the departed can
be imagined to dwell and carry on their occupations. When this earthly
tabernacle is dissolved, no other habitation or building can take them
in: it is in the language of ideas only that we speak of them.

First of all there is the thought of rest and freedom from pain; they
have gone home, as the common saying is, and the cares of this world
touch them no more. Secondly, we may imagine them as they were at
their best and brightest, humbly fulfilling their daily round of
duties--selfless, childlike, unaffected by the world; when the eye was
single and the whole body seemed to be full of light; when the mind was
clear and saw into the purposes of God. Thirdly, we may think of them
as possessed by a great love of God and man, working out His will at a
further stage in the heavenly pilgrimage. And yet we acknowledge that
these are the things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard and therefore
it hath not entered into the heart of man in any sensible manner to
conceive them. Fourthly, there may have been some moments in our own
lives when we have risen above ourselves, or been conscious of our truer
selves, in which the will of God has superseded our wills, and we have
entered into communion with Him, and been partakers for a brief season
of the Divine truth and love, in which like Christ we have been inspired
to utter the prayer, 'I in them, and thou in me, that we may be all made
perfect in one.' These precious moments, if we have ever known them, are
the nearest approach which we can make to the idea of immortality.

14. Returning now to the earlier stage of human thought which is
represented by the writings of Plato, we find that many of the
same questions have already arisen: there is the same tendency to
materialism; the same inconsistency in the application of the idea of
mind; the same doubt whether the soul is to be regarded as a cause or as
an effect; the same falling back on moral convictions. In the Phaedo the
soul is conscious of her divine nature, and the separation from the body
which has been commenced in this life is perfected in another. Beginning
in mystery, Socrates, in the intermediate part of the Dialogue, attempts
to bring the doctrine of a future life into connection with his theory
of knowledge. In proportion as he succeeds in this, the individual seems
to disappear in a more general notion of the soul; the contemplation of
ideas 'under the form of eternity' takes the place of past