pplying a similar
consideration to the Creator. Allowing him consciousness and
intentions, as we must, what object could he have either in
exerting his creative power or in sending out portions of himself
in new individuals, save the production of so many immortal
personalities of will, knowledge, and love, to advance towards the
perfection of holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, filling his
mansions with his children? By thus multiplying his own image he
adds to the number of happy creatures who are to be bound together
in bands of glory, mutually receiving and returning his affection,
and swells the tide of conscious bliss which fills and rolls
forever through his eternal universe.

Nor, finally, is it necessary to expect personal oblivion in God
in order to escape from evil and win exuberant happiness. Those
ends are as well secured by the fruition of God's love in us as by
the drowning of our consciousness in his plenitude of delight.
Precisely herein consists the fundamental distinction of the
Christian from the Brahmanic doctrine of human destiny. The
Christian hopes to dwell in blissful union with God's will, not to
be annihilatingly sunk in his essence. To borrow an illustration
from Scotus Erigena,5 as the air when thoroughly illumined by
sunshine still keeps its aerial nature and does not become
sunshine, or as iron all red in the flame still keeps its metallic
substance and does not turn to fire itself, so a soul fully
possessed and moved by God does not in consequence lose its own
sentient and intelligent being. It is still a bounded entity,
though recipient of boundless divinity. Thus evil ceases, each
personality is preserved and intensely glorified, and, at the same
time, God is all in all. The totality of perfected, enraptured,
immortalized humanity in heaven may be described in this manner,
adopting the masterly expression of Coleridge:

"And as one body seems the aggregate Of atoms numberless, each
organized, So, by a strange and dim similitude, Infinite myriads
of self conscious minds In one containing Spirit live, who fills
With absolute ubiquity of thought All his involved monads, that
yet seem Each to pursue its own self centring end."

A third mode of answering the question of human destiny is by the
conception of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leave
the body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starless
grave world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things is
c