either will tell about itself. If there is one
thing which advancing knowledge makes clearer than
another, it is that death is swallowed up in life,
and life in death; so that if the last enemy that
shall be subdued is death, then indeed is our salvation
nearer than what we thought, for in strictness there
is neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing,
except as figures of speech, and as the approximations
which strike us for the time as most convenient.
There is neither perfect life nor perfect death,
but a being ever with the Lord only, in the eternal
f??a, or going to and fro and heat and fray of the
universe. When we were young we thought the
one certain thing was that we should one day come to
die; now we know the one certain thing to be that we
shall never wholly do so. Non omnis moriar,
says Horace, and “I die daily,” says St.
Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death
on this side of it, were each some strange thing which
happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely
once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly
called that of death, and who does not die daily and
hourly? Does any man in continuing to live from
day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue
in a changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and
aims, so that he lives from moment to moment only
in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to moment
also? Does any man in dying do more than, on
a larger and more complete scale, what he has been
doing on a small one, as the most essential factor
of his life, from the day that he became “he”
at all? When the note of life is struck the harmonics
of death are sounded, and so, again, to strike death
is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life that rise
forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer.
If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in
the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live
or whether we die, whether we like it and know anything
about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—living
always, dying always, and in the Lord always, the
unjust and the just alike, for God is no respecter
of persons.
Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them,
are as functionally interdependent as mind and matter,
or condition and substance, are—for the
condition of every substance may be considered as
the expression and outcome of its mind. Where
there is consciousness there is change; where there
is no change there is no consciousness; may we not
suspect that there is no change without a pro tanto
consciousness however simple and unspecialised?
Change and motion are one, so that we have substance,
feeling, change (or motion), as the ultimate three-in-one
of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, and all
feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited,
to be the interaction of those states which for want
of better terms we call mind and matter. Action
may be regarded as a kind of middle term between mind
and matter; it is the throe of thought and thing,