In whatever way we may interpret the story of Eden, whether literally, or if, like some of the Fathers of the church such as Origen, we take it as an allegory, the result is the same—­that Death is not in the essence of man’s creation, but supervened as the consequence of an inverted mode of thinking.  The Creative Spirit thought one way, and Eve thought another; and since the Thought of the Creating Spirit is the origin of Life, this difference of opinion naturally resulted in death.  Then, from this starting-point, all the rest of the Bible is devoted to getting rid of this difference of opinion between us and the Spirit of Life, and showing us that the Spirit’s opinion is truer than ours, and so leading us to adopt it as our own.  The whole thing turns on the obvious proposition, that if you invert the cause you also invert the effect.  It is the principle that division is the inversion of multiplication, so that if 2 x 2 = 4 then you cannot escape from the consequence that 4/2 = 2.  The question then is, which of the two opinions is the more reasonable—­that death is essentially inherent in the nature of things, or that it is not?

Probably ninety-nine out of a hundred readers will say, the whole experience of mankind from the earliest ages proves that Death is the unchangeable Law of the Universe, and there have been no exceptions.  I am not quite sure that I should altogether agree with them on this last point; but putting that aside, let us consider whether it really is the essential Law of the Universe.  To say that this is proved by the past experience of the race, is what logicians call a petitio principii—­it is assuming the whole point at issue.  It is the same argument which our grandfathers would have used against aerial navigation—­no one had ever travelled in the air, and that proved that no one ever could.  My father, who was a junior officer in India when the first railway was run in England, used to tell a story of one of his senior officers, who, on being asked what he thought of the rapidity of the new mode of travelling, said he thought it was “all a damned lie,” which opinion appeared to him to settle the whole question.  But I hope that none of my readers will hold the same opinion regarding the overcoming of death, even though they might express it in more polite language.  At any rate it may be worth while to examine the theoretical possibility of the idea.

To begin with, it involves a self-contradiction to say that the energy of any force can stop the working of that force.  If a force stops working, it is for one of two reasons, either that the supply of it is exhausted, or that it is overcome by an opposite and neutralizing force.  But we have seen that the Originating Cause of all things can only be an inexhaustible Power of Life, and therefore the hypothesis of it becoming exhausted is eliminated; and similarly, since all the forces of the Universe proceed from this Source, it is impossible for any of them to have