as to his kind, and only approach permanence as they are fastened upon us.  The brute cognizes external things, but does not perceive their being.  Thus man can live in an intellectual or spiritual world as to his aims, motives, and occupations.  He need touch matter only so far as it is necessary to support the bodily strength on which his spiritual and intellectual movement must depend for basis and manifestation.  On the other hand he may reduce the intellectual and spiritual life to the lowest limit by giving the mastery to his physical appetites.  We feel instinctively that to do this last is unworthy of manhood and destructive of the higher nature and intent.  But who expects a brute to do anything else but minister to his appetites?  If he delays a single second in doing it, it is only through fear of man or of some stronger animal.  His intellectual movements have this as an end in complete reversal of the case with man.  With the brute the intellect seems incidental to the body.  With man the body is incidental to the intellect.  One feels for this reason that man might live a purely spiritual and disembodied life.  No one from this standpoint thinks so of a brute.

[Sidenote:  Immortality of Force.]

[Sidenote:  Christ’s Light.]

[Sidenote:  The Christian’s Eye.]

Once more let Huxley speak as to the scientific possibility “with regard to the other great Christian dogmas, the immortality of the soul, and a future state of rewards and punishments, what possible objection can I, who am compelled, perforce, to believe in the immortality of what we call matter and force, and in a very unmistakable present state of rewards and punishments for all our deeds, have to these doctrines?  Give me a scintilla of evidence, and I am ready to jump at them."[9] But when all conditions are considered, and just weight given to all the probabilities, the full persuasion of immortality comes through Him who has “brought life and immortality to light.”  These seem part of His communication to the souls in whom He dwells.  To them He says, “Because I live, ye shall live also.”  Into their being He injects the power of an endless life.  Their hopes, faith, affections center less and less on time.  The truer, fuller, richer life is felt to be coming.  It is to surpass the earthly life in quantity and in quality only because the soul, as it flutters Godward, must here feel the attrition of its fleshly tabernacle.  This dissolved, the fullness and the freedom come.  The house not made with hands henceforth enshrines the spirit.  Christ’s great Word is finally interpreted:  “I am come, that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.”

[Footnote 9:  Biography.  Vol.  I, p. 260.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote:  The Life Everlasting.]

[Sidenote:  Literalism.]