into light, we cannot--as yet--convert
either into Life.

So far Knowledge takes us on the hypothesis that Life is material, for
Energy is not outside of the world of matter. But still within the
field of Knowledge is the old problem of Immaterial Reality and its
relation to Life. To those who are convinced, as I am myself, by the
old arguments in favour of Immaterial Reality, conceivable but not
imaginable, it is certain that intellectual and moral life belongs to
it and shares its attributes of eternity. Metaphysics are more
convincing than psychology. But need this mean that this eternal life
is personal? No one as yet has answered this question.

{96}

And there are further considerations: all that we know of life teaches
us that it is a succession of losses. The passage from youth to middle
life, and the change from middle life to old age are losses, from which
we shrink. No man willingly surrenders the flexibility of youth or the
power of middle life. But the experience--shrunk from and postponed
though it be--teaches that through loss came gain. Yet none of us ever
foresaw the form which the gain would take. After old age comes death:
that too is loss. Is it also gain? If Life continue, and that at
least seems probable, Knowledge teaches us that it will change its form
and that here, too, gain will come through loss. But, it is often
said, this is the denial of the survival of personality, and it is
personality, not life, which we desire. No doubt we do: but we desire
to keep much which we lose, and yet come to see that only thus could we
achieve the greater gain.[10]

After all, Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn
of consequence--a courageous trust in the great purpose of all things
and pressing forward to finish the work which is in sight, whatever the
price may be. Who knows whether the "personality" of which men talk so
much and know so little may not prove to be the temporary limitation
rather than the necessary expression of Life?

There was once an archipelago of islands off a mountainous coast
separated from each other and from the mainland by the sea. But in
course of {97} time the sea dried up, the islands were joined to the
great mountain behind them, and it became clear that they had always
been united by solid ground under a very shallow sea. If those islands
could have thought and spoken what would they have said? Before the
event they would have prot