On Saturday evening Mr. Midith returned from the postoffice with a letter in his hand, an unusual brightness in his eye, and an additional elasticity in his step. The family were seated on the porch when he returned, and as he approached he said:
“I have received very favorable news from the financial committee of San Francisco, of whom I told you the other evening. They say they have met with complete success in the organization of a company who will undertake to search for my projectile. They have plenty of funds to prosecute the work on an extensive and thorough scale. They want me to come by first train, so as to assist them all I can in ascertaining the locality as nearly as possible where the projectile emerged on my arrival on earth, and also to be present at a meeting which is to be held there a few evenings hence. If I start on the next limited train I can just reach San Francisco in time for that meeting. It is an important event in my life, and I must by no means miss it.
“Perhaps I may yet be able some day to see my native world once more, to enjoy the kind, peaceable society which it has developed and blessed with intelligence and prosperity. I may be able once more to drink a draught from its almost faultless social and economic fountains; to press the hand and kiss the lips of those who are dear to me.”
“We can never let you return to Mars unless you can take us with you,” said Viola. “The earth is desolate enough with you in it, and without you it would be much more so. But if you find your projectile you may be able to establish a line of intercommunication between Mars and the earth; if so, we can all go. That will be grand, indeed.”
“We will do the very best we can,” replied Mr. Midith. “We can tell better what we can do after we find the projectile and see what repairs it needs, and whether or not those repairs can be made by the aid of earthly skill and machinery. Of course, you understand that it is no little thing to make a projectile which will traverse the vast distance between the earth and Mars. It is an undertaking which probably borders on the boundaries of human possibilities.”
We all expressed our regrets of having Mr. Midith depart from our midst. Our curiosity concerning the new world and its inhabitants of which Mr. Midith had already told us so much, was not half satisfied, but, on the contrary, the novelty of it increased in proportion as we learned the realities of it.
“It will be quite lonesome at first when you are gone,” said Mr. Uwins, “and we have not heard half as much of your world as we would like to, and I hope for your sake that you will be successful in your enterprise; but I also hope that your business may be such that you can do the most of it when you are here with us.”
“My train by which I must leave you, at least for a few days, is due here at ten o’clock; but I am almost certain that I shall return very shortly. It seems that I can not leave your hospitable home for any considerable length of time as long as I am a resident of this earth,” said Mr. Midith, after Mr. Uwins had finished speaking. “No doubt all I can do on the coast is to attend that meeting and tell the dredgers as nearly as I can where my projectile went down in the Pacific. The parties who have undertaken the search for the projectile must be highly interested in the project, for I have corresponded with them only a few days and have given them only a very few facts concerning my history.”
“I very much regret that you must leave us,” said Mrs. Uwins. “I have become so interested in the narrative of your just and beautiful world that I do not like to have you leave off telling before we have heard the whole of it.”
“I have told you but a little so far,” replied Mr. Midith, “but when I return from the coast, I shall tell you much more; and if we succeed in finding the projectile, I will tell and show you all about its construction and operation; how it was gradually improved from time to time, the same as your locomotive or threshing machine. There are also countless other details, of which I have so far said nothing.”
“It is more than an hour and a half before your train is due,” said Mr. Uwins, “and we cannot afford to have you silent as long as you are with us. I shall, therefore, ask you a question that I have been wanting to ask you several times before, but never got to it; and that is, how you dispose of your dead, your obsequies, mourning, monuments, etc.”
“We do not bury the dead at present, like you do and like we formerly did, but we cremate them. Every community has a ‘crematorium,’ and a corps of undertakers, who take charge of the corpse immediately after death. They are notified by the attending physicians or friends of the deceased. The undertakers convey the corpse to the crematorium, where it is laid out in an open casket until it shows unmistakable signs of decay and dissolution, after which it is cremated. These undertakers also clean, disinfect and otherwise prepare the apartment of the deceased for the reception of a new occupant.
“The old form of interment was gradually superseded by cremation for a number of reasons; the principal one is that cremation offers greater security to the living. An interred body, having died from the effects of a contagious disease, may, under certain conditions, easily spread the disease or contagion; while a cremated one can not. The atom of the contagious corpse, after dissolution by combustion, is no more dangerous to life, as far as we know, than the atom from a decomposed corpse having died from old age. It is true that contagious diseases are almost unknown with us, but a careful guard against them on all sides, and other favorable conditions, has made it so. Display, unnecessary contact and carelessness in disposing of the dead has cost us and you an untold number of lives, and you are paying dearly for it still.
“Our obsequies are the simplest possible; in fact, I think you would call them no obsequies at all. As soon as a physician has notified the undertakers or cremators of the death of a person, they take the corpse with their motor-hearse to the crematorium. No one except the cremators follows the corpse to his final place of dissolution; for it can not be the desire of a highly cultivated being, who has the highest welfare and greatest happiness of his friends and companions at heart, to have them follow his senseless corpse, when such an act can not conduce to his personal happiness; when it involves nothing but unproductive and destructive labor. A funeral procession also tends to spread contagious diseases, and prolong the mournful and depressed feelings caused by the death of a dear friend. No one who clearly sees these and other evils can consistently desire his surviving friends to follow him in a funeral procession. Our aid and sympathy are always with the living, for death has satisfied, at least, all the material and mental wants of the deceased, and these are all the wants we have any positive knowledge of.
“Let us examine this from another point of view. From historical records, and from the present practices of savages, we find that funeral rites and processions are born in barbarous times, and first practiced by primitive savages, and that all you have left of them at present are only the modified remnants of former barbarity and superstition.
“The primitive savage worships his deceased ancestors; he embalms them; he assigns them the best place at the table during the time of a feast; he often inters his horse, his gun and a number of slaves with him. His wife has often such a profound ‘respect’ for the dead that she often voluntarily cremates herself alive on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband.
“Thus we see at a glance that the savage has a much profounder respect for the dead, and much less respect for the living than the more cultivated person has, and this change gradually continues until all our help and sympathies are with the living, for the dead can not utilize them.
“You do not at present directly bury the living in the same tomb with the dead like the savage did and still does; but, no doubt, you often indirectly do it. I have seen more than once, while I have been living on earth, that a bereaved widow who was completely broken down by the bereavement, care and attention she had given to her sick husband, follow him for miles in a slow funeral procession during a rain or snowstorm, and also at times when the temperature was almost unbearably high or low. It seems to me that no highly cultivated person, who has the well-being and happiness of his surviving companions at heart, can form a conception that the unconscious dead would appreciate such useless hardships from their dearest friends even if they could know. After we had learned that all our acts and sympathies should go with the living—that the dead are unconscious and that all organs and faculties, as far as we know and have reason to believe, suspend their function in death—we no longer could expend any useless efforts for the supposed whims of the dead. We do all we can for them while they live, but death ends all our physical ties.
“We never wear mourning for a number of reasons. As I have said before, no person of high culture can desire his surviving friends to undergo any useless hardship and privation on his account; and mourning has a tendency of increasing the burden of grief by making the surroundings more solemn and gloomy. Our aim should be to make the surroundings of the bereaved as attractive, cheerful, and gay as possible. A living person of learning and culture would desire his friends to be as happy as possible; and a dead one, if he could know anything, would be a tyrant if he were different.
“The foregoing propositions are based upon the facts that it is in the inherent nature of things that death must necessarily come to all. That no amount of fretting and resistance can surmount this natural phenomenon. That a dead person is unconscious and can not appreciate and utilize help and sympathy. That the living should forget the bereavement of the dead as soon as possible. That no cultivated person desires his friends to undergo any useless hardships on his account, for the fundamental object of all sentient beings is the enjoyment of the greatest happiness, and mourning tends to intensify and prolong the depressed feeling of grief, which detracts from the greater happiness.
“In order to prevent being misunderstood, let me illustrate my meaning by an example.
“We, no doubt, all acknowledge that our life would be a miserable one if our burden of grief were always as hard to bear as it is immediately after the death of a dear friend, and when we are deeply depressed by a burden of grief, we can not devote ourselves with the same energy and success to the development of body and mind, and grapple with the phenomena of life as we can when our vital functions act in accordance with the laws of the most complete life and health; therefore, he who can lay aside all grief and melancholy, caused by the deprivation of a dear relative and friend, is the most complete person, while he who must bear the burden longest is the most incomplete person on this point. In a fierce struggle for existence the latter would, no doubt, soon perish. Hence no one can consistently and successfully defend the position and practice of artificially prolonging our grief and misery by wearing mourning for the dead; and no considerate person would desire it of his friends, for this practice of wearing mourning is no less a remnant of barbarism than the practice of interring the living with the dead, and he who feels that it is honorable, and that his dead friend would appreciate it, if he could, must necessarily lack refinement and consideration himself, for mourning can serve no good purpose for either the living or the dead.
“We have no material monuments; no memorials erected over our material remains. We believe that the deeds we do while we live, if they deserve remembrance, will erect a mental memorial in the minds of the living, which will serve to perpetuate our memory until our deeds are eclipsed by some nobler ones of posterity.
“Again, when we examine your tombs we find that nearly all the great monuments have been erected to the honor of the most unworthy and infamous persons—generals, torturers, despots and tyrants and bigots who were instrumental in taking the lives of thousands of innocent persons, and who have appropriated countless billions from the earnings of the productive laborers. The principle of material monuments is the same, whether contemplated from the colossal pyramids of Egypt or from the humblest tombstone of a country cemetery; costliness is the only difference.
“From the foregoing explanation you see at once that all obsequies, mourning and memorials originated in primitive barbarism; and were first practiced by savages; that they are wasteful, useless and destructive of life, health and property; that they fall into disuse in proportion as man, by a higher state of culture, begins to see that they detract from the completest life and health, and are, therefore, destructive of the greatest happiness, and that no thoughtful, considerate person would desire any such acts from surviving friends whom he really and truly loves.”
“Can you tell me why the savage instituted these practices of burying the living with the dead, of following the dead in funeral processions to their ‘last resting place,’ of wearing mourning, and of erecting costly monuments on their tombs?” asked Rev. Dudley.
“Yes, sir; that is very plain to the Marsites,” answered Mr. Midith. “I can account for that as easily to my satisfaction as I can account for the physiological fact that we require food in order to sustain life. Let us see if I can make it plain: We all know that the primitive savage almost universally believes in a conscious personal existence of some kind after death; that he deifies certain or all of his ancestors; that the departed need nearly the same subsistence as they do in this life; that the living may incur the pleasure or displeasure of the dead, and that the departed have the power of working either for the good or ill of the survivors. Just as soon as we believe these propositions the hecatomb, the obsequies, the mourning and the monuments naturally follow. Thus they are originated in and are founded on superstition and uncertainty, and will continue to live until we learn by a higher and deeper interpretation of nature that the vast preponderance of our most trustworthy evidence point against the primitive hypothesis of a conscious personal existence after death; and that the warrant for believing so is weakening with every advancement of scientific investigation and discovery.”
“You have so far told us nothing concerning the religious beliefs of the Marsites,” said Rev. Dudley, “and as I am engaged in religious work I would feel highly interested in a brief account of their religious sentiments. You have more than an hour before the train leaves, and during that time you can give us the principal points of Marsian theology.”
“In giving you our religious views, if I may call them such, you must remember that the vast majority of your people are yet very superstitious on the religious subject; many of them are even more superstitious on this subject than they are on the social, industrial and sexual questions. Some of them consider it even too sacred for discussion. Under these circumstances it is quite difficult to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth without wounding some one’s feelings; but, nevertheless, if you desire it, I shall give you a short account of it.
“The Marsites are nearly what you call agnostics in their religious beliefs, if you call agnosticism a religion.”
“I have heard a great deal about agnosticism, but I am not sure that I understand its fundamental principles. I would like very much to have your explanation of it, especially if your agnosticism differs from ours,” said Rev. Dudley.
“Agnosticism is a modern doctrine with you. It neither asserts nor denies the existence of a personal prayer-hearing God, a conscious personal existence after death, etc. Mr. Herbert Spencer is the father of it in this world. It teaches that the human mind is limited in the sphere of knowledge, and that we can not know what lies beyond this limit. It is alike opposed to dogmatic atheism and dogmatic theism. It is founded on the ‘relativity of all knowledge,’ that is, things can be known only under certain conditions, but that there may be forms of existence not possessing these requisite conditions, and are, therefore beyond the boundary of the sphere of human knowledge.
“We have seen that knowing implies two things—a conscious subject to receive the impression and an object to make it. For aught we know there may be forms of existences that have neither matter nor gravitation, but we can not assert this as a fact, because the data of proof and disproof are inaccessible. It is a form of existence, if it does exist, that does not excite a sensation as an object on a recipient subject. It is a well-known fact with us that all knowledge must enter the mind through the channels of the senses, and whenever and wherever we attempt to pass beyond the boundaries of the phenomenal, we are always checkmated by two alternate impossibilities of thought.
“Nearly all of your foremost thinkers are agnostics. This seems to show that your foremost minds are following us right up in religious beliefs and that there is but one line of progress here as well as elsewhere.
“Before we proceed any further, let us contemplate how the religious sentiments probably originated and developed, and how, under a better acquaintance with nature, they became identical with it.
“We know by actual experience, from the present savages, that the savage knows little of the so-called natural laws and that he is very superstitious. We also know that with any of us all tricks which we see performed, but which we do not understand at first, lose their miraculous character in proportion as we learn how they are performed. Just so it is with natural phenomena. At first when man does not understand them, he believes them to be the acts of an arbitrary deity; but as soon as they come under what is called the dominion of law, they lose their supernatural character; they are then nothing but the uniformity of nature.
“The primitive savage knows so little about nature that he largely runs cross-grained with her, and nature punishes him for every violation of her laws. He sees, hears and feels so many things that he can not account for. He sees the lofty tree torn to splinters by a flash of lightning. He hears the awful peal of thunder. He believes that nothing can happen without a personal agency, yet he sees no such agency. Again, at one time his abode is destroyed by an earthquake, or a sudden volcanic eruption; at another time it is inundated by a flood. At one season of the year he suffers from drought; at another season he is visited by destructive tornadoes and hailstorms. His improvidence often causes him to starve; his imprudence to go to war; his ignorance to be visited by painful and incurable epidemic, etc. He also has fearful dreams and sometimes meets raving maniacs. All these things are beyond his understanding. He can see no cause for them and, therefore, attributes them to supernatural agencies. He is pinched and punished by nature so often for violating her laws, the existence of which he knows nothing, that he is almost afraid to stir. He is a rude, cruel creature himself, and, therefore, has also a cruel god. His god, like himself, delights in torture. The savage delights in receiving the humiliation and services of his ‘inferiors,’ and imagines that his all-powerful god has similar feelings and requires the same of him.
“Thus you see how deities are born. The savage has many of them, because his mind is incapable of comprehending how one can rule all things; they are also rude and cruel like himself. He puts the same sentiments in his deities that he feels in his own breast. A person who can believe that an all-powerful God finds delight and pleasure in torturing a creature for all eternity, must have some mean blood in his own veins, for it is very probable that the cruelest person that ever lived would get his revenge satisfied by torturing his worst enemy for less than half an eternity. Thus, such a person makes his God meaner, more cruel, more revengeful than that person is himself. The savage knows of but few natural laws, and hence he puts nearly everything under the immediate and arbitrary supervision of his deities, whose anger is very easily excited. But as man becomes more and more civilized, his deities grow less in number; they also become kinder and more abstract. The process of discovering laws continues, until at last he concludes that all things are governed and maintained by law, and that wherever men have not yet discovered the law of a certain phenomena, their limited knowledge is at fault. Thus gradually as the mind unfolds and the heart improves, the supernatural is step by step brought within the domain of the natural, and the personal deities slowly become identical and at one with the Great Fact of the universe.
“The Marsites claim that they know nothing about supernaturalism, and that by the very nature of the knowing process nothing can be known about it. What we claim is, that there may be a personal God and there may not be one; but if there is such a personal God, the kind, cultured can conceive of Him only as being kind and just, having no revengeful feelings whatever. You see the Marsites never revengefully punish any one; how, then, can we think that God would; for, if we would think so, we would make our God worse than we are ourselves.
“Similarly we know nothing of a conscious personal existence after death. We believe that the facts of the universe, as far as we know them, point in the direction that there is no conscious personal existence after death; but for all that, there may be just such a God, soul, heaven and hell, as you folks teach there is. No one can either prove it nor disprove it. Hence we are not at all positive, like you are, about things that lie beyond the sphere of human knowledge. We are fully convinced that the possibilities of thought are not co-extensive and identical with the possibilities of things. But we also believe, if there is a conscious personal existence after death, that things, when we get there, will be suited to that life the same as we find them suited here to this life. We further believe that this life, in order to make it as good and complete as possible, requires all our efforts and talent to live up to the most wholesome relations that are stamped in the very nature of things. There is more about this life than we can probably ever learn; hence we have no time to spare for gaining the favors of beings in a supposed world, of which we know nothing definitely. The facts of the universe are the highest known authority, and he who lives most nearly in accord with them lives, in our opinion, the ‘holiest’ life.
“We believe that the universe is the grandest volume ever written by the Creator. It contains a complete history of all things. Every fossil, every plant, every bud, every flower and every organism is a letter. It does not even end with our and your little earths.
“All the other planets of our solar system, all the moons, all the meteors, comets and nebulæ, all the multitudes of stars with their attending host scattered in the remotest space are found recorded on the pages of this infinite volume. Its words, phrases and sentences consist of phenomena.
“This sacred volume is a continuous revelation; and with the rise of a higher intelligence and a keener sensibility, it commends itself to a rapidly increasing number of devotees. Every obedience of its commandments is rewarded by happiness, and every disobedience is punished by pain, right here in this life.
“It teaches that every heart-beat is an accent, every budding springtime an emphasis, every sunbeam a smile, every pleasant, blooming face a prayer, and every harmonious act an adoration.
“All who especially attribute the writing of any particular paper volume to the author of this universal volume infinitely belittle him.
“When we consider, then, that this infinite natural volume contains far more information than any finite mind can ever hope to grasp, and that all pain, or misery, results from an inadequate understanding of this sublime revelation, the inevitable conclusion is at once forced upon all impartial minds, that in order to live the holiest lives, all our time should be agreeably employed in learning as much as possible of its contents; and he who spends his time in any other devotion than that of discovering and investigating this phenomenal book, and he who erects any other temple of adoration, and worships at any other shrine than the temple of intelligence, is disobeying the highest authority, and is, therefore, always punished by the Creator here and now.
“That the Architect of the universe delights in having us obey the commands He has written in the constitution of things is evidenced by the fact that He always rewards obedience with happiness and disobedience with pain. For example:
“Healthful exercise, He rewards with a strong muscle and a vigorous mind. A well-adjusted appetite, He rewards with an unimpaired digestion and an abundant assimilation. To him who does not violate the circulatory laws, He gives a pure, firm, plentiful circulation. Regular, healthful habits, He rewards with a sensitive, highly-adjusted nervous system, a bright eye, rosy cheeks, and an elastic step. Industrious voluntary co-operation, He rewards with abundance and harmony; peaceful habits, with love and prosperity; genius, with improvement and progress; true justice, with equity and abundance to all; and freedom, with the highest form of happiness.
“But let us look at it from still another standpoint; let us examine whether the postulation of a prayer-hearing God can be reconciled with the scientific world, with the ‘harmony of the universe.’
“If God is affected by man’s prayer, and if man is a ‘free, moral agent,’ as your orthodox world claims him to be, then God’s action must, to a certain extent, be determined by and dependent on the arbitrary fancies of man’s devotional exercises. This state of affairs would, on the one hand, deprive science of all its certitude; would sever the continuity and destroy the uniformity of nature; would probably, by an intervention of prayer, make action which is equal to reaction one day, only half equal to it the next day. It would also rob God of all independent activity and make Him the sport of man’s whims and passions. But if, on the other hand, God is not affected by prayer, prayer is worse than useless; for it involves an expenditure of vitality which should be all utilized for useful activity, as we have seen. Thus we see that a prayer-hearing God and a ‘free, moral agent’ can not be reconciled with the scientific world.”
“But is not your belief a cold, uncertain and abstract one?” asked Rev. Dudley.
“That, no doubt, depends altogether on the evolution of the mental power of the mind that contemplates it. To a Marsite it is perfectly satisfactory; immeasurably more so than the belief that only a few of all the multitudes that die are saved, while all the rest are tortured for all eternity. To a Marsite a revengeful God, a heaven with a monarch, a crown and a throne are highly repugnant. We can not conceive that we can be happy anywhere as long as vast multitudes are suffering eternal hell-fire. Such a contemplation may be agreeable to your folks, but never to us.
“From the foregoing remarks concerning our religious sentiments, if you wish to call them such, you see at once that we have no creeds, no sectarian antagonism, no churches and cathedrals, no theological seminaries, no ordained ministers, no synods and ecclesiastical councils, no religious ceremonies and no adoration of a supernatural agency. All this vast amount of wealth and labor which you expend in absolute uncertainty we employ in finding how to live the most complete lives here and now.
“There is much more of religion, as well as of all other information, that you no doubt would be interested in and which I will tell you with the greatest of pleasure when I return from my western errand in a few days. It is now almost train time, and I shall have to take my departure from you for the present with the assurance of fulfilling my ‘promise’ to return as soon as possible. I can assure you that the time I have spent with you has by far been my happiest days on earth, and I highly appreciate your kind hospitality and congenial sociability.”
“If you must and will go, Mr. Midith, we will all accompany you to the depot and see you off,” said Viola, to which all consented and started.
Soon after we arrived at the depot the “flyer” arrived. After we had all given our parting friend a warm pressure of the hand, in which he warmly reciprocated and also imparted a kiss on Viola’s rosy lips, he mounted the slowly moving train, which was soon out of sight. We departed home and are now awaiting his return, when we will ask him many more questions concerning that wonderful world of his.
THE END.