cannot create anything absolutely unlike anything which ever existed.  All the fabled beings who, according to the ancient mythology, filled the spaces and waters, were but human creatures adapted to imaginary environments.  Faith in the existence of the soul after death could not have originated in the soul itself; to believe that would be to contradict the laws of thought.  It seems to have been born with the soul, and yet not to be a part of it.

The common conviction of continuance of being can be explained only on the assumption that it is an innate idea.  That this assumption starts, perhaps, quite as many questions as it settles may be granted.  Nevertheless, it is the only way in which this fact in mental and spiritual history can be accounted for.

Not only is belief in persistence of being innate, but it is also universal.  It has been found in every land, in every time, in every religion.  Dr. Matthewson has finely argued that the savage worships a fetish because he is seeking something which does not change[8].  He knows that he dies; he worships that which he thinks does not die.  A piece of wood or a stone, at first, seems to him more enduring than a man; therefore he worships the fetish.  Gradually his eyes are opened and he realizes that the man is more enduring than the thing.  Then the object of his worship is lifted from something material to a spiritual being.  The belief in immortality is coterminous with belief in the Deity; the two forms of faith are always found together.  The cultured Greek, the mystic Egyptian, the idealistic Indian, the savage who inhabits the forests of Africa, or who formerly dwelt in the forests of America, alike have believed in some land of spirits to which their loved ones have gone and to which they themselves, in turn, will also go.  Every age and every time, alike, have borne witness to the strength and vitality of this faith.

[Footnote 8:  Distinctive Messages of the Old Religions, p. 9.]

But still more convincing to me than any of the suggestions which have gone before, is the fact that it is irrational to suppose that the soul dies with the body.  If that were true, how could we account for the enormous waste in discipline and culture, in education and affection?  What is the meaning of the love that binds human beings together, if after a short “three-score-and-ten career” it utterly ceases to be, and being and affection alike go into oblivion?  How can our systems of education be justified, if the soul is perfected only to be destroyed?  On everything else man spends time, labor, affection in proportion to the possibility of its endurance.  He never seeks that which he knows will be taken from him and destroyed as soon as it is perfected.  An artist would not spend a lifetime on a picture, or a sculptor in finishing a statue, if he knew that when his work was completed it would be instantly sunk in the depths of the sea.  We devote a large part of our lives