Mr. Huxley, a thorough Christian so far as his social hope went, though without a Christian’s faith, wrote to John Morley, as age approached, “The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigor as long as one lives, and death as soon as vigor flags.”  But the allusion to death set his mind on a painful train of thought, and he continued:  “It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal.  It flashes across me at all sorts of times with a horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800.  I had sooner be in hell a good deal—­at any rate in one of the upper circles, where the climate and company are not too trying.  I wonder if you are plagued in this way.”  He was repeating the experience of the old Greeks as it is expressed in Pindar’s Fourth Pythian:  “Now this, they say, is of all griefs the sorest, that one knowing good should of necessity abide without lot therein.”  It is glorious to hold up before ourselves the splendors of the age that is to be, to dream of our cities made over in ideals, of our land as a world-wide servant of righteousness and peace, of a whole earth filled with truth and beauty and goodwill; and glorious to give ourselves unremittingly to bring this consummation nearer.  But can we be content with no personal share in it?  Are our lives merely fertilizer for generations yet unborn?

  Oh, dreadful thought, if all our sires and we
  Are but foundations of a race to be,—­
  Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon
  A white delight, a Parian Parthenon,
  And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid
  Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade,
  And in processions’ pomp together bent
  Still interchange their sweet words innocent,—­
  Not caring that those mighty columns rest
  Each on the ruin of a human breast,—­
  That to the shrine the victor’s chariot rolls
  Across the anguish of ten thousand souls!

Tennyson once said to Professor Tyndall that, if he believed he were here simply to usher in something higher than himself in which he could have no personal part or lot, he should feel that a liberty had been taken with him.  And when that something higher is the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed, its devotees cannot forego their longing to share in its perfected life.

And, above all, Jesus opens up for us an intimacy with God which is both unbearable and incredible without the hope of its continuation beyond the grave.  To enter with Jesus into sonship with the Father, to share God’s interests and sympathies and purposes, to become the partner of His plans and labors, and then to think of God as living on while we drop out of existence, is the crowning misery, or rather the supreme confusion.  Jesus would have pointed to some heartbroken man or woman, like Jairus or the widow of Nain or the sisters at Bethany, and said, “If ye then, being evil, know how to care so intensely for your kindred, and would give your all to keep them with you forever, how much more shall your heavenly Father insist on having His own with Him eternally?”