like Dante’s Beatrice. Still, they are encountered first, and the narrative stops with the reunion.

Uncertainty prevailed alongside hope. Samuel Johnson assured readers of the Idler (1759) that “Reason” stops “at the grave.” That did not, however, prevent him from hoping that the living might still be the objects of “attention and kindness of those who…are now receiving their reward.”¹⁵⁹ In Rasselas (1759), Nekayah looks no further beyond the grave than to see her beloved Pekuah again and to “enjoy [her] friendship.”¹⁶⁰ Yet when Boswell asked about the future state in 1772, Johnson would not go beyond Henry More and scripture. He affirmed no certainty about future relationships, except that everyone talked of it: “Then, Sir, they talk of meeting our relations: but then all relationship is dissolved; and we shall have no regard for one person more than another, but for their real value. However, we shall either have the satisfaction of meeting our friends, or be satisfied without meeting them.”¹⁶¹

By 1772, when “they” were all talking of “meeting our relations,” two secular and two clerical writers had founded their arguments on three separate faculties of the human mind: the passions and affections, self-knowledge through others, and memory. The secular pair were Richard and Elizabeth Griffith, publishing their own courtship letters, and the female character led.

Richard and Elizabeth Griffith’s Frances spoke first, for the passions. In the Griffiths’ popular, flatly titled A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances (1757, 1761, 1770, 1786), Frances knows “there can be no Certainty that we shall know one another in a future State.” She is not, however, willing to rest in uncertainties, especially with Addison’s argument from progress in hand. Using God’s nature to displace God, she argues that passions must retain their human objects. Just as God’s goodness requires that his creatures have eternal life, so his wisdom requires that we continue to enjoy our passions in the next life. Those passions and attractions attach themselves not to God, but to the persons who elicited those emotions: “I think it is arraigning the Wisdom of the Almighty, to imagine that he should form us with Passions, and Attractions for each other, (which more frequently produce Misery, than Happiness, in this Life) and let those strongest, noblest Faculties of the Soul perish with the Body in the Grave. No——it cannot be; they were ordained to answer higher Ends, to make the everlasting Happiness of his Creatures, and will exist to all Eternity” (emphasis added). Judgment requires memory, and memory engages affections: “Besides, we are taught to believe, that we must render an Account of our past Lives. Sure ‘Love is the informing, active Fire, that kindles up the Mass;’ and is it not the highest Absurdity to suppose, that, when in a State of Perfection, we shall remember the Effects, but forget the Cause?—”162 The “higher ends,” “everlasting happiness,” “the Cause” ought to be divinity itself. Instead, passion for “each other” displaces the divine. Both Frances and her Henry are willing to take her argument for good divinity. The original ending of the novel, Henry’s five letters challenging eternal punishments vanish in the second edition, but Frances’s arguments stand. Two divines supply, within the decade, the scriptural evidence Frances neglected.

In 1766, the Anglican William Dodd (1729–1777) insisted that we would know our loved ones in the next world, Mutual Knowledge in a future State; Offered as an Argument of Consolation under the Loss of Friends. Other funeral sermons, including Isaac Watts’ Death and Heaven forty years earlier, had expressed the hope that friends would know one another; Tillotson had affirmed it in passing.163 Bunyan’s Great-heart hoped it in the gynocentric second part of Pilgrim’s Progress, but Dodd asserted the position as if it were proved and made it focal. The sermon had all the conviction communicated by repeating oneself: Dodd had already made the argument in The Visitor, 1764, reprinted from The Ledger, 1760–61.¹⁶⁴ The next year, 1767, the dissenter Richard Price (1723–1791, Godwin’s authority against death, Edmund Burke’s nemesis-to-be) chimed in with his third dissertation On the Reasons for expecting that virtuous Men shall meet after Death in a State of Happiness. The Anglican Dodd scooped the dissenter Price, and his popular Reflections on Death (1763) reached over a dozen editions and the Americas by 1806, including a handsome illustrated edition in 1796. Price’s work earned him four editions by 1777 and the lifelong friendship of the Earl of Shelburne, who sought him out for consolation after the death of his wife.¹⁶⁵ The coincidence does not, perhaps, rank with Newton’s and Leibniz’s simultaneous discovery of the calculus, but it too is a creative convergence.

Hanged for forgery and nicknamed the “macaroni parson,” William Dodd is best known for eliciting Samuel Johnson’s most famous quip: when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.¹⁶⁶ Yet before he pointed a tale, Dodd introduced alterity and a profounder psychology to the afterlife. In Reflections upon Death (1763), Dodd, hoping for the balmy consolation of again meeting friends, and his redeemer, looked forward to “union with thyself, and with my friends.”¹⁶⁷ In the funeral sermon, abandoning all caution, Dodd assures his auditors of “The certainty, the glorious and transporting certainty, that we shall meet again and enjoy those beloved friends, who have got the start of us in the course of life, and are first happily admitted to our Father’s house.” Clarissa may have been in his ear: Jesus spoke of “my father’s house” (emphasis added). The phrase “our Father’s house” evokes Clarissa’s duplicitous letter to Lovelace, promising that he may, if he behaves, see her at “her Father’s house.” “Expectations,” stronger than “hopes,” become “realities”: “to pass an eternity in consummate reciprocations of affection…. which the fear and pain of parting nevermore shall interrupt! these are the expectations,—nay, I ought to say more,—These are the great, the interesting realities, which every true believer hath before his eyes:…”¹⁶⁸ Life is defined in a distinctly non-theocentric way: “What is life, but the enjoyment of those we love?” God and Jesus are doubtless included among “those we love,” but they do not seem to be Dodd’s principal referent.

For his text, Dodd takes a strong, comical misreading of 2 Samuel 12:23. Shrugging off his prayers and demanding his dinner when Bathsheba’s son dies, David explains to his perplexed courtiers that the time to plead with God is over: “I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”¹⁶⁹ For Dodd, this passage can only be consolatory. The alternate, ironic reading is simply unacceptable, a caustic where Dodd insists on “balm.” The New Testament Abraham knows Dives and Lazarus; Jesus promises company to the thief on the cross.

The most interesting aspect of Dodd’s argument is psychological. We must know our friends again because personal consciousness is defined through knowledge of others. Unless we know them, we cannot know ourselves: “[D]eprived of his consciousness to which mutual knowledge is inseparably joined…he would if I may so express myself, cease to be himself; he would become another person. So that if we retain personal identity in a future state…we must retain mutual knowledge.”170 Bunyan’s Great-heart had argued a Cartesian position: self-knowledge is self-sufficient. “Do they think they know themselves then? Or that they shall rejoice to see themselves in that bliss? And if they think they shall know and do these; why not know others, and rejoice in their welfare also?”¹⁷¹ Dodd reverses that dependence. Personal identity and social relations, self and other, silently take priority over the experience of God.

Dodd refigures the contemporaneous debate between self and others, instantiated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vehement rejection of others’ influence and Adam Smith’s careful analysis of others as fundamental to self-formation, and morality in particular. Dror Wahrman sees Dodd’s relational self as losing ground even in Smith’s own formulation of the “man within.” It is time to revisit it.¹⁷² For Smith, others are the mirror through which we come to self-understanding. That self-understanding includes an otherness-within, a division into two persons, one of whom judges, the other is judged, by standards we derive from others, who alone enable us to see ourselves.¹⁷³

Richard Price escaped hanging, but not hanging up: Edmund Burke turned him into Hugh Peters redivivus in 1790.174 Treading more cautiously than Dodd or Elizabeth Griffith, Price was more passionately convinced that the afterlife gave life meaning. Without a future state, a “chill or damp” falls over every action and friendship. With it every enjoyment “receive[s] an additional relish.” Even “the face of nature” shines more brightly.¹⁷⁵ Memory and consciousness, without Griffith’s reference to passions or Dodd’s identity through others, form the basis of his confidence. Jesus’s promise to prepare a place for his disciples is inconsistent with their dispersal “into different parts of the universe, and scarcely leaves us any room to doubt on the present question…Shall we be together with Christ, and yet not with one another?…Being in the same happy state with our present virtuous friends, and relatives, will they not be accessible to us? And if accessible, shall we not fly to them, and mingle hearts and souls again?” (331–32). When these mingled souls will look towards God, Price does not say. Price imagines St. Paul looking among his Thessalonian converts as the dead rise, rather than to Christ. The dead have, inadvertently, been made an end in themselves.

For Price, these reunions—of friend with friend, parent with child, husband with wife, master with family—make “one of the most agreeable circumstances in the future state of felicity. It has a tendency to render the contemplation of another world much more delightful.” It would be unfair to focus on the theocentric heaven as a delight-free zone. Price’s insistence on his own desires, so infuriating to Burke in another context, marks the shape of things to come. “The hope of [reunion] rises up unavoidably in our minds, and has generally, if not always, accompanied the belief of a future existence” (334). Those reunited will joy in the common danger escaped— “our friends preserved amidst the dismal wreck”—while the eternal hellfire of the wicked rages on. “[T]he future everlasting rejection and extermination of all that work iniquity” (337–39): Hell Price has every which way. “Rejection and extermination” suggest annihilation. Hellfire may be “everlasting” even if the doomed sinners in it are not.

Retaining hell and insisting that reunion is for “virtuous,” “good men” contributed to Price’s being taken more seriously than Dodd. Dodd’s funeral sermon the Critical Review faulted for “extravagant Encomiums” on Dodd’s dead patron, the bishop of St. David’s, and similar excess in his doctrine. Dodd breached “the limits which revelation prescribes.” Dodd had gushed:

(Dodd had been less sanguine about despairing poor men who reviled their wives and did not attend church. To them he offered only what consolation he “dar’d to offer.”176) The reviewer observed that this “very comfortable doctrine” was not one on which we can “in every case, depend.” Admission was limited to those qualified for bliss. “Were the mansions of happiness open to all, were every pilgrim indiscriminately admitted, heaven itself would become a scene of confusion, and the habitation of the just a den of thieves.”¹⁷⁷ Did the Critical reviewer remember this remark a decade later when Dodd was hanged, thief and forger?

Happily for him, Dodd had confidence in his salvation as he faced the hangman. Thanking Samuel Johnson for his assistance, Dodd anticipated welcoming Johnson to the “realms of bliss” and greeting him there, having arrived earlier: “And admitted, as I trust I shall be, to the realms of bliss before you, I shall hail your arrival there with transport, and rejoice to acknowledge that you was my Comforter, my Advocate, and my Friend! GOD be ever with you.”¹⁷⁸ It is perhaps churlish to suspect that Dodd was reminding Johnson that he, too, would die, sooner or later, or to consider how little Johnson would appreciate such a reminder, but neither Johnson nor Boswell entered any cavils at Dodd’s theology.

For Dodd’s and Price’s desires, John Jortin had found better biblical arguments, but his sermons appeared posthumously only in 1771. Urged to publish, he demurred, “let them sleep until I sleep.”¹⁷⁹ Eternal punishment he psychologized, leaving the wicked to their consciences. Terrible and perhaps eternal, hell’s worst punishments are self-reproach for having given up happiness, forced “perpetually [to] converse with the worst of companions, even with his own uneasy thoughts.”¹⁸⁰ For Jortin as for Price, seeing one’s friends again depends on their virtues and temperament, which might shut out Dr. Dodd: “The righteous will there converse with the best and the wisest beings and, as they may reasonably hope, with those whom they loved here below for their good qualities” (emphasis added). God shifts from God to first friend, descending from object of vision to model of equal friendship:

Our Saviour had his friends when he dwelt here; and when he saw them deeply afflicted at the thoughts of losing him,…he…applied a suitable consolation. I only go, says he, to prepare a place for you, that where I am, there ye may be also. He says not to them, as a just Master, ye shall be happy; but he says, as an affectionate Friend, you shall be where I am, along with me; intimating possibly that such alliances are immortal, and that Death, which breaks all other bonds, dissolves not the union between virtuous minds (emphasis added).¹⁸¹

As prominent clerics promoted their own “reasonable hopes,” the laity chimed in, emboldened by claims they had long made in advance of their instructors. In the Richardson circle, in 1749, Catherine Talbot endorsed eternal sociability: “The more connections we make here…the more friends we shall have to rejoice with hereafter in a permanent state of felicity.”182 William Mickle at last published his Voltaire in the Shades (1770), written, he claimed, at twenty (c. 1754) when he was furious against the deist “sophistry that would destroy the dearest hope of his heart, the hope of yet meeting the deceased friend in another and better state of existence.”¹⁸³

By the 1780s, later writers interpret the careful Young as justifying reunions with loved ones. So “Clementina” in Letters Religious and Moral (1786), floats imaginatively upwards: “The departure of our beloved relatives and friends…invites our thoughts to those heavenly regions, where we hope they are ascended, and breathes a consolatory expectation of a reunion with them in the realms of bliss if so happy to choose, and persevere in the same virtuous path. Dr. Young judiciously observes…” In 1788, G. Wright, collecting Pleasing Reflections on Life and Manners…Principally selected from Fugitive Publications, found that in death the blessed “renew those ancient connections with virtuous friends, which had been dissolved here below by death.” “[T]he happiness of a future state” once concluded in God or angels, divine or scientific visions. Now it ends with no more separations: “[N]o revolutions of nature shall ever be able to part us more!—Such is the society and blessedness of the saints above.”¹⁸⁴

In less pious precincts, Goethe’s Werther had shot himself in anticipation of joining his beloved Charlotte in heaven (Goethe, 1749–1832; Sorrows of Young Werther 1774). Rousseau demanded reunions in death for himself in the Confessions (1782) and his Julie and St. Preux in Nouvelle Eloise (1759), making explicit what his admired Richardson a decade earlier had fudged, and been harried for fudging. The Critical reviewer must have trembled for heaven: everyone seemed flooding in, on Dodd’s open-access pass.

By 1790, Hugh Blair and Richard Polwhele claimed reunions after death for Christians, turning Rowe and Young from hopeful speculation to doctrine. The most popular preacher of the century—and the early part of the next—Hugh Blair (1718–1800) proposed reunion as the principal consolation for those grieved by a friend’s loss: “let [the mourner] turn for relief to the prospect of a future meeting in a happier world. This is indeed the chief soother of affliction; the most powerful balm of the bleeding heart…. Until this season of re-union arrive, no principle of religion discourages our holding correspondence of affection with them by means of faith and hope” (emphasis added).185 Until the 1780s, the “reunion” celebrated in the future state had been that of soul and body at the resurrection (a usage unnoticed in the OED). Hugh Blair changed the referent.¹⁸⁶

In 1807, the Critical Review declared Blair’s sermons to be, except for the Spectator, “the most popular work in the English language.” Blair, eminent Presbyterian preacher, first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh, tenant and friend of David Hume, defender of Ossian from “that barbarian Samuel Johnson’s” skepticism, owed his sermons’ publication to Johnson. Johnson admired the sample the bookseller showed him after the bookseller had already declined what became Blair’s first volume in 1777. When the sermons succeeded, Johnson preened himself on his part in bringing them forward.¹⁸⁷ They earned Blair more than 2,000 pounds, his publisher increasing his copyright payment with every volume and making later cash gifts.¹⁸⁸ To put that sum in perspective, Johnson was paid 1,500 pounds for the Dictionary, from which he had to pay copyists, paper, and ink. Blair’s only expense for his sermons was considerably less paper and ink.

From the first volume (1777) through the second (1780) and third (1790), Blair’s confidence about reunions mounted, from “Our imperfect knowledge of a future state” (Sermon 4, 1777) to the certain reunions with “ancient and beloved friends” (“On Death,” 1780) that constitute “The Happiness of a Future State” (1780): “re-union with those with whom our happiest days were spent; whose joys and sorrows once were ours; and from whom, after we shall have landed on the peaceful shore where they dwell, no revolutions of nature shall ever be able to part us more!—Such is the society of the blessed above. Of such are the multitude composed who stand before the throne” (255). “The throne” puts God at the edge of the picture, just out of the frame, reordering a society otherwise taken up entirely with itself. In 1790, Blair discovers scriptural warrant for his hopes. “On the sacrament of the lord’s supper” (Sermon 15) reads a passage in Matthew (26:29) as a promise that Jesus and his disciples will meet on the other side, a promise only Matthew makes. In Mark, Matthew’s source, Jesus tells his disciples he will again drink of the vine only in his Father’s kingdom. Matthew adds “with you” to Mark 14:25: “I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” Blair likes his Savior the better for this promise: “in how amiable a light does our Saviour appear here, looking forward to a future reunion with those beloved friends, whom he was now leaving, as to a circumstance which should increase both his own felicity and theirs, when they met again in a happier world!” He is glad to generalize from Jesus and his disciples to confirm “what has always been a favourite hope of good men; that friends shall know and recognize each other, and renew their former connections, in a future state of existence.” Indeed, death would be too bitter “if no support were to be ministered by religious hopes…If there were no voice to whisper to our spirits, that hereafter we, and those whom we love, shall meet again in a more blissful land?”189 Blair, like Fielding, L.H., and the philosopher in Rasselas, had suffered the loss of a daughter, his twenty-year-old only child, in 1769, and “retired ‘for some time from social intercourse and professional labour.’”¹⁹⁰ He returns, having ministered to himself, reading consolation to the world.

Blair was distinguished and Presbyterian, Richard Polwhele (1760–1838) a prolific Anglican cleric. Each represents an established church now offering unquestioning confidence in gospel warrant for heavenly reunions. An early admirer of Catherine Macaulay, Polwhele later became a scourge of Jacobin feminist writers in The Unsex’d Females (1798), where Christ and the Devil square off as Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft. Enemy of French revolutionaries, contributor to the Anti-Jacobin Review (1799–1805), careless topographer of Devon, he turned heavenly reunion into an argument for Christianity against anticlerical revolutionaries. A few years later, he would win a prize, and come to two editions, for demonstrating the immediacy of the afterlife to the satisfaction of the Church Union Society in An Essay on the Evidence from Scripture that the Soul, immediately after the Death of the Body, is not in a state of Sleep or Insensibility; but of Happiness or Misery: and on the Moral Uses of that Doctrine (1818, 1820). With equal confidence in invisible evidence, his earlier “On the reunion with our friends in a future state,” Discourse X of his 1791 Discourses on Different Subjects, affirmed that the gospels promised reunions, and reunions demonstrated Christianity’s superiority to other religions and philosophies, including the religion of nature. The gospel “confirm[s] the fondest wishes of the mourner…That we shall be restored to the friend whose separation from us is the cause of our grief, is the strongest of all consolatory arguments. To be assured of this was the great, the fervent longing of unenlightened nature. And this fervent longing had its full satisfaction in Christianity.”191 Blair and Polwhele say nothing of infants, but they neither exclude them, nor offer the old advice not to mourn. If children are not exactly what most people understand by “friends,” that distinction is not drawn.

While devotional writers were refitting the afterlife, it remained for a clergyman-novelist to turn the Christian afterlife, like the classical, into a site of literary fantasy, familiar now in New Yorker cartoons or, at our outset, Twain and Shaw. Popular since Aristophanes and Lucian, who used their own afterlives, Christian-era satirical commentaries and dialogues of the dead took place in the classical afterlife, not the Christian. Quevedo’s Sueños name Jupiter, Pluto, Mercury, though his own hell was the one he had in mind.192 Such exceptions as Erasmus’s Julius Exclusus and Dante’s broadly satirical Inferno skewered politico-theological problems. Wishful reformers still kept to Elysium, not addressing Heaven. In 1742, when Henry Fielding remodeled the afterlife in his Journey from this World to the Next, his motives were Christian, his terrain classical.¹⁹³ Even freer thinkers, rewarded, kept to classical geography. Quevedo Jr. moved Tindal, Collins, Locke, and the Puritans “from Hades to the pleasantest meadow in Elysium” in 1743.¹⁹⁴ Mickle put “Voltaire in the Shades” in 1770, and the anonymous Philosophical and Religious Dialogue in the Shades between Mr. Hume and Dr. Dodd (1778) took place outside Elysium’s borders, where Hume was held up by a severe enquirer long enough to meet Dodd dying the next year (1776, 1777). In 1762, in the sixth volume of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne redrew heaven’s gate to accommodate modern sensibilities. He made no apology and incurred no reproach: readers loved it and critics applauded.

Sterne’s incursion, the century’s most significant after Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s, has long been hiding in plain sight.¹⁹⁵ When Yorick dies in the first volume (1759), the parsons are cautious. Parson Sterne has his parson Yorick express hope but no certainty about meeting his friend Eugenius beyond the grave: “if it was their fate to meet hereafter,—he would thank him again and again” (vol. 1, chap. 12). A black page marks where Yorick lies dead. Two years later (1762) Sterne grew bolder, not about meetings but about regulating heaven’s conduct. Two angels in the Christian heaven delete a violation of the commandment against taking the Lord’s name in vain in favor of beloved Uncle Toby. In passing, Sterne invents the phrase “the recording angel,” appearing most recently in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: I.¹⁹⁶

The transit from earth to heaven has rarely seemed more natural or inevitable or easy. Heaven’s rules bend to benevolence. An officer named LeFever lies dying, his child with him, and the hapless, benignant Uncle Toby swears, “by G——, he shall not die!” Up in heaven the angels are agitated, one blushes, another weeps over Toby’s criminal words: “—The ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever” (vol. 6, chap. 8). A recording angel could be presumed from the Book of Life, though this is his first public appearance. The “accusing spirit” adapts the “adversary” (Hebrew Satan) of the Book of Job, who accuses mankind to God. Job’s accuser is cynical; Sterne’s is not. Versified by Jane Timbury (1787), parodied by James Gillray in The Accusing Spirit which Flew up to Heaven’s Chancery with the Oath (1791), the scene offered no excuses.¹⁹⁷

No “fairy tale,” Heaven is an accessible, fallible place where accidents happen, spirits regret their roles, and angels mess up their papers. Unlike Fielding, Sterne claims the apparatus of the real Christian heaven for sentiment and comedy. God remains out of view, but Sterne has a cleric’s confidence—or Swedenborg’s—in his knowledge of how things work. And his readers had no problem with it. Sterne shocked contemporaries with his bawdy innuendos and his own sermons published as by his fictional character Parson Yorick. This scene spoke to their sense of divine judgment and the heavenly sphere. Even Samuel Johnson would probably have included Toby’s cry among the “involuntary errors” that still terminate in happiness.

For Reed, theological difference is still a problem: his ghosts quarrel over religion, and each sect needs its own sector of heaven to prevent civil war. Coming down the road to St. Peter’s lodge, all the souls have passports, issuer unidentified. “Made immortal,” they do not naturally possess immortality. Chatting happily until religion enters the conversation, they fall to blows, which, since they are ghosts, do no harm. But “new-made fellowship takes wing.” St. Peter explains the geography of heaven: “To each Religion, every Sect / A sep’rate bound’ry we select; / For, should they meet, eternal squabble / Would render Heaven a second Babel.” Catholics join Jesuits; a Puritan seeks Calvin, “this murderous Snake,” admitted only by Servetus’s entreaty; a Mahometan arrives, whose “bill of fare of bliss eternal/ Is false, voluptuous, and carnal,” and whose region is shaped like a crescent, extensive yet compact, “You’ll reach it in an hour at most, Sir, / And join the Shade of your Impostor.” There follow a Quaker, an Anabaptist, with two Sabbaths and full dipped baptism; a Methodist who hanged himself to avoid committing adultery; then a flock of Pagans, Wild-Indians, Negros, Tartars, and finally an adherent of “no Sect or godly Class” (35). St. Peter wonders how the last obtained his document. As in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, there was an “examination” at which he made “This brief, yet honest declaration,” trusting “Man’s great CREATOR, SIRE, and FRIEND,” “doing Good, and shunning ill,” holding all men “my Brethren to the Grave.” St. Peter, thrilled, embraces him and gives him full run of paradise, for following reason and not the priest. He alone is invited to “Range thro’ these Realms, whose space immense is,/ And view, in rapture lost your senses, /The countless wonders Heaven has wrought,/ So far surpassing human thought.” St. Peter’s final request is that the deist come to visit him every now and then, “You’ll find me constantly at home…. If I had judg’d like you, my fate / Had ne’er confin’d me to this Gate.”

Young’s Poem on the Last Day had put Turk, Jew, Christian, and pagan happily together before the throne for the Last Judgment, but Young avoided saying what happens to the non-Christians.198 It looks well for them all, but a few lines on we learn that Caiaphas and Judas are also hopeful, though a little worried. Pope’s prayer was universal. In Reed, the deist’s explicitly Christian heaven widens, Twain’s way, by the rule of Christian charity, to include non-Christians.

We have arrived, and it looks just like home, what we always expected to find in the next world. As Keith Thomas and Jacob Sider Jost suggest, filling in the next life’s activities creates a world that resembles more and more the world one leaves, as does the self one takes to it. This stealth revolution depended for success on its not being noticed that anything much was changing even as the ground shifted. The inhabitants of Kansas woke up in Oz, and they declared that things had always been just so.

Tories were either more skeptical (like Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, David Hume [who thought himself a “sceptical whig”], and Edward Gibbon) or more conservative (like Jonathan Swift and Hannah More), or more inclusive (like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson). Whigs were also deists (Toland, Collins, Reed), Socinians (Locke, Newton), and Other (Shaftesbury); they were more pious than some Tories (Defoe relative to Swift), and less pious (Fielding relative to Richardson and Johnson). Methodists, Swedenborgians, and Moravians present no clear political affiliations. Of Dodd, Price, and Jortin, Price was the most “whiggish,” intent on putting things right both in this world and the next. Dodd, the fashionable “macaroni preacher,” had been equally active in charitable initiatives. Even these approximations break down in the generation of political radicals: the dissenting Price provoked the orthodox Burke in politics, but they did not disagree about an afterlife. The heretical but devout materialist Unitarian Joseph Priestley, the deist Tom Paine, and the Anglican Mary Wollstonecraft all held to an afterlife against her spouse the atheist immaterialist William Godwin, and his atheist son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley. Politics does not predict afterlife views, though a dedication to self-styled “progressive” politics may carry over to improving the afterlife or dissolving death, as with Asgill, Price, or Godwin.

Correlated with afterlife liberalization is the church’s waning coercive power. Spectacular hells, like spectacular executions, flourish in periods that seek to reinforce their police. Hells diminish as policing, external and internal, improves. As hell lapsed and heaven accommodated human desire, in this world occasional conformity bills could not be maintained, convocation lost its power to sit, agitation against the Thirty-Nine Articles and Athanasian creed proceeded apace. Parliament passed a Jewish Naturalization Act (1753) and proposed toleration for Catholics (1780). Both incurred violent popular opposition: A Jew was murdered during anti-Semitic press campaigns in 1753–54, and London burned again in the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780. The Naturalization Act was repealed, Catholic toleration abandoned for a generation. Peter Annet, at seventy, stood in the pillory for mocking Moses. Meanwhile, the first atheist declared himself. Shifting and changing, the afterlife kept pace with other social values, not, except for Swedenborg and Abraham Tucker,200 as innovations or discoveries, but as rereadings of the biblical text that disclosed an overlooked truth. Such progressive revelations gave the afterlife a new lease on life, and religion a new hold on people, at precisely the moment when “ideology” replaced “theology” as a master discourse (Destutt de Tracy’s “philosophy of mind,” 1796), and established religions endured the massive assault of the French Revolution. Religion rebounded strengthened, but never again had the universe of discourse to itself.

If those who believed in an afterlife made it fit new desires, what of those who did not believe? The year 1786, when Reed’s tale appeared, was also the year of Robert Burns’s Kilmarnock edition. In poems he suppressed, Burns declared his disbelief. Poems he published mocked the devil and the religious, including himself, and built comforting, homely afterlives for others. “The Devil and Dr. Hornbook” tells a preposterous lying tale “as true’s the Deil’s in hell/ Or Dublin city.”²⁰¹ Shelley recast the line in Peter Bell the Third where “Hell is a city much like London” (Part the Third, I, 1 [1819]), echoed more euphoniously by Shaw, “Hell is a city much like Seville” (“Don Juan in Hell Interlude”). The devil is certainly in Dublin city; whether he is in hell is a question.

Hume’s “comfortable” doctrine Burns early dismissed, unpublished. A “Song” expects a poor, obscure life “till down my weary bones I lay in everlasting slumber O.” An epitaph buries the Laird of Boghead: “But if such as he in Heav’n may be, /Then welcome, hail! damnation.” By contrast, his father’s friend need not snatch at afterlife hopes: “An honest man here lies at rest, /As e’er God with his image blest…. If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;/ If there is none, he made the best of this.”202 Versified psalms Burns could publish. He juxtaposes Psalm 1, where good men prosper and the wicked are doomed, with Psalm 90, where God’s power brings all men from nothing and returns them to nothing: “Thou layest them with all their cares/ In everlasting sleep.” Psalm 90 has the last word.

Burns’s published doctrine becomes very comfortable indeed. With his Scottish country upbringing and public humiliations for fornication, he remembers the punitive Scots afterlife to tease God with His benevolence. Two poems written “in the prospect of Death” require God to forgive Burns’s sins since He created the “Passions wild and strong” that led to them. “No other plea I have,/ But, Thou art good; and Goodness still /Delighteth to forgive” (“A Prayer, in the Prospect of Death,” 1786). The next year, “Stanzas on the same Occasion” (1787) faced, terrified, “an Angry GOD, /And…his sin-avenging rod.” Burns reminds God that Burns’s sins are His responsibility. God controls the sea and tempest, so He ought to be able to “aid me with Thy help, Omnipotence Divine!” If Burns sins more, God’s help needs stepping up. The sinned against is responsible for the sinning, for forgiving it, and for the sinner’s sinning on.

Burns glides easily between heaven, hell, and no afterlife at all, a feat now so familiar as to be unappreciated. The afterlife-dismissing poems circulated in many manuscripts, cautiously, tactfully, but not silently. Burns claimed never to have altered a word in a poem except once, for “Dr. Blair,” still supporting Scots poets after Ossian (and persuading Burns not to publish The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata).²⁰³ Yet Burns happily creates the new traditional heaven for his rustic family in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” after Blair’s own heart. God invisible, the trusting family sing together, hopeful

Adam Smith did it. It is odd, but pleasant, at this date in time to add something new to what our world owes Adam Smith (1723–1790), friend and acolyte of David Hume, subscriber to Burns’s poems, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), critic of empire and the slavery that subjects magnanimous black “heroes…to wretches…whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”204 In 1790, revising his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Smith repudiated the theocentric heaven with which this chapter began as violating “all our moral sentiments.” Feeling strongly, he repeated the phrase: once was not enough. He evicted the priests from heaven and made room for anti-theist philosophers, like the unnamed Hume. Situating the afterlife in the human mind and desires, like many of his contemporaries, he undermined its reality, as they did not. Nor did Smith deny the afterlife outright, any more than the deity. In the Platonic, Christian, enlightenment traditions, he redefines what ought to be true. God elided, his afterlife is free from fear. “All our moral sentiments” are gratified in the reward of persons and accomplishments Smith values. Most poignantly, even unrealized human potential is recognized and rewarded in heaven.

In 1759, God’s looming judgment in the afterlife was more real than people’s actual experiences of others’ deaths, their intuitive irrational sympathy with the dead. In the first edition’s first chapter (TMS, 1759) Smith analyzes the projection into the bodies of the dead that underlies all afterlife inventions (and that Lucretius had ridiculed). “[T]his illusion of the imagination” Smith called it. We pity the dead for being trapped underground in the dark, forgotten by their friends, bereft of all they loved. We lodge, Smith says, “if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimated bodies, and thence conceiv[e] what would be our own emotions in this case.”²⁰⁵ Unlike Hume, Smith forgives such errors: they are how the mind works, not how it ought to work. Smith’s “sympathy,” those dead bodies make clear, goes beyond pity to irresistible bodily identification, a new meaning that Bence Nanay describes as “a very simple, visceral, quasi-automatic imaginative process.”²⁰⁶ In Smith, that relation to others precedes self-formation.

Yet what should concern us about the dead is not what makes us shudder, but their actual predicament: “that awful futurity which awaits them.” Our friends’ future judgment alone concerns them and ought alone to concern us. The afterlife and natural human feeling contradict each other. Over retribution, they come together, climaxed by a dark and dismal account of the Atonement.

Against Hume’s utilitarian account of justice, Smith insisted that the demand for retribution precedes any rational concern for justice as the support of society. Smith called the utilitarian view refined and plausible, but secondary. The impulse precedes it. Our moral sentiments so demand justice that we pursue it beyond the grave, where it is useless for society: “the example of…punishment there cannot serve to deter the rest of mankind, who see it not, who know it not, from being guilty of the like practices here.”207 We want murder avenged, the widow and orphan compensated as an immediate desire, not a utilitarian rationalization. Like identifying with corpses, the demand for justice or retribution is immediate, visceral, and irrational. Utility—and reason—have nothing to do with it. In 1790, Smith closes that discussion with the (inaccurate) observation that every religion or superstition the world has known has featured a Tartarus for punishment, an Elysium for reward.²⁰⁸

The curious, ill-fitting climax of this discussion had been from 1759 the Atonement. Man’s unworthiness before God merits, Smith feels, only punishment. Some atonement must be made for human failings. Happily, “[t]he doctrines of revelation coincide…with those original anticipations of nature”: “the most dreadful atonement has been paid for our manifold transgressions and iniquities.”²⁰⁹ Hume had remarked (1757) how believers’ terrors overwhelmed their hopes in that futurity Smith designated “awful” (1759). The atonement figures for Smith as “dreadful” but necessary to overcome human unworthiness before God. By 1767 he had begun tampering with the language until in 1790 the discussion vanished as a change of “no great moment.” Human nature demands justice, whether as Virgilian geography or Christian doctrine.

In a review of The Look of Silence on the killings of Indonesian communists, Anthony Lane quotes a victim’s mother, “In the afterlife, their victims will take revenge.” He concludes, “What’s unnerving is not how rare that ancient sentiment sounds, in a documentary, but how badly you want it to be true.”²¹⁰

In 1761 (TMS second edition), a still orthodox Smith defended God and his afterlife from the unpublished but devastating contempt of Hume’s essay “On the Immortality of the Soul,” printed, but withdrawn from publication in 1755 (published posthumously in 1777).211 A benevolent deity’s leaving unclear something so important as eternal rewards and punishments Hume called cruel, iniquitous, and unjust, “a barbarous deceit.”²¹² This was strong language from the famously good-tempered “bon David.” Smith in 1761 felt compelled to answer that slur. If we had all the information we will ultimately possess about the next world, he argues, we would be unable to carry on the business of society in this world. The more important world to come would erase consideration of this.²¹³

In 1790, Smith admits for the first time the “melancholy…suspicion of a fatherless world,” but he prefers the joy-giving conviction that the world is conducted by “universal benevolence,” desiring “the greatest possible quantity of happiness” for all the universe’s “inhabitants,” the “great Judge,” “the author of Nature” in place.²¹⁴ That happiness includes another life to compensate for such brutal injustices as that inflicted on Jean Calas at Toulouse in 1762, broken on the wheel and burned to death, as a Protestant accused by Catholics of murdering his convert son.²¹⁵ (Smith had been in Toulouse 1764–65, when Voltaire was agitating the reversal of the court’s sentence, achieved in 1765.)

Rooted in human nature, an afterlife promotes lofty ideas of human dignity, cheers us against death, consoles us in distress, and sees to justice (no punishment mentioned). Our happiness in this life often depends upon it (as Dryden observed a century earlier). Smith’s, however, promises justice beyond any earlier dreamed of. He imagines righting the wrong of unrealized potential. Smith is improving, massively, a hint Thomas Gray gave in his Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard (1751). Mark Twain followed a hundred years later.²¹⁶ Looking at the graves of the nameless and illiterate, Gray muses on what might have been, what unused gifts lie buried around him,

the owner of those humble talents and virtues which, from being depressed by fortune, had, in this life, no opportunity of displaying themselves; which were unknown, not only to the public, but which he himself could scarce be sure that he possessed, and for which even the man within the breast could scarce venture to afford him any distinct and clear testimony; where that modest, silent, and unknown merit, will be placed upon a level, and sometimes above those who, in this world, had enjoyed the highest reputation, and who, from the advantage of their situation, had been enabled to perform the most splendid and dazzling actions…

Then abruptly Smith subverts the vision in a move as devastating as Virgil’s sortie by the gate of false dreams. This afterlife stitched to one’s most secret desires, pregnant with social implications, turns, slipping from “venerable” to “comfortable” to “flattering,” and stumbles over “doubt.” Reality checks and withdraws, emphases added:

Most commentators on the passage call it encomiastic because even unbelievers would wish to believe.²¹⁹ That the structure of the sentence quite unnecessarily pulls belief out from under any afterlife is politely ignored. The virtuous man doubting and wishing can only be Smith. Smith had called Hume the most perfectly virtuous man he had ever known, as Plato called Socrates (Phaedo), but he had also described Hume’s cheerfully approaching death without afterlife expectations (to very bad press in his letter to Strahan, 9 November 1776). Reading Lucian’s dialogues, Hume supposed bargaining (unsuccessfully) with Charon to stay for a last revision of his works or until the reigning superstition ended. Hume also lacked “lofty ideas of [human] dignity.” He did not think “every stupid clown, that ever existed” should have eternal life.²²⁰ Stranded outside Elysium in the 1778 Dialogue between Mr. Hume and Dr. Dodd, Hume was by his own account nowhere at all. Yet once Smith made the afterlife into a wish, he promptly remodeled it on Virgilian principles to welcome David Hume.

The traditional theocentric afterlife, Smith asserts, violates “all our moral sentiments.”²²¹ Smith evicts monks and priests better to accommodate warriors, heroes, and philosophers. He does not name Hume, but he does quote Voltaire. Rewarding the monkish, priestly life of devoted contemplation is as corrupt as a monarch’s preference for courtiers’ present flattery over “faithful and active service” in distant fields. As the Bastille and Europe’s greatest monarchy fell, France’s church lands were confiscated, and Edmund Burke defended monkish contemplation, Smith attacks a French bishop who a half-century earlier (d. 1742) told his military congregation that monks reached heaven at once and warriors might not attain it at all.

“[M]onks and friars” Smith does not include among “those to whom our natural sense of praise-worthiness forces us to ascribe the highest merit and most exalted virtue.” Such virtue Smith had ascribed to Hume, and here it fits out a Virgilian Elysium: heroes, statesmen, lawgivers, poets, philosophers, those who invent, improve, or excel in life-promoting arts (of subsistence, convenience, or ornament), protectors, instructors, benefactors of mankind. For such is the afterlife made. Privileging the “devout and contemplative virtues” only makes the afterlife risible, especially to those who lack a turn for the devout virtues. The chapter ends citing Voltaire in a footnote, mocking theists’ burning Plato, Homer, Cicero.222 Hume smiles. Hume’s preference for soldiers over clerics he had made conspicuous in “Of National Characters.” Soldiers are brave, open, and conversable; clergy guarded grimacing hypocrites. And he was a philosopher himself, with little turn for the “devout virtues.”

On Hume’s behalf, Smith simultaneously doubts the afterlife and transforms it better to suit the doubter’s wishes. Unlike the afterlife reformers of the 1760s, Smith did not speak of reunions, but the last words he is reported to have addressed to friends supposed them: “I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place.” A variant does not suppose reunion: “I love your company, gentlemen, but I believe I must leave you to go to another world.”²²³ Destroying his papers before his death suggests an acceptance of mortality rarely found in writers. Perhaps sensitive to Hume’s triumphant and Smith’s sidling withdrawal, Adam Ferguson’s reported last words in 1816 were “There is another world!”²²⁴

Arrived is that moment when, if you believe in the afterlife, you can change it to suit. And if you don’t believe in an afterlife, you can change it to suit. How you change it will show what you value and whose clichés dominate your thinking. Smith is an index, not an influence, his revolution unremarked in the turbulent 1790s. When a wishful Christian heaven reappears, occasioning a literary quarrel that would once have taken place on the banks of Styx or in Elysium, politics has replaced theology as the topic that gets an author and his printer into trouble. Asgill is safe.

Along with Southey’s roll call of British worthies, the eighteenth-century’s new terms are firmly in place. Hell overcome, Dante’s gate is rewritten as heaven’s: “ ‘This is the Gate of Bliss,’ it said: ‘through me is the passage/ To the City of God, the abode of beatified Spirits./ Weariness is not there, nor change nor sorrow nor parting; /Time hath no place therein, nor evil. Ye who would enter, /Drink of the Well of Life, and put away all that is earthly’ ”(Sect. IV, The Gate of Heaven). Dante’s gate, created by justice, power, wisdom, and love for eternity, says, “Through me is the way into the sorrowing city…into eternal sorrow…among the lost people.” To be put away, left behind, by those who entered was hope. (PER ME SI VA NELLA CITTÀ DOLENTE,/ PER ME SI VA NELL’ ETERNO DOLORE,/ PER ME SI VA TRA LA PERDUTA GENTE./ GIUSTIZIA MOSSE IL MIO ALTO FATTORE:/ FECEMI LA DIVINA POTESTATE,/ LA SOMMA SAPIENZA E ’L PRIMO AMORE./ DINANZI A ME NON FUOR COSE CREATE/ SE NON ETTERNE, E IO ETTERNA DURO./ LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE. Inferno, III, 1–9).225

Nor will the reader of this chapter be surprised that Southey’s vision ends in a section called “The Meeting.” And who is met? Surely God or Jesus? The reader knows better: who but George’s daughter Amelia, the popular princess whose early death had saddened a public. It is, frankly, a little depressing to think that this, this is where the intellectual movement traced in this chapter has been tending, but the reader may as well know the worst:

The Christian heaven still surpasses Greco-Roman afterlives—meeting wishes, gratifying desires, fostering reunions, uniting the nation, enabling readers to cope with death and to confront life. Yet another father has been led into heaven by his daughter. Southey has been called, “blasphemous” by a modern critic, but neither Southey nor his readers in his own time regarded this fulfillment of political and social desire as anything but fitting, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and his printer’s supporters excepted.²²⁷

Their problem was not Southey’s presuming to read the mind of God, but his politics and his preface, which condemned “the Satanic school” of poets and their works as unsuitable for maidens and children. Annoyed by Southey’s slur and his politics, Byron riposted in The Vision of Judgement (1822). Allowing George III to slip into heaven, if that is where he wants to be, Byron gives the occasion a politico-theological turn, attacking the Athanasian creed, opposing eternal damnation, and enlisting St. Peter on the side of Catholic emancipation. George III’s opposition to emancipation rouses the impetuous old saint to a fury against this “royal Bedlam bigot”: “Ere heaven shall ope her portals to this Guelph, /While I am guard, may I be damned myself!” (stanzas 49, 50). Although the heavens fill with Americans and Scots and French massacred by George, his ministers, and his generals, the two witnesses called, Wilkes and Junius, decline to testify against him now—they had their say under the sun. Like Shelley in Peter Bell the Third (1819), Byron pinches his denouement from Pope’s Dunciad (1728, 1742). Taking off Wordsworth, Shelley had sent Pope’s great yawn on another errand of universal stupefaction. Byron’s Southey reads from his works. Heavenly and hellish hosts scatter at the third line, and St. Peter knocks him down at the fifth. Like Pope’s divers, Southey sinks, but his rotten, hollow works float. Meanwhile, in the uproar, the old blind king slips into heaven and starts practicing his psalm. Heaven is open to all men, even kings. It is also open to all literary purposes.

Byron was a little nervous about his poem. His usual publisher Murray refused it, and Byron took pains over a preface that named virtuous antecedents, Quevedo, Fielding, Swift, for jocular treatments of the afterlife.228 Like everyone else he forgot Sterne, whose phrase “recording angel” appears in his third stanza. When the government moved against the printer, Byron was abroad, and dead before the verdict was delivered. But the indictment charged no one with blasphemy. Instead, the malicious intent was “to injure, defame, disgrace, and vilify, the memory, reputation, and character of his late Majesty King George the Third, the Father of our Sovereign Lord the now King…. [and] to cause it to be believed that his said late Majesty was a bad King, guilty of misrule, and a protector of tyrants, and that his death was unlamented and unregretted even by those who attended his burial….”²²⁹ It goes on, and Byron’s “impiety” was noted, but that was not the focus of the charge.

The afterlife revolutions had already happened by the time Byron makes his contribution, and Byron could have gone further in fulfilling his own wishes. In 1806, he had written in a private letter that in heaven everyone is divorced, and loves around.²³⁰ Such sentiments Swedenborg and Blake might have recognized as the flippant version of their own imaginings of amorous freedom. Revolutions in the afterlife are peculiar in their invisibility, for no one wants the situation ever to have been different from what the revolution achieves. Whatever one believes in the present instant ought to be eternally true. No one laments the loss of a theocentric heaven which, after all, need not be lost. It is still there for anyone who desires it.