Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1885 — Chinese Notions of Immortality. [ARTICLE]

Chinese Notions of Immortality.

In the most ancient times ancestral worship was maintained on the ground that the souls of the dead exist after this life. The present is a part only of human existence, and men continue to be after death what they have become before it. Hence the honors accorded to men of rank in their lifetime were continued to them after their death. In the earliest utterances of Chinese national thought on this su'bject we find that duality which has remained the prominent feature in Chinese thinking ever since. The present life is light; the future is darkness. What the shadow is to the substance, the soul is to the body; what vapor is to water, breath is to man. By the process of cooling steam may again become water, and the transformation of animals teaches us that beings inferior to man live after death. Ancient Chinese then believed that as there is a male and female principle in all nature, a day and a night as inseparable from each thing in the universe as from the universe/itself, so it is with man. In the course of ages and in the vicissitudes of religious ideas, men came to believe more definitely in the possibility of communications with supernatural beings. In the twelfth century before the Christian era it was a distinct belief that the thoughts of the sages were to them a revelation from above. The “Book of Odes” frequently uses the expression “God spoke of them,” and one sage is represented after death “moving up and down in the presence of God in heaven.” A few centuries subsequently we find for the first time great men transferred in popular imagination to the sky, it being believed that their souls took up their abode in certain constellations. This was due to the fact that the ideas of immortality had taken a new shape, and that the philosophy of the times regarded the stars of heaven as the pure essences of the grosser things belonging to this world. The pure is heavenly and the gross earthly, and therefore that which is purest on earth ascends to the regions of the stars.

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Alt ingenious resident of Maine has succeeded in inducing his kitchen fire and tea kettle to do much for him. Several vires run from the kitchen to

his sleeping room up-stairs. He pulls one wire and opens the draught, and his coal fire, which has been slumbering all night, blazes up. Pulling a second wire he lifts a cover from the stove, and a third wire pulled places the tea kettle in its place. When he and his wife have dressed and come down stairs their breakfast is well under way.