into the midst of the human struggle “ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena.”  It is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality, he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative individual immortality.  Of these elect he says that “they will be somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves.”  And he closes this splendid dream by supposing that “it is not impossible that we shall arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.  Then we shall understand,” he continues, “that everything was necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light.  And if the God whom we shall find again possesses a body—­and we cannot conceive a living God without a body—­we, together with each of the myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be the conscious cells of his body.  If this dream should be fulfilled, an ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would be to add a drop of water to this ocean’s infinity.”  And what is this cosmic dream of Bonnefon’s but the plastic representation of the Pauline apocatastasis?

Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis, the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order that God, Consciousness, may be all in all.  And this supposes a collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis.  Moser “declared that his religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to God through Christ.  But this demands the thorough knowledge—­a knowledge that goes on increasing until the end of life—­of one’s own sins and also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering