deeper meaning in their constant use.  But I do not see any gain in forcing figurative language into a literal use.  Everybody knows what life and death, in ordinary language, imply.  Life means sensibility, consciousness, capacity of acting, union with the living.  Death means senselessness, helplessness, separation.  No doubt we may trace analogies, very close and real, between the natural and the spiritual life and death.  But still they are no more than analogies.  You do not identify the physical with the spiritual.  And it is felt by all that the use of the words in a spiritual sense is a figurative use.  To the common understanding, a man is living, when he breathes and feels and moves.  He is dead when he ceases to do all that.  And it is a mere twisting of words from their understood sense to say that in reality, and without a figure, a breathing, feeling, moving man is dead, because he lacks some spiritual quality, however great its value may be.  It may be a very valuable quality; it may be worth more than life; but it is not life, as men understand it; and as words have no meaning at all except that which men agree to give these arbitrary sounds, it matters not at all that this higher quality is what you may call true life, better life, real life.  If you enlarge the meaning of the word life to include, in addition to what is generally understood by it, a higher power of spiritual action and discernment, why, all that can be said is, that you understand by life something quite different from men in general.  If I choose to enlarge the meaning of the word black to include white, of course I might say with truth (relatively to myself) that white forms the usual clothing of clergymen.  If I extend the meaning of the word fast to include slow, I might boldly declare that the Great Northern express is a slow train.  And the entire result of such use of language would be, that no mortal would understand what I meant.

Thus it is that I demur to any author’s right to tell me that such and such a thing is, or is not, ‘the true life of man.’  And when he says ’that man wants life, means that the true life of man is of another kind from this,’ I reply to him, Tell me what is the blessing man needs; Tell me, above all, where and how he is to get it:  but as to its name, I really do not care what you call it, so you call it by some name that people will understand.  Call it so that people will know what you mean—­Salvation, Glory, Happiness, Holiness, Redemption, or what else you please.  Do not mystify us by saying we want life, and then, when we are startled by the perfectly intelligible assertion, edge off by explaining that by life you mean something quite different from what we do.  There is no good in that.  If I were to declare that this evening, before I sleep, I shall cross the Atlantic and go to America, my readers would think the statement a sufficiently extraordinary one; but if, after thus surprising them, I went on to explain