belongs to it have been the nursery of great thoughts and burning aspirations. To the high theme of Immortality poets, artists, and philosophers, no less than preachers or theologians, have been drawn by an irresistible attraction. They have spent upon it reverent, earnest thought and labour. How much light has been so shed upon the darkness encompassing the future of the soul is not now the question. It is enough that in seeking to illumine the darkness (even though the effort has been made in vain), they have enlarged and enriched the spiritual thoughts of Humanity, and have lifted them to a brighter and purer world.

For, apart from all particular theories of Immortality, it is the belief in a personal Immortal Life of human souls which gives Man his proper dignity in the scale of Nature. As Science lowers him in his own eyes, Theology exalts him. On the one hand he is little higher than the beasts; on the other hand he is little lower than the angels. For Our Lord in the mysterious passage in which He speaks of the angels, says explicitly that they "die not." Death is the lot of Humanity. Deathlessness is the boon of the angelic life. Spiritual beings, as the angels, cannot die. So too the spirit of Man, as

being itself immortal, approximates to the angelic life.

There is much in Nature which tends to overpower human thought. The vast spaces of Astronomy, the vast periods of Geology, stand in contrast with the narrow limits of human being. The mighty powers which Nature now and again puts forth in the earthquake or the hurricane or the cataclysm reduce Man's physical activity to insignificance. What is to be set against this great overmastering thought? It can be nothing else than the belief that Man possesses in himself an immortal treasure, and that treasure is the soul. The soul is the witness of its own eternity as of its own spirituality. It is, as Democritus said, "the house of God." Or as Epictetus said, every man "carries about a God within him." To know this truth is to know the dignity of Man.

It is no part of this essay to discuss the theory of Man's origin. But among the seeming evidences of a lost potency or capacity, as of a vision halfforgotten yet half-remembered, is his dissatisfaction with himself and the conditions of his being. He does not think of himself as of one whose history · ψυχή οἰκητήριον δαίμονος.

I

had been a continuous progress from a lower to a higher state. He has felt always that he might be better than he is, and ought to do more than he has ever done. He is conscious of powers which do not find full play in this world. He is oppressed by the sense of contrast between his ideal and the realisation which falls so far short of it. Hence his spirit is for ever in unrest. What a pain there is in human inability to do more work! How wasteful and saddening seem the hours spent in sleep! The limitations of his physical senses are distressful to him. The imperfection of his moral nature jars upon his conscience. He feels within himself the yearnings for a sanctity not of earth. Nay, as he looks around him his pathetic regret is only intensified. He erects buildings, and they outlive him. He makes calculations, such as Halley's, and he may not live to verify them. His purposes are immortal. His earthly life closes as a tale that is told. With infinite hopes and aspirations, with poor sinful deeds, striving and failing and learning by failure to strive again, he seems to himself as a prince immured in a gloomy prison house.

But let Man, so cramped and saddened, be suddenly invested with the promise or potency of

an everlasting life; then his being assumes a new dignity, as being fraught with endless issues; his actions, his very thoughts bear the stamp of Immortality; he is as a pauper who has succeeded unexpectedly to an inheritance of vast and ample riches. "I am fully persuaded that one of the best springs of generous and worthy actions, is the having generous and worthy thoughts of ourselves. Whoever has a mean opinion of the dignity of his nature, will act in no higher a rank than he has allotted himself in his own estimation. If he considers his being as circumscribed by the uncertain term of a few years, his designs will be contracted into the same narrow span he imagines is to bound his existence. How can he exalt his thoughts to anything great and noble who only believes that after a short term on the stage of this world, he is to sink into oblivion and to lose his consciousness for ever?" I

Thus it is true that the belief in Immortality dignifies life as nothing else can dignify it.

"Life is real! Life is earnest !

And the grave is not its goal.
'Dust thou art, to dust returnest,'
Was not spoken of the soul." 2

I

Spectator, No. 210.

2

Longfellow, A Psalm of Life.

The assurance of Immortality is generally proportionate to the elevation of the personal life. As Dr. Martineau has said: "The great essential to this belief is a sufficiently elevated estimate of human nature; no man will ever deny its Immortality who has a deep impression of its capacity for so great a destiny."

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But conversely the belief in Immortality inspires great thoughts of the potency lying in the present life. He who is possessed with the thought of his own immortal being, and of that being especially as spiritual, will make it his aim, in the noble words of a pagan philosopher, "to live as far as possible an immortal life." 2

What then is the character of that life? This is a question which will be more fully considered hereafter. The Immortal Life must depend, as has been seen, upon the constitution of human nature. All the parts of human nature possess their own graces. But the graces of the body, though beautiful and splendid, are evidently transient. Long before the approach of death they are seen to decay. The soul, too, has its graces, partly intellectual, partly

2

Five Points of Christian Faith, p. 19.

ἐφ ̓ ὅσον ἐνδέχεται ἀθανατίζειν, Aristotle, Nicom. Eth. x. 7, 8.