Lecture on "Hope of Immortality"

The Ingersoll lecture for this year was delivered last night by the Rev. Charles F. Dole D.D., '68, of the First Congregational Church, Jamaica Plain, who spoke on "The Hope of Immortality and Our Reasons for It." After acknowledging the wide-spread skepticism of the present day, and speaking of that class of people whose desire to believe prevents them from entering the discussion at all, Dr. Dole went on to discuss various arguments on this most perplexing of all subjects.

The speaker frankly admitted that in spite of all arguments, immortality was, after all, a hope. And yet, he said, it is a hope which reason compels our mind to adopt. Predominant over all matter we find that curious, spiritual thing called personality. Love, dreams of power, music, intellectual activities-abstract qualities which one cannot buy, see, not touch-all denote that we move in a spiritual realm. If these personal qualities-which distinguish man from animals-are spiritual, and therefore immortal, why should not persons be? To one who considers all the great minds and intellectual geniuses which the world has produced, skepticism is less satisfactory than the opposite view. Dying flowers rise again to fruit; decaying vegetable matter is born again. Following the line laid out by the great truths of Nature it is therefore difficult to keep our intelligence from reacting towards immortality.

This is a world of startling possibilities in which nature ever meets us with wondrous surprises. Again and again fertile minds startle us with inventions which would have seemed supernatural to the past generation. Is it too much to suppose that in the higher realms of a world where "truth is stranger than fiction" we may not discover the great truth of Immortality? Hope cannot live without immortality, and life cannot go on without hope.