Beecher's position is the only reasonable one. If hearing and believing the message of Christ is essential to all mankind's eternal happiness, then that opportunity must be available beyond the confines of mortal life. Why not, asked missionary Parley Pratt, insisting the dead "not only live, move, and think but might hear the gospel. . . . We reason from what we know." In the "spirit world societies are made up of all kinds." Many presumably "have lived in part of the spirit world . . . where the key has not yet been turned nor the gospel preached." If this is true, then the fact would explain Peter's claim that "the gospel was preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit."
Peter's cryptic allusion represents the Christian Bible's single most stupendous moment of liberality and generosity. The eighteenth-century revolt against organized religion was in large measure a protest against the narrowness of its vision. As the philosopher and author Gotthold Lessing phrased it, "accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason." What he meant was, God could not hide the Savior's advent in a Bethlehem stable, and require all humans across time and cultures to recognize its universal import. Paul's words suggest an original conception of a ministry that would extend not just across borders, but across death itself.
The belief that the work of ministry includes the departed, animates the Latter-day Saint practice of tracing the roots of their families into ages past and performing gospel ordinances on their behalf. "The work of love in remembering one who is dead is a work of the utmost unselfish love," wrote the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. "If one wants to make sure that love is completely unselfish, he eliminates every possibility of repayment. But precisely this is eliminated in the relationship to one who is dead. If love nevertheless remains, it is in truth unselfish."
Referring to the performance of sacraments on behalf of the deceased, Krister Stendahl expressed "holy envy" for a practice so conspicuously rooted in love for one's ancestors. We see in this undertaking, with its hints of ancient origins (1 Cor. 15:29), acts of devotion performed across a veil of silence, a reaching after our dead in the hope of uniting them to us.
If we are serious about our prospects of life beyond the grave, then we should not shy away from making a considered effort to understand what kinds of continuity with this life make sense. If God's dominion does not end with our death, why should the progress of the human soul? The particular potency of the challenges we face—our bodily weakness, the instincts and passions that consume us, the press of evil all around us—make a life of virtuous aspiration very like a race through quicksand. However, it is just these conditions of mortality, like the world of Darwin's honeybee, that are especially conducive to growth and progress.
Life may well give us, in a concentrated dose, the soul-stretching most necessary to our long-range spiritual development. That would explain the urgency for acting in the here and now to pursue the path of virtue. For those with the understanding and capacity, procrastinating repentance does not just prolong our pain and forestall our happiness; it may greatly prolong and complicate the process when repentance does begin. But even for those who live and die in obliviousness to God's eternal purposes, death does not freeze the soul in time.
In God's universe nothing is stationary. For the last two centuries, we have known that the stars and planets are not arrayed in a perfect celestial order, a once and forever system of static harmony. When William Herschel plied his magnificent telescopes in the late 1700s, he observed a universe in process of continual disruption, upheaval, and transformation on a colossal scale. As suns died and faded away in one quadrant of the galaxy, whole star systems sprang into being in another. If God takes as much care with the destinies of human souls as with the planets they inhabit, surely they too gain in splendor and glory through the cycles of eternity.
What challenges and conditions may come when we have passed into that undiscovered country, death, we cannot know. What we do know is that Jesus spoke in simple, hopeful terms about the people for whom He died. "This is the father's will . . . that of all which He hath given me I should lose nothing, but raise it up again at the last day." Surely, the work of redeeming and exalting that He began before the earth was formed will continue after it passes away.
In the language of conventional Christianity, will all be saved? Put another way, will anyone be eternally consigned to hell? If our intended destiny is to become like our Father in Heaven, "joint-heirs with Christ," then anything short of that eventuality is damnation. As cycles of poor choices may tend ever downward in mortality, so may they hereafter. For redemption to be permanently beyond reach, however, one would have to choose to put oneself beyond reach.
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