on, both the starry
worlds above and the manifold forms of life on earth about him, is his
self-conscious personality, his ego, through which he feels himself akin
with God, the great world-ruling _I Am_. This self-conscious part of man,
which lends to his every manifestation its value and purpose, can no more
disappear into nothingness than can God, who called into existence this
world with all its phenomena, who set it in motion and directs it.
Whatever thought the crudest of men may have of his ego, his self,(910) or
however the most learned scholar may explain the marvelous action and
interaction of physical and psychical or spiritual forces which culminates
in his own self-conscious personality, it appears certain that this ego
cannot cease to be with the cessation of the bodily functions. There is in
us something divine, immortal, and the only question is wherein it may be
found.

2. The creation of man which is described in the Bible in the words, "God
formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life, and man became a living soul"(911) corresponds to the
child-like conceptions of a primitive people. On the other hand, Scripture
speaks of death in parallel terms, "The dust returneth to the earth as it
was, and the spirit (Ruah, the life-giving breath) returneth unto God who
gave it."(912)

The conception that the soul enters into man as the breath of life and
leaves him at his death, flying toward heaven like a bird,(913) is quite
as ancient and as universal as the other, that the soul descends into the
nether world as a shadowy image of the body, there to continue a dull
existence. The two are related to one another, and in the Bible, as well
as in the literature of other peoples, they have given rise to diverse
definitions of the soul. This was the point of departure for the
development of the conception of immortality in one or the other
direction, according to whether the body was considered a part of the
personality which somehow survives after death, or only the spiritual
substance of the soul was thought to live on in celestial regions as
something divine. The former led to the theory of the resurrection of the
body and its reunion with the soul; the latter to the belief in a future
life for the soul, after it had been separated or released from the body.

3. When once the soul was felt to be a "lamp of the Lord," filling the
body with light when man is awake,(914) i