y
ourselves in thought and mind with the absolute values, we are sure of
our immortality.

But it will be said that in the first place this promise of immortality
carries with it no guarantee of survival in time, and in the second
place that it offers us, at last, only an impersonal immortality. Let us
take these two objections in turn, though they are in reality closely
connected.

We must not regard time as an external, inhuman, unconscious process.
Time is the frame of soul-life; outside this it has no existence. The
entire cosmic process is the life-frame of the universal Soul, the
Divine Logos. With this life we are vitally connected, however brief and
unimportant the span and the task of an individual career may seem to
us. If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be
because the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of
expression. My death, like my birth, will have a teleological
justification, to which my supra-temporal self will consent. When a good
man's work in this world is done, when he is able to say, without
forgetting his many failures, 'I have finished the work that Thou gavest
me to do,' surely his last word will be, 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy
servant depart in peace'; not, 'Grant that I may flit for a while over
my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.'
We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures
of the disembodied ghost--

'Quo cursu deserta petiverit, et quibus ante
Infelix sua tecta supervolitaverit alis.'

The most respectable motive which leads men to desire a continuance of
active participation in the affairs of time is that which Tennyson
expresses in the often-quoted line, 'Give her the wages of going on, and
not to die.' We may feel that we have it in us to do more for God and
our fellow-men than we shall be able to accomplish in this life, even if
it be prolonged to old age. Is not this a desire which we may prefer as
a claim? And in any case, it is admitted that time is the form of the
will. Are we to have no more will after death? Further, is our probation
over when we die? What is to be the fate of that large majority who, so
far as we can see, are equally undeserving of heaven and of hell? To
these questions no answer is possible, because we are confronted with a
blank wall of ignorance. We do not know whether there will be any future
probation. We do not know whether Robert