there is a principle of immortality in the universe, and we have seen that this principle is a principle of life—that there is a persistent force, and that this force is alive. These, we think, are legitimate conclusions from the law of evolution as we now behold it. Yet this does not amount to a doctrine of individual immortality. What is that which has been proved to be immortal? It is only generic life, life in the mass, the collective life of the universe. What is proved is the fact that there has been no cessation in the flowing of the general stream of vitality. But an individual immortality has to do not with the stream but with the drops. The immortality of force as a whole, and the immortality of life as a whole, are certainly highly suggestive facts; they imply that even in the plantworld and in the animal world there is an immortal something, an element which is not destroyed by death. But that is a very different thing from saying that the forms of plant-life and the forms of animal life are themselves immortal. So far as we have yet gone, we have found no trace of such an immortality; all that we have reached is the proof that there is in the world something which has revealed its capacity for infinite survival, and that this something is of the nature of life.

Now if this persistent, living force had intrenched itself in the centre of each individual's being, there would have been no such thing in

the universe as the fact of death; it would have quickened each individual form with its own persistence. Instead of that, the living force of the universe has not intrenched itself in the centre of any individual's being, and the result is, that every separate form of life-alike in the plant, the animal, and the man-is subject to death. The Book of Genesis says that man had the chance of attaining to a contrary experience—the chance, that is to say, of having the persistent force of the universe embodied in the centre of his being. The truth of that assertion the doctrine of evolution can neither affirm nor deny; it lies beyond the range of evolution. But the doctrine of evolution can affirm that the doctrine of Genesis is theoretically true, that the indwelling of the persistent force within the centre of man's personality would, as a matter of fact, have exempted him from the common law of mortality-would have made him immortal, not only in the sense of being able to survive death, but in the sense of being able to refuse to die.

There is now, however, no instance in the individual forms of nature, of any special manifestation of life being in the absolute sense immortal-that is to say, there is no instance of immortality in the sense of freedom from individual death. Yet it does not follow that the individual life is excluded from immortality in the wider sense. We may regard death as the inevitable lot of all indi

vidual forms, and still continue to believe in a reconstruction of the individual form subsequent to death-in other words, we may believe that the individual immortality which has been lost as a right may be given back as a gift. This is, indeed, the precise doctrine of the old faith in relation to the immortality of man. If man had received the persistent force into the centre of his individual being, his individual being would have been immortal in the absolute sense; it would have been exempt from death. But although he has not received the persistent force into the centre of his individual being, there still remains to him a hope that he may inherit immortality as a future gift of God; and that hope is converted into a certainty by the indwelling in the second Adam of the primal Power of the universe.

What is the relation of modern science to this doctrine of the old faith? Is it favourable, is it adverse, is it indifferent? Each of these positions has at different times been taken, and the natural conclusion is, that science may seem to exhibit one or other of them, according to the angle from which it is received. We shall, in the first instance, endeavour to inquire whether there be in the scientific system of nature anything which, either by way of fact or analogy, supports the doctrine of the old faith; and we shall afterwards consider whether in the system of evolution there be any

facts or analogies which seem to point in an opposite or counterbalancing direction, and whether these admit of an explanation consistent with the analogies of the old faith.

First, then, let us ask if the present scientific system of nature presents us with any fact or any analogy corroborative of the position that the reconstruction of an individual life subsequent to the fact of death is a possibility. One very important question lies on the threshold-Is death annihilation? We are not asking whether death be the annihilation of the individual life; that is not a question on the threshold, but the question itself under consideration. What we say is, that there is a preliminary inquiry-whether the materials which before death constituted the life of the individual, are dissolved by the fact of death: if so, then reconstruction is a contradiction in terms, and so is resurrection; the only possibility would be re-creation, which is something very different from immortality. But so far as this preliminary question is concerned, the facts of nature come to our aid most thoroughly. We may state with perfect confidence that the materials which constituted the individual life before death are still in existence after death. This is involved in the evolutionary doctrine of the persistence of force, besides being partially verifiable by actual experiment. The doctrine of the conservation of forces

is the doctrine of the immortality of forces-the doctrine that when a physical form is disintegrated, the forces which existed within it remain undiminished in quantity. When the flame of the candle is extinguished, it is only put out in an etymological sense; it is put out of the candle, but its energy lives elsewhere.

Now what is the bearing of this on the subject in hand? It is this. If we could once admit that there is now a vital force in the individual man, the existence of that vital force hereafter would be as demonstrable as any proposition of Euclid. If all the materials which constitute an individual life continue to exist somewhere after the seeming disintegration of that life, then, conceding a vital spark to be one of these materials, it would follow irresistibly that this vital spark was not extinguished by death. The truth is, that paradoxical as it may seem, the scientific difficulty here does not lie in the fact of death, nor in the inability to conceive a state beyond death; it lies entirely in a dispute concerning the state on this side of the grave. Admit that man has now a special force called vitality, and so far as mere future existence is concerned, the difficulties of the theologian would be over; the modern scientific doctrine of the correlation of forces would itself demand for him all the immortality he desires. But where the scientific doctrine fails to produce demonstration is in the