rigin of
spirit with anything else whatever. For all its beliefs, the most sublime
and the crudest alike, conceal within them the conviction that
fundamentally spirit alone has truth and reality, and that everything else
is derived from it. It is a somewhat pitiful mode of procedure to direct
all apologetic endeavours towards the one relatively small question of
"immortality," thus following exactly the lines usually adopted by the
aggressive exponents of naturalism, and thus allowing opponents to dictate
the form of the questions and answers. It is quite certain that all
religion which is in any way complete, includes within itself a belief in
the everlastingness of our spiritual, personal nature, and its
independence of the becoming or passing away of external things. But, on
the one hand, this particular question can only be settled in connection
with the whole problem, and, on the other hand, it is only a fraction of
the much farther-reaching belief in the reality of spirit and its
superiority to nature. The very being of religion depends upon this. That
it may be able to take itself seriously and regard itself as true; that
all deep and pious feelings, of humility and devotion, may be cherished as
genuine and as founded in truth; that it behoves it to find and experience
the noble and divine in the world's course, in history and in individual
life; that the whole world of feeling with all its deep stirrings and
mysteries is of all things the most real and true, and the most
significant fact of existence--all these are features apart from which it
is impossible to think of religion at all. But they all depend upon the
reality, independence and absolute pre-eminence of spirit. Freedom and
responsibility, duty, moral control and self-development, the valuation of
life and our life-work according to our life's mission and ideal aims,
even according to everlasting aims, and "sub specie aeterni," the idea of
the good, the true and the beautiful--all things apart from which religion
cannot be thought of--all these depend upon spirit and its truth. And
finally "God is Spirit": religion cannot represent, or conceive, or
possess its own highest good and supreme idea, except by thinking in terms
of the highest analogies of what it knows in itself as spiritual being and
reality. If spirit is not real and above all other realities; if it is
derivable, subordinate and dependent, it is impossible to think of
anything whatever to wh