THE PERMANENCE OF THE COMPLETED LIFE OF MAN.
Back of the movement which began in creation and culminated in man, we
posited the mind of a self-conscious, self-determining, self-active,
personal God. Necessity was upon us to assume a first principle of some
kind, and it seemed proper to have one large enough to account for the
facts we were about to consider. The first principle Thales set up was
water. In water he saw the origin of all and the end of all. But all that
came out of water must, in the end, find its death in water. With nothing
but a vast ocean to start with, we shall find, at the conclusion, nothing
more articulate and rational than an infinite expanse of water to end
with.
Herbert Spencer, “the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of
time,” took as the starting point of his philosophy the unknowable. In
the selection of a first principle, however, we think Thales, though the
first philosopher who ever lived, had the advantage of him.
Water is a definite and positive somewhat; the unknowable is an
indefinite and inarticulate vacuity. With water for a first principle,
the prospect is certain destruction in a general deluge. With the
unknowable for a first principle, the prospect is sure imbecility in
universal ignorance. It is better to be drowned in water than to have
the light of intelligence put out in everlasting night. Mr. Spencer’s
unknowable was a convenient receptacle into which to dump difficulties
and troublesome problems; but, as a working hypothesis, it was not
sufficient even to build the universe Mr. Spencer saw. In the process
of constructing his system, Mr. Spencer gave to his unknowable nearly
all the attributes which theologians give to a personal God. As we
have already seen, when Mr. Spencer got through with drawing from his
unknowable all that he had to have to give his system the order and show
of reason, it was found that the unknowable part of the unknowable had
about been scattered in the light of knowledge. For this same unknowable
was found to have Being, Power, Activity, Causal Energy, and Omnipresence
for attributes. Nothing more can come out of a first principle than what
is contained in it. Out of water, nothing but water comes, and out of the
unknowable, nothing but the unknowable comes. One can posit an acorn,
under certain conditions of soil and sky, and get an oak; but the germ of
the oak must be in the acorn, and the nutriment of the oak must be in the
conditions before any oak can come out. It is the old truism, that “out
of nothing, nothing comes.” No one ever attempts to account for anything
without a first principle. The test of the reality and value of a first
principle will be determined solely by its capacity to account for the
facts which come out of it. It is because the unknowable fails to account
for the facts of nature, and for self-consciousness, self-determination,
and self-activity in man, who stands as the complete consummation and
realization of nature, that it is not accepted as an adequate first
principle.
Matthew Arnold, in order to escape the objections which he had to
taking a self-conscious, self-determining, personal God for a first
principle, substituted “The Stream of Tendency, not ourselves, that
makes for righteousness.” But this sentence, when analyzed, reveals the
fact that Matthew Arnold’s Stream has about the same essential elements
the theologian supposes to reside in God. A stream has a source, a
direction, and an end. Here, then, we have cause, means, and ultimate
object. It is also said that the stream makes for something; here is
self-determination. It is said to make for righteousness; here is the
attribute of Justice, and justice can only be predicated of a person.
Given nature, with its elements, laws, and unity, and man as the being
in whom the whole of nature is summed up, with self-consciousness,
self-determination, and self-activity; the only first principle
sufficient to account for the facts is a self-conscious,
self-determining, self-active personal God. It is only such a first
principle that is large enough to account for the number, and order, and
drift, and collocations of the facts; and to such a first principle the
number, and order, and drift, and collocations of the facts may be traced.
If we see red and violet and blue colors appearing in the carpet on
one side of the loom, we are warranted in assuming that red and violet
and blue threads are entering the carpet on the other side of the loom.
Nature is a marvelous loom. At first there are simple elements, then
there are compounds, then there are plants, then there are animals. At
last all the elements, as so many strands, with their manifold hues and
variegated colors, appear in the life of man. Man is the harbor where
all the freight, started on its stormy course at creation, comes to
shore. Its matter takes majestic form in his body, its power lends itself
as wind to his sail, as heat to his engine, as light to his street:
its truth is arranged by the intellect into literature and science:
its law is formulated into statutes, enactments, and constitutions:
its beauty is built into oratorios and spread in radiant visions: its
love is accepted and turned into tenderness, and sacrifice, and hope.
Infinite personality at the beginning, self-conscious, self-determining,
and self-active. Finite personality at the conclusion, self-conscious,
self-determining, and self-active.
If you call the process evolution, then no more has been evolved than
was involved. If you prefer direct creation, then nothing is seen in the
creature that was not built into him by the Creator. Either way, if a
self-conscious, self-determining, and self-active man appears on one side
of nature, a self-conscious, self-determining, and self-active personal
God is, we may know, on the other.
I.
The importance of a correct first principle, and of a right idea of the
nature of that first principle, cannot be urged too strongly. In the
right solution of the question we are considering, everything depends on
it. If we start with water, as Thales did, we will be forced to conclude
that individual lives, like bubbles, will eventually fall back and mingle
with the waves of the sea.
If we start with the unknowable, as Spencer did, we shall be led to see
that human spirits will lose themselves at death, as candles lose their
light when the wicks are consumed.
It is not left us, however, arbitrarily to assume such a first principle
as comports with the particular theory of life it is our purpose to
establish. The first principle that corresponds to reality is already
implicit in the facts, the origin, and purpose, and end of which we
wish to know. The law of gravity is implicit in falling bodies, and in
the revolving stars. The sunbeam is implicit in the growing tree. All
that happens when one posits a first principle that is not implicit in
the facts he is considering, is that his first principle will fail to
account for the facts. Matthew Arnold had a perfect right to assume as
a first principle, “The Stream of Tendency, not ourselves, that makes
for righteousness.” This looked poetic and impersonal, and in his esteem
served him as a working hypothesis.
It never seemed to occur to him that his principle implied the same
elements and attributes the theologians regarded as uniting in God;
the elements and attributes he was so anxious to get rid of. Herbert
Spencer, with a theory to work out, and a particular system to buttress
and bolster, devised and adopted a first principle that seemed to promise
most to his peculiar views. This he had a right to do. But he had no
right to take as a first principle the unknowable, with which to destroy
the Christian’s God; and just as soon as he had accomplished this to his
entire satisfaction, to turn deliberately and take nearly every attribute
of the Christian’s God to bestow upon his unknowable. It is hardly to be
supposed that Mr. Spencer, with malice aforethought planned the death
of God in order to steal his attributes. The more charitable view is to
suppose that at the outset his intention was to erect an absolutely new
philosophic edifice, upon a new and original foundation. To do this, it
was necessary to clear the ground of everything in sight. So in a high
moment of philosophic self-confidence, he determined on the obliteration
of all previous and time-honored first principles, that he might posit
one of his own making and to his own liking.
This was the destructive stage of his mental movement, and it did not
occur to him that many of the elements he was clearing away in such
wholesale fashion would be necessary to carry up his new philosophic
temple. When he got through with the period of preparation, he had
nothing to start with but a plain, simple, empty, unknowable. But it
soon became evident that the unknowable must have some content, in order
to support a decent and orderly structure. At this point he took the
attributes of the Christian’s God, Being, Power, Activity, Causal Energy,
Omnipresence, and filled up his empty unknowable with them. Then he
proceeded with his work.
II.
In starting with a self-conscious, self-determining and personal God,
then, as a first principle that accommodates and insures the immortality
of the individual spirit, we are only beginning with what is implicit
in the facts of nature and human life. Let it be clearly apprehended
that the ground of the self-conscious, self-determining, personal God
is thought. That the fundamental and first thing in this universe is
mind. That the being of God is secondary to the mind, or thought of God.
God has being, because he has thought, and not thought, because he has
being. The trouble with the pantheistic system of Spinoza was that he
looked upon God, first as infinite substance or being, while thought was
only one of the modes of this being, and extension was the other. The
root of all doubt and skepticism is to be traced to a confused notion of
the nature of God. Many speak of God as the Supreme Being, and advertise
by their language that in their esteem God is diffused nebulosity, or
universally extended externality. There never was a skeptic in the world
who had come to the rational and tenable position, that God is primarily,
and fundamentally, and essentially thought. We may properly speak of
his being, his wisdom, his justice, his truth, his love; but these are
different determinations of his thought. God’s being is the externality
of his thought. His wisdom is his thought devising means to ends. His
justice is his thought balancing and regulating. His truth is his thought
in realization. His love is his thought in sacrifice. “In the beginning
was the Word.” A word is an expressed thought. “The Word was with God.”
The realized thought or word was with God, the Eternal Thinker, or
Thought. “God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” Light was
thus the expression of thought. Nearly all materialism and pantheism
look upon things as an emanation from something. Vapor emanates from the
surface of a river, and is only the river in diffusion. But the universe
does not emanate from God; it is the direct creation and expression of
his thought. Potentially the universe was always in the thought of God.
III.
We have dwelt at length on the self-consciousness and self-determination
of God, as these unite in him as an absolute personality, for the
reason that the immortality of the human spirit finds its condition
and its security here. If God is a person, and self-conscious,
self-determining, and self-active, man is immortal, for in him the
elements which constitute the essential nature of God appear. Man is
a person and a spirit, made in the likeness and image of God. He is,
therefore, as imperishable and indestructible as God is. He has thought
and is therefore self-conscious; he has a will, and is therefore
self-determining; he has power, and is therefore self-active; he
maintains his identity through change, and is therefore a person. But
the finite person finds his life through the infinite Person. He finds
his knowledge by partaking of truth, the realized thought of God; he
finds his freedom by the observance of law, the expressed will of God;
he finds his peace by partaking of the life that was in Christ, the
manifested love of God. As the fundamental and prior thing in the being
of God is thought, so the fundamental and prior thing in the being of
man is thought. His progress in the practical matters of life will be in
proportion to his thought. His political status will be in proportion
to his thought; his religious attainment will be in proportion to his
thought. Schleiermacher said “Feeling is the source of religion—a feeling
of dependence.” But one cannot have a feeling of dependence without
having the thought of dependence. One cannot feel that he depends unless
he thinks of himself as dependent. Matthew Arnold said that religion
was morality touched by emotion. But there cannot be morality without
the thought of some rule by which conduct ought to be guided. Even the
African savage, who worships a snake, thinks there is something in the
snake entitled to his adoration. Thought is the clearest self-explication
of the human spirit. In thought it comes to itself and knows itself.
Take thought out of the spirit of man, and you take out its essential
nature. Its immortality, even were it possible, would then not be worth
contending for. One had as well be blotted out, as to lose the only
element of his spirit by which he is able to recognize himself as such.
Looking upon thought as the center and kernel of the human spirit,
we see that to deny the immortality of the human spirit is to assume
that thought is destructible; and this is a flat contradiction, for
destruction has no meaning, except in relation to thought. It is of the
very nature of thought to be eternal. No thought ever dies, or can die.
All the determinations of God’s thought are eternal. The mind of God
has within it all determinations of thought; those past, those present,
and those to come. Some of these determinations of the divine thought
have taken the form of objects in the inorganic world, some have taken
the form of objects in the vegetable kingdom, and some have taken the
form of objects in the animal kingdom. The determinations of thought, of
which inorganic things, trees, and animals were the expressions, are all
eternal.
It is of the nature of the things in which the determinations of thought
took form to change and pass away. But the ideal patterns, of which they
were only the temporary forms, are held in the mind of God forever. The
house which expresses the architect’s ideal may be blown away, or burned
up, but the ideal in the thought of the architect cannot be blown away or
burned up. Now in man the determination of God’s thought is not expressed
in a thing, but in a thought. Man, as God’s child, inherits, or comes
through creation into the possession of thought, of mind, so that he is
able to set up thinking—in his own behalf, and by the self-determining,
self-conscious, and self-active power of his own mind. God as thought is
his own object and his own subject, and man as thought is his own object
and his own subject. God has set him up to housekeeping in the republic
of thought.
In the changes which take place in material objects, there is
preservation of the species, but the loss of the individual. The object
is an element and not a self. When it changes, it is by something
external to itself, and in changing, realizes its nature. It is
indifferent to change, as there is no central self that retains its
essential identity in the midst of all change. The tree belongs to
a higher order of existence than a rock. It is the expression of
unconscious life. The animal belongs to a still higher plane than the
tree. Besides appropriating food from its environment, as does the tree,
it takes in the images of things, and lives a low order of sentient life.
But in order that animals may take in the images of things through the
senses, the things must be present before them. When the thing is gone,
the image fades. The objects which stand around man in his environment
pass into his consciousness through the senses. But when the environment
changes and the objects are taken away, the impressions made by the
objects remain. In this way man re-creates the universe for his own
thought. The gurgling of brooks, the murmur of the sea, the sighing of
the winds, the cooing of doves, he hears just as the animal does. But
away from brooks, and seas, and winds, and doves, Beethoven throws into
one of his symphonies all the notes that were ever on sea or land. He
has within him the same kind of mind that expressed itself in all the
notes of music, and he not only hears these notes, but he re-combines and
reorganizes them in his great compositions.
IV.
The spirit of man is simple. It is an ultimate and indivisible unity.
Death divides, breaks up, and disintegrates. The nature of the human
spirit is such, however, that it cannot be divided, broken up, or
disintegrated. We see it maintain its identity through the storms and
mutations of eighty years. All things change about it. The very body
that constitutes its temporary abiding place is torn down and rebuilt
many times in the course of a long life. It advances in knowledge and
experience; grows larger and richer in hope and love, but all its
accumulations of thought and increasing wealth of life are stored in the
same self-conscious, self-determining, personal spirit. In the evening of
life the old man sits in the midst of his grandchildren and recounts the
scenes of his boyhood days. All the waves of time contained within the
sweep of three score years and ten have left their labels of drift and
storm on the shores of his life. But they have not worn, or wasted, or
altered his spirit.
A rock wears away, or is crumbled to dust, when it is a rock no longer.
A tree is cut down and split into cord wood and burned in the engine,
and it is a tree no longer. In the furnace it is turned back into its
original elements. In the fire it is altered or othered. The other of a
tree is oxygen, hydrogen, etc. The bird in the thicket is shot by the
heartless sportsman. It falls to the ground and its little heart ceases
to beat. Soon its body is changed back into earth and air. The other of
a bird is not a bird, but the particles which were organized under the
process of natural law to form its body. The images which fell on its
vision in the grove, faded away when the objects which caused them were
removed. The sounds which came to its ears from here and there in the
forest passed from its sense when the air that caused them ceased to
vibrate. In the bird there was no inner self, abiding, self-conscious,
determining, and active, that was capable of grasping and holding and
recreating the visions and the notes which came to it. It may have
had a sort of sentient consciousness, but it was not much above the
consciousness of the sea, which holds the images of the stars in its
dark blue waves, as long as they stand above it.
By comparing man with the classes of individuals below him, we may see
the respects in which he rises infinitely above them. And we may see,
too, by this comparison, that immortality is not something to which
man is to come beyond death, but something that he has already in the
very constitution of the personal spirit. The same may be said of man’s
body, that is said of the bodies of trees and birds, its other is the
original elements which compose it. The life in a tree cannot other
itself, because it is not conscious. The life in a bird cannot other
itself because its consciousness is not self-consciousness. But in man’s
body there resides a spirit that can other itself. Man, as a personal
spirit, can project himself out of himself, and reason with himself and
commune with himself. The self he projects out of himself is another
self, but not a different self. The other of man’s spirit, then, is not
something else, but it is the same spirit. Man is subject and object,
active and passive, determiner and determined. Man, as subject, may
externalize himself, and thus make of himself his own object, and by this
self-separation enrich himself and advance within himself. Beethoven, as
a thinking subject, objectified his thought in the symphonies, and thus
regaled and thrilled his own spirit. By putting his own thought into the
form of sound waves, it came back to him in the rain, and storm, and
thunder, and sigh, and murmur of music. As a thinking subject Raphael
objectified his own thought in the transfiguration, and thus had it
come back to him in a vision as immortal as the spirit that created it.
Michael Angelo objectified his own thought in the Last Judgment, and by
this self-separation of his spirit, advertised its indestructibility.
Homer, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought into the Iliad.
This great epic poem has already lived, even on this side of the grave,
where the order is change and decay, nearly three thousand years. Are we
to conclude that a personal spirit that could deposit itself in numbers
never to die, was itself subject to dissolution? This would be to have an
effect greater than the cause. The sunbeam may deposit itself in a tree,
and thus secure to itself life in embodied form for hundreds of years.
But in order that this may be, the sun must send his beams to warm and
nourish the tree all the days of its life. The Iliad has lived, however,
nearly three thousand years, without the daily ministrations of Homer’s
spirit. For a bubble on the sea of life to lift itself into imperishable
form and then fall back to mingle with the waves and the waters, is to
contradict the principle of the correlation of forces, which declares
that action and reaction must always be equal. The expression a spirit
makes of itself cannot be more enduring than the spirit itself.
“The ship may sink and I may drink
A hasty death in the bitter sea;
But all that I leave in the ocean grave
May be slipped and spared, and no loss to me.
“What care I, though falls the sky,
And the shriveled earth to a cinder turn?
No fires of doom can ever consume
What never was made nor meant to burn.
“Let go the breath! There is no death
For the living soul, nor loss nor harm.
Nor of the clod is the life of God;
Let it mount, as it will, from form to form.”
When a train of cars stops suddenly at the depot, the energy that caused
it to fly along the track is not lost, it is only transformed. When a
tree is cut down, the energy that expressed itself in its trunk and
branches is not lost, it will only take other forms. When a horse dies,
the energy of which its life was the expression is not lost, it is
transformed. When a tree or a horse passes from the living world into the
world of inorganic things, the exact amount of energy in the body of the
living tree or horse takes other forms. The amount on the side of death
is equal to the amount on the side of life. If we consider man only as a
physical organism, the same may be said of him. The amount transformed
into earth and air, will be the equivalent of the organized fund of
bone, and sinew, and muscle, turned over to death. If we thus estimate
man, however, as we do a tree or a horse, have we taken into account the
entire sum of assets that were in his possession during life? What of
his thought, affection, and volition? When Kepler died, what became of
the intelligence that discovered the “Three Laws,” which constitute the
arches of the sublime bridge that spans the vast chasm between Ptolemaic
and modern astronomy? When Laplace died, what became of the spirit that
solved the problems of the Mécanique Céleste, by the aid of which the
irregularities of the heavenly bodies were reduced to order? When Adams
died, what became of the massive spirit that built in the depths of his
own study the planet Neptune, with no other raw material to work from
than the perturbations of Uranus? When Moses died, what became of the
affection that expressed itself in the training and civilization of a
race? When Jesus Christ died, what became of the love that sacrificed
itself for a sinful world?
When we begin to talk about human life, we find all that has made
civilization is not physical. In the death of human beings, the energies
of thought, and affection, and volition are not represented in the
transformations which take place with reference to their bodies. Yet all
the energies man has put forth that give any evidence of his record on
the earth are such as come from thought, and affection, and volition. As
these energies are not transformed at death, as are the forces of the
body, they must continue. For to suppose they ceased at death would be to
break the law of the correlation and the conservation of forces. If they
are not transformed at death, along with the forces of the body, they
must reside in another than the material world, and must not, therefore,
be subject to its changes.
V.
The personal spirit, by its very nature, and tendencies, and
possibilities, seems to be addressed to another than the tangible, local,
and physical realm in which it finds itself while residing in the body.
An irrepressible and wide-reaching something in the spirit of each man
seems to impel him to triumph over space, and time, and change. In the
accumulation of property, he would own the whole world. A very small
portion of land would be adequate to his physical needs. But he would
add acre to acre, till his private domain compassed the surface of the
whole earth. Alexander, weeping because there was not another world he
could get to conquer, advertises the immensity and illimitability of the
human spirit. By the aid of instruments by which man has augmented and
lengthened his power of vision, he has come upon stars rolling in the
immensity of space to the circle of the thirteenth magnitude. He has not
been content to look upon the stars in the vast depths of space, but he
has photographed them, so as to behold their faces in his study. Back
beyond the dim dawn of time, commensurate with the appearance of human
life on earth, he has gone, to return with the chemical, physical, and
stratigraphical history of the globe. By the aid of steam, he has made
himself a cosmopolite, and through the application of electricity, he has
made himself ubiquitous. Must we not posit a spirit correlated to the
universal to account for this disposition to compass all things, to know
all things, and to be everywhere? The tendency of the human spirit to
compass and possess universality is seen, too, by its capacity to create
language, in which it embodies all things and through which it expresses
its thought of all things. If there had to be separate words for all
individual things any but the most limited knowledge would be impossible,
and such knowledge alone there would be if man was shut up to atomic
sensations for the data of knowledge. But the mind, by its creative,
combining power, and its active spontaneous insight, forms words which
represent not only individual things, but classes and species of things.
Man devises the word _oak_, and lets it stand for all the oaks in the
world. He creates the word _humanity_, and puts into it the whole human
race. He coins the word _vegetable_, and uses it to define the whole
kingdom of plants. Thus he not only goes over the world and sees it
directly, but he produces language manifold and complicated, and elastic
enough to accommodate and contain the world, with all that is in it. This
makes it possible for him to go round the world and see all its wonders,
without leaving the place of his birth.
He not only builds for himself the universe in language, so that he can
contemplate its moons, and measure its suns, and sail its oceans, and
climb its mountains in the silent precincts of his study, but he avails
himself of sound and light, also, to give expression to universal ideas.
He takes a few notes, and so combines and mixes them as to be able to
touch all the chords of the universal human heart in one song. Michael
Angelo put all the theology of all the books into the Last Judgment.
Throughout the length and breadth of nature, there is economy of faculty
and resource until we come to man. The fish has not a gill nor a fin too
many, and there is not in the water where he lives any surplus or margin
upon which he does not make levies for his life.
The wings and tail and bones of the bird are all necessary to his poise
and circle in the sky. The same economy is found in the atmosphere
through which the bird flies. It is none too heavy and none too light.
But when we come to man, we find that margin and surplus is the rule.
He has a surplus of faculty and a surplus of resource, a surplus of
endowment and a surplus of environment. He finds it necessary to make
levies on hardly any of himself to get along in this world, at least as
far as his natural wants are concerned. What would be the use for a
carpenter to have all the tools necessary to build St. Peter’s at Rome,
if his only work was to put up a tent for a week’s camping excursion in
the woods? Why have an engine with a million horse power to run a flutter
mill?
With the animal there is changing endowment and changing environment.
Limitations are clear and distinct within and without. But with man
there is infinite environment. Within he has a self-determining spirit,
subject and object, bound together in a simple and indissoluble unity.
Surrounding this spirit, infinite in structure and capacity, is infinite
truth, infinite law, and infinite love. Even Herbert Spencer said
“Perfect correspondence would be perfect life. Were there no changes in
the environment but such as the organism had adapted changes to meet, and
were it never to fail in the efficiency with which it met them, there
would be eternal existence, and eternal knowledge.” In the personal
spirit and the elements which surround it, we have the two eternal terms
of eternal correspondence. A self-determining spirit is essentially,
structurally, and constitutionally imperishable. It others itself only
through its own act. And the other of itself is itself. It is its own
subject and its own object. When it goes out of itself, it is itself
that goes out. It is a complete circle, an absolute and indestructible
individuation. It is the final expression of God’s creative power.
Through all the revolutions and mutations of time, this was the destined
goal. The destruction of a human spirit would register the death of
God. It is the direct expression of the spirit of God, and bears his
own likeness and image, and has for the guarantee of its permanence the
person of the eternal God himself.
VI.
Rev. Edward White of England, Dr. E. Petavel of France, and Dr. Lyman
Abbott of America, have denied what Dr. Abbott is pleased to call
facultative immortality. Immortality, in their esteem, is an importation
from without. It is the claim of Locke, and Hume, and Mill, and Spencer,
that knowledge is an importation from the realm of sensation. Their
war was upon the knowing faculties. From the domain of philosophy
the conflict has passed up to the plane of religion, and we now have
the attack made upon the self-determining spirit. In the sensational
philosophy, we have seen all things dissolved. It not only makes it
impossible to rationally believe in God, but also in mind, and self,
and external world. The sensational philosophy got the object of
knowledge by a process that destroyed the subject of knowledge, so this
irrational theory of Dr. Lyman Abbot would secure the object of life by
the destruction of the subject of life. We know that the raw material of
knowledge is found in the objective world, but unless the mind has the
inherent combining, active power to take this raw material and organize
it into an orderly system, then the individual can never know anything.
There being in the mind no master of ceremonies, no director and referee,
the tramp and vagabond sensations may wander in and wander out at their
sweet will. They would come in with their own opinions and go out with
their own opinions. There being no head of the house within, the tramps
could have it all their own way.
Knowledge, beginning out of the mind, would have its cause and end out of
the mind. Beginning with matter, knowledge could be resolved back into
matter.
We believe the life in which the human spirit is to realize its nature
fully and harmoniously was embodied in Jesus Christ, who was the word
made flesh.
But it is because the spirit of man is essentially indestructible, that
it has power to take hold of this life and assimilate it. If it refuses
this divine embodiment of life, it brings disorder, and confusion, and
everlasting sorrow to itself, but not destruction. The self-determining
spirit is in its structure and constitution up to the style of life
offered it in the Son of Man and the Son of God. In finding the life that
was in Christ, it finds its own life, and enters the path of everlasting
progress.