aturally from the Christian doctrine of
God. The argument is frankly ethical; it flows from the view of God's
character which we have received through the revelation of that
character in His Son. Without hurling any wild indictment at life, we
dare to say that it requires to be supplemented by the life to come in
order to fit in with the idea of a just and loving God, a faithful and
merciful Creator. This span of days, this hand's-breadth of existence,
is too palpably fragmentary. The sinner, the failure, all those who
have here missed the way, ask another opportunity of the Divine mercy;
the wronged, the sufferers from unmerited griefs, those whose lives
passed in gloom and closed in tragedy, appeal for justice; the longing
for reunion with loved ones whose going hence has left us permanently
poorer, demands fulfilment; the goodness of the good and the sanctity
of the saint plead for "the wages of going on." This ethical argument
for personal {241} immortality--Browning's "On the earth the broken
arcs; in the heaven the perfect round"--will carry no weight with those
who profess a "religion of the universe"; for the universe, viewed
simply as the sum-total of phenomena, possesses, as we have so
frequently pointed out, no sufficiently decided moral character to
inspire us with confidence in its justice, or mercy, or pitifulness.
On the other hand, the same argument will powerfully appeal to all who
believe in the Divine Goodness, and especially to those who, looking
unto Jesus, have in His face beheld the lineaments of the Father. If
God be such as Jesus taught, then life everlasting may be a dim,
intangible dream, but a dream that is destined to come true: we shall
be satisfied when we awake.

Thus, at the close of this inquiry, we find ourselves left with two
ultimate realities--two, not one; alike, not identical; related, and
_therefore_ distinct, for a relation can only subsist between one and
another: the realities of God and the soul. _Gott und die Seele, die
Seele und ihr Gott_--these two, eternally akin, yet in their kinship
unconfounded, make up the theme and the content of religion; and any
attempt to obliterate the distinction between them in some monistic
formula, any tendency to surrender either the Divine or the human
personality, any philosophy which seeks to merge man in God and God in
the {242} universe, is fatal to religion itself. We have been told of
late that "there is no Divine immanence