In Sleep We Die Daily–God Alone is Life

Having, as I think, established at least a violent presumption that something of supreme importance is being operated within us during our sleeping hours; that that something concerns our spiritual training and development; and that this view is countenanced, not only by some of the most eminent thinkers of all time, but by what Christians call the Word of God; may we not penetrate a little further into the mysteries of those consecrated hours?

We are warranted in saying that the constituents of every human being are either material or spiritual, either body or soul. No one has any attributes or qualities that do not come under one or the other of these rubrics. Neither can it be successfully disputed that all matter is inert, is incapable of initiating or of arresting motion; that it can neither be increased nor diminished in volume. Its arrangement or form may be changed, but not its quantity.

It has, therefore, no life in itself, though, like a house or a garment, it may be the habitation of life of what we call the soul, or spirit.

It is true that the tree drops its fruit and its leaves in their season, but neither tree, leaf, nor fruit dies; they merely pass into a new form of life, as man is presumed to do when his heart ceases to beat. This habitation returns to its elements, or some other form, neither increased nor impaired in quantity by the change. In the language of Juvenal:

"Mors sola fatetur
Quantula sint hominum corpuscular."

But what becomes of the tenant? We neither know nor can conceive of anything having occurred to the soul more certain than, or beyond the fact, that it has been emancipated from the restrictions of its prison-house and set free to do, be, or become whatever it has been prepared for becoming during its earthly confinement.

This spirit was all of the man that was or could have been substantial to him. It possessed and represented all he had or knew of life. It was all there was or is of anyone's I am.

"There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins:
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."1

1 "Merchant of Venice," act v. scene I.

Milton describes the death of Jesus as

"a death like sleep;
A gentle drifting to immortal life."1

So when Adam communicated to Eve the conditions upon which they were to leave Paradise, the poet adds:

"For God is also in sleep, and dreams advise."

All life emanates from our Creator, who is life itself, and necessarily the source of all life–a doctrine I was gratified to find dogmatically and most impressively stated quite recently by the head of the most numerous division of the Christian Church. Pope Leo XIII., in an encyclical issued from the Vatican in November, 1901 A.D., said:

"God alone is life. All other things partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by his very nature, is 'the Life,' just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For 'by the Word all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made.' "

The same view of the origin of life and the great distinction between divine and natural, or secondary, causes was proclaimed in Rome nearly twenty centuries before this encyclical from our contemporary Pontifex Maximus, and under circumstances which lend a peculiar interest to it. The world is indebted to Cicero for the record of it, and to Macrobius for finding it after it had been supposed, for some fifteen centuries, to be irrevocably lost. I refer to the extraordinary vision attributed to Publius Cornelius Scipio, the second Scipio Africanus, while he was the military tribune in Africa and the guest of Prince Massanissa.

The night after his arrival, and after much talk about politics and government, but mostly of his ancestor, known as the first Africanus, Scipio retired to rest, and, as he said, "A sleep sounder than ordinary came over me." In his sleep he represents Africanus the elder to have presented himself, and to have predicted many things, favorable and menacing, to his descendant.

"Upon your single person," said Africanus, "the preservation of your country will depend; and, in short, it is your part, as dictator, to settle the government, if you can but escape the impious hands of your kinsmen…

"But that you may be more earnest in the defence of your country, know from me that a certain place in heaven, where they are to enjoy an endless duration of happiness, is assigned to all who have preserved, or assisted, or improved their country. For there is nothing which takes place on earth more acceptable to that Supreme Deity who governs all this world than those councils and assemblies of men bound together by law which are termed states; the governors and preservers of these go hence, and hither do they return."

1 Paradise Lost, xii. 430.

"Here," says Scipio, "frightened as I was, not so much from the dread of death as of the treachery of my friends, I asked him whether my father Paulus and others whom we thought to be dead were yet alive. 'To be sure they are alive,' replied Africanus, 'for they have escaped from the fetters of the body as from a prison. That which you call your life is really death. But behold your father Paulus approaching you.' No sooner did I see him," says Scipio, "than I poured forth a flood of tears; but he, embracing and kissing me, forbade me to weep. And when, having suppressed my tears, I began first to speak, 'Why,' said I, 'thou most sacred and excellent father, since this is life, as I hear Africanus affirm, why do I tarry on earth, and not hasten to come to you?'

" 'Not so, my son,' he replied. 'Unless that God whose temple is all this which you behold shall free you from this imprisonment in the body you can have no admission to this place; for men have been created under this condition, that they should keep that globe which you see in the middle of this temple, and which is called the earth. And a soul has been supplied to them from those eternal fires which you call constellations and stars, and which, being globular and round, are animated with divine spirit, and complete their cycles and revolutions with amazing rapidity. Therefore you, my Publius, and all good men, must preserve your souls in the keeping of your bodies; nor without the order of that Being who bestowed them upon you, are you to depart from mundane life, lest you seem to desert the duty of a man, which has been assigned you by God. Therefore, Scipio, like your grandfather here, and me, who begot you, cultivate justice and piety, which, while it should be great towards your parents and relations, should be greatest towards your country. Such a life is the path to heaven and the assembly of those who have lived before, and who, having been released from their bodies, inhabit that place which thou beholdest.' "

"Truly, O Africanus," said the junior Scipio, "since the path to heaven lies open to those who have deserved well of their country, though from my childhood I have ever trod in your and my father's footsteps without disgracing your glory, yet now, with so noble a prize set before me, I shall strive with much more diligence.

" 'Do so strive,' replied he, 'and do not consider yourself, but your body, to be mortal. For you are not the being which this corporeal figure evinces; but the soul of every man is the man, and not that form which may be pointed at with a finger. Know, therefore, that you are a divine person. Since it is divinity that has consciousness, sensation, memory, and foresight—that governs, regulates, and moves that body over which it has been appointed, just as the Supreme Deity rules this world; and in like manner, as an eternal God guides this world, which in some respects is perishable, so an eternal spirit animates your frail body.

" 'For that which is ever moving is eternal. Now, that which communicates to another object a motion which it received elsewhere must necessarily cease to live as soon as its motion is at an end. Thus the being which is self-motive is the only being that is eternal, because it never is abandoned by its own properties, neither is this self-motion ever at an end; nay, this is the foundation, this is the beginning of motion to all things that are thus subjects of motion.

" 'Since, therefore, it is plain that whatever is self-motive must be eternal, who can deny that this natural property is bestowed upon our minds? For everything that is moved by a foreign impulse is inanimate, but that which is animate is impelled by an inward and peculiar principle of motion; and in that consists the nature and property of the soul. Now, if it alone of all things is self-motive, assuredly it never was originated, and is eternal. Do thou, therefore, employ it in the noblest of pursuits, and the noblest of cares and those for the safety of they country.'

"He vanished, and I awoke from my sleep."

This story comes to us as a dream. Whether a dream, a vision, or a meditation, science knows nothing and can presume nothing in conflict with this pagan's view either of life or death.

We absolutely know nothing of life which warrants us in attributing to it perishability; nor have we any reason to presume that with the change called death anything perishes, or that anything more has really occurred than a separation of the tenant from his habitation—of the soul from its material prison. Neither have we more reason to suppose that the spirit, or soul, has become less a soul, less an individual life, than the matter with which it was clothed has been diminished in quantity by the separation. The destructibility of matter was, until comparatively recent times, just as popular a belief, and even more universally prevalent than is now that of the extinction of life when the soul leaves the body. Nor can science produce any more fallacious than the other. We are sent into this world and invested with material garments in order that we may be qualified to study and comprehend divine laws. The phenomenal world into which we are born is a kind of kindergarten where those divine laws are illustrated and made intelligible to our undeveloped and limited intelligence, through the operations of what we call Nature.

It is a stage in our education when the phenomenal world is a necessity to us, as the hornbook and black-board are to school-children. When we have learned all the lessons in this kindergarten by which we are likely to profit we leave that school; and in leaving it, we assume the larger liberty of that higher life where time and space only signify differences in moral conditions; where, as in this life, we will seek the association and companionship of those with whom we shall then have most affinity.

All these, I say, are presumptions; and the burden of proof lies upon those who would undertake to maintain the contrary in any of these particulars.

Now, after we have shaken off this mortal coil and entered the world of spirits, in what respect does our condition differ from that of sleep? In both, our consciousness of this phenomenal world—of the kindergarten—has been entirely suspended. It is true that form sleep we awaken, sooner or later, to a consciousness of our incorporate limitations, while from death we do not awake. But is the difference any more than this—that in one case our carriage is left standing at the door to take us back again, while in the other we have no animus revertendi? Having reached home, we have no further use for our carriage and it is dismissed.

Nay, what reason have we for doubting that during our sleep we are in substantially the same society and surrounded by similar, if not the same, influences as we should be were we never again to awake? We cannot conceive that the abandonment of our earthly habitation, the laying aside of our garments, the deliverance from our prison, has deprived us of any of the qualities or attributes which constituted our being, except upon the theory of utter extinction by the separation. The spirit, or soul, inhabits the body, but is no more a part of it than the heat generated in a furnace is a part of the chamber.

The inhabitants of the spiritual world are presumed to know nothing of the limitations of time or space. There is no manifest reason, therefore, why we should not always be accessible to and in intercourse with them, unless when too preoccupied by the distractions of our environment in the phenomenal world; nor for presuming that our post-mortem life will differ from our condition while sleeping, except that one is for a time and the other is for eternity. As the spirit during sleep is presumptively as free as it ever will be from all the restrictions of sense, what reason is there for doubting that we enter at once into a life and a society substantially the same as that awaiting us when we enter into "the sleep that knows no waking"?

This presumption is strengthened by the fact that we can bring back no more information of what occurs to us in our temporary sleeps than we can from the spiritual world when we shall sleep with our fathers.

During our sleep we have no more power over anything in this phenomenal world than, while we are awake, we have over the spiritual world; and yet, while asleep, we retain, in full activity, all the powers to act upon the world about us, save only the power or inclination to exert them. While this condition continues, what other or greater change could be wrought in us by death?

When we reflect upon the extraordinary change, psychological and physical, which we experience after a night's sound sleep, by what theory can that change be so satisfactorily and so rationally explained as to suppose that we have been temporarily in association with those who have preceded us to the spirit land? What is there improbably in this? What more entirely consistent with divine goodness? What so admirably, what so exclusively adapted to work the change which in the morning we realize has been worked in us during our slumbering? How very much more probably this, than that one-third of each day of our lives is permitted to go to waste, for which there is no imaginable explanation better than that a Creator, of infinite wisdom, could not fashion us in his image in any way that did not involve that waste—an absurd presumption.

While in a swoon or in immediate peril of drowning, as in some other cases of temporarily suspended action of the heart and lungs, persons have remained for hours, and even weeks, without any consciousness it is difficult to imagine any psychological difference between their condition and death.

The evidence is practically unanimous that while in a swoon or while near drowning, one's experience, instead of being painful, is altogether agreeable, even blissful, and entirely free from the concern and anxiety with which the prospect of death is ordinarily contemplated when awake.

An impressive illustration of what the death of the natural body means comes to us through the following Persian story, abridged from Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia:

"DEATH OF ABDALLAH

"Faithful friends, it lies, I know,
Pale and white, and cold as snow;
And ye say, 'Abdallah's dead,'
Weeping at the feet and head.
I can see your falling tears,
I can hear you sighs and prayers;
Yet I smile and whisper this:
'I am not the thing you kiss!
Cease your tears and let it lie;
It was mine—it is not I.'

"Sweet friends, what the women lave
For the last sleep of the grave
Is the hut that I am quitting,
Is the garment no more fitting,
Is the cage from which at last,
Like a bird, my soul has passed.
Love the inmate, not the room;
The wearer, not the garb—the plume
Of the eagle, not the bars
That keep him from the splendid stars.

"Loving friends, oh, rise and dry
Straightway every weeping eye;
What ye lift upon the bier
Is not worth one single tear.
'Tis an empty sea-shell—one
Out of which the pearl is gone.
The shell is broken, it lies there;
The pearl, the all, the soul is here."

If this resemblance of sleep to death should seem chimerical to any, I have only to say that the teachings of the Bible on that subject must seem equally so. In that sacred record death and sleep are frequently—I might almost say constantly—used as equivalents.

Among the many marvels by which the death of Jesus on the cross was signalized, "the tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised."

In the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians he says:

"For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried; and that he hath been raised on the third day according to the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas; then to the twelve; then he appeared to five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep."

In the same letter Paul says:

"For if the dead are not raised, neither hath Christ been raised: and if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; you are yet in your sins. Then they which are fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all most pitiable. But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them that are asleep."

When Stephen was stoned to death for his loyalty to Jesus, he is reported to have kneeled down and cried with a loud voice, "Lord, lay not this to theyr charge. And when he had said this he fell asleep." We have no other authority for saying that he died.

Paul, in the thirteenth verse of the fourth chapter of his letter to the Thessalonians, says:

"But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them that fall asleep; that ye sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him."

Also, in the ninth verse of the fifth chapter of his letter to the Thessalonians, he says:

"For God appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him."

"Knowing this first that there shall come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as from the beginning of the creation."

"David, after he had in his own generation served the counsel of God, fell on sleep and was laid unto his fathers."

When the sisters of Lazarus sought Jesus, to tell Him that their brother was dead, He replied to them: "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." Then said his disciples: "If he sleep he shall do well"' howbeit Jesus spoke of his death. But they thought He had spoken of taking rest in sleep. Then said Jesus unto them, "Lazarus is dead."

Here we find Jesus calling the separation of the soul from the material body, which the disciples termed death, sleep; and it was not till the disciples showed that they misunderstood Him that He said, "Lazarus is dead."

When the prophet Elisha learned that the child of the Shunammite woman was dead he gave his servant Gehazi his staff and directed him to go and lay it upon the child. He did so, but was obliged to report to Elisha that "there was neither voice nor hearing. The child is not awakened."

Elisha then come and found "the child was dead and laid upon his bed." He went in, shut to the door, excluding all but the boy and himself and prayed upon the Lord. Then, after embracing him, "the flesh of the child waxed warm." Presently he sent for the mother and said to her, 'Take up thy son."

Here the child had been dead. But all life comes from the Lord, and, in answer to the prophet's prayer, his body was warmed into life again; or, to use Gehazi's expression, was "awaked."

The daughter of Jairus was given up for dead by her family. "Why make yet a tumult, and weep?" said Jesus, when He arrived, in response to a message from the father. "The child is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But he, having put them all forth, taketh the father of the child and her mother and them that were with him, and goeth in where the child was. And taking the child by the hand, he saith unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise. And straightway the damsel rose up, and walked; for she was twelve years old."

Again in I Kings i. 21:

"Otherwise it shall come to pass, when my lord the king shall sleep with his father, that I and my son Solomon shall be counted offenders."

In the thirty-ninth verse of the fifty-first chapter of Jeremiah we read:

"When they are heated, I will make their feast; and I will make them drunken, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the Lord."

Secular and profane authority help to show how universally the conditions of sleep and death were assimilated in the popular mind throughout the ages.

It was the common belief of the ancient philosophers of Greece and Rome that the causes of sleep and death were the same. A place was assigned them in their Pantheon as brothers. Sleep was regarded both by the Epicureans and the Stoics, as well as by Plato, as death, followed by a resurrection. "Latet meus opressa somno," says Lactantius, "tanquam ignis obducto cinere sopitus, quem si paulatim commoveris, rursus ardescit et quaasi evigilabat." Lucretius illustrates the same idea by the same metaphor:

"cinere ut multa latet obrutus ignis,
Unde reconflari sensus per membra repente
Possit, ut ex igni Caeco consurgere flamma."

Pausanias, describing the inscriptions on a chest, or cypsela, says:

"On the other side of the chest, beginning from the left hand, you will see a woman holding a white boy who is asleep, in her right hand, but in her left hand a black boy, who is likewise asleep and whose feet are distorted. The inscriptions signify—though you might infer without them—that these boys are Death and Sleep and that the Woman who is their nurse is Night."

So when in the Iliad the large-eyed Juno demonstrated with the "dread Son of Saturn" for wishing to deliver Sarpedon

"from the common lot
Of death, a mortal doomed long since by fate,"

she finally suggested an alternative which was embraced:

"yet if he be
So dear to thee and thou dost pity him,
Let him in mortal combat be o'ercome
By Menaetiades, and when the breath
Of life has left his frame, give thou command
To Death and Gentle Sleep to bear him hence
To the broad realm of Lycia. There his friends
And brethren shall perform the funeral rites;
There shall they build him up a tomb and rear
A column—honors that become the dead."

After Sarpedon had been slain by Patroclus, the Cloud-Compeller spake to Phoebus thus:

"Go no beloved Phoebus, and withdraw
Sarpedon from the weapons of his foes;
Cleanse him from the dark blood and bear him thence,
And lave him in the river-stream, and shed
Ambrosia o'er him. Clothe him then in robes
Of heaven, cosigning him to Sleep and Death,
Twin brothers, and swift bearers of the dead;
And they shall lay him n Lycia's fields,
That broad and opulent realm—" etc.

Apollo instantly obeyed his father, sought the field of battle, bore off Sarpedon,

"And laved him in the river-stream and shed
Ambrosia o'er him. Then in robes of heaven
He clothed him, giving him to Sleep and Death,
Twin brothers and swift bearers of the dead,
And they, with speed conveying it, laid down
The corpse in Lycia's broad and opulent realm."

Here death and Sleep are twice designated as brothers and a third time are sent together on the same errand, implying functional equality. Of the Golden Age, or Edenic period, Hesiod, the father of Greek poetry, said:

"As gods they lived, void of care, apart from labors and trouble, nor was wretched old age impending, and they died as if overcome by sleep."

Xenophon, as quoted by Cicero, represents Cyrus, King of Persia, saying to his children on his death-bed:

"Do not believe, my dear children, that when I shall have quitted you I shall be nowhere and no more (nunquam aut nullum fore). While I was with you you did not see my soul; you only comprehended by my actions that this body was animated by one. I have never been able to persuade myself that souls that live while in mortal bodies, when they leave them die. I cannot believe that they lose all intelligence. When death disunites the human frame, we clearly see what becomes of its material parts; they apparently return to the several elements out of which they were composed; but the soul continues to remain invisible, both while present in the body and when it leaves it.

"You know, my children, that nothing more resembles death than sleep; and the sleep of souls chiefly proclaims their divinity, for many of them foresee the future and show what they will become when they shall be freed from the prison of the body."

Sir Thomas Brown saw so little difference between sleep and death that he dared not lie down in his bed at night without saying his prayers and having a colloquy with God. He says:

"We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleep, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the litigation of sense, but the liberty of reason, and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. I am no way facetious nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company. Yet in one dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful. I would never study but in my dreams, and this time also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understanding that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a confused and broken tale of that that hath passed.

"Thus it is sometimes observed that men sometimes upon the hour of their departure do speak and reason above themselves; for then the soul, beginning to be freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason lie herself and to discourse in a strain about mortality.

"It is that death by which we may be said literally to die daily—a death which Adam died before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers and a half adieu unto the world, and take my farewell in a colloquy with God."

We have from the same distinguishing physician the following lines, in which the identity of the states of sleep and death is, if possible, more distinctly asserted:

Sleep is a death; O make me try,
By sleeping, what it is to die;
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe'er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at least with Thee.
And thus assured, behold I lie,
Securely, or to wake or die.
These are my drowsy days; in vain
I do now wake to sleep again:
O come that hour, when I shall never
Sleep again, but awake forever."

When these verses were written, Sir Thomas might have had in mind the following lines of Heinrich Meibon, an Austrian poet-laureate, who died when Brown was but twenty years old:

"Alma quies optata veni; nam sic sine vita
Vivere quam suave est. sic sine morte mori."

Henry Vaughan, the precurson of Wordsworth as the interpreter of the mystical and symbolical aspects of nature, in his verses entitled "The Morning Watch," has the following lines, quoted in the Life and Times of Thomas Kettlewell, by Francis Lee:

"Prayer is
The world in tune,
A Spirit Voice
And Vocall joyes,
Whose Echo is heaven's blisse.
O let me climbe
When I lye down. The pious soul by nighte
Is like a clouded starre, whose beames, though said
To shed their light
Under some cloud,
Yet are above,
And shine and move
Beyond that mystic shroud.
So in my bed,
That curtained grave, though sleep like ashes hide
My lamp and life, both shall in Thee abide."

Vaughan also, in the following notable lines, has more emphatically anticipated all I have attempted to demonstrate in these pages, of the providential purpose of sleep.

THE NIGHT

John iii 2

"Through that pure virgin-shrine,
That sacred veil drawn o'er they glorious noon,
That men might look and live, as glowworms shine,
And face the moon,
Wise Nicodemus saw such light
As made him know his God by night.

"Most blessed believe he!
Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes
When thou didst rise;
And, what can never more be done,
Did at midnight speak with the Sun!

"Oh, who will tell me where
He found thee at that dead and silent hour?
What hallow'd, solitary ground did bear
So rare a flower;
Within whose sacred leafs did lie
The fullness of the Deity?

"No mercy-seat of gold,
No dead and dusty cherub, nor carved stone,
But his own living works, did my Lord hold
And lodge alone;
Where trees and herbs did watch and peep
And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.

"Dear Night! this world's defeat;
The stop to busie fools; care's check and curb:
The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christ's progress, and his prayer-time;
The hours to which high heaven doth chime.

"God's silent, searching flight:
When my Lord's head is filled with dew, and all
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;
His still, soft call;
His knocking time; the soul's dumb watch,
When spirits their fair kindred catch.

Were all my loud, evil days
Calm and unhaunted as is they dark tent,
Whose peace but by some angel's wing or voice
Is seldom rent;
Then I in heaven all the long year
Would keep, and never wander here.

"But living where the Sun
Doth all things wake, and where all mix and type
Themselves and others, I consent and run
To ev'ry myre;
And by this world's ill-guided light,
Erre more than I can do by night

"There is in God, some say,
A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
Oh, for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim!"

In trying to reconcile one of his heroes to the death to which he has been condemned, one of Shakespeare's heroes says:

"Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest, yet grossly fearest thy death,
Which is no more."