For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal Consciousness—­and in this feeling and imagination religious experience consists—­simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual consciousnesses.  And how?

Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is the longing that there may be a God.  The one does not exist apart from the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same thing.  But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves, we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt to rationalize God.

The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble reason. Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium, said Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (Tuscul.  Quaest., xvi., 36).  But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all his previous assent melted away, assentio omnis illa illabitur (cap. xi., 25).  And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world.  Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his former idea is dissipated (De caelo et inferno, Sec. 183).  Nevertheless, as Cournot says, “it is the destiny that awaits me, me or my person, that moves, perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the nature or the essence of this inexplicable bond of union, in the absence of which the philosophers are pleased to determine that my person must disappear” (Traite, etc., Sec. 297).

Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an eternal life without trying to represent it to ourselves?  This is impossible; it is beyond our power to bring ourselves or accustom ourselves to do so.  And nevertheless there are some who call themselves Christians and yet leave almost altogether on one side this question of representation.  Take any work of theology informed by the most enlightened—­that is,