lation of the individual. More and more as the drama of life develops, is it said to be revealed that man is but the fragment of a mighty whole. The nothingness of the individual is declared to be a truth that grows in prominence in proportion to the advance of scientific knowledge, and the duty of man is said to be to yield up his own petty life to the great life of the universe. This is the origin of that doctrine which in modern times has become increasingly popular,-that the only future state which man ought to look for is the state called corporate immortality-the state in which the individual loses his individuality, and is submerged in the life of the whole. He himself as a personal being will not live, but his influence shall. He shall live in the hearts of those whom he has left behind, shall live in the lives he has inspired, in the memories he has endeared, in the imaginations he has kindled, in the thoughts he has stimulated. This, we are told, is a far nobler view of immortality than the search for an individual future, a view which lifts the mind out of its own selfishness, and ushers it into the glorious liberty of the life that has ceased to regard itself. In reaching this belief, we have reached the highest motive to philanthropy, the purest stimulus to duty, the loftiest incentive to benevolence, and the most imperishable source of personal blessedness.

Now we admit that the doctrine of evolution

has increasingly revealed the organic unity of the universe, has increasingly brought to view the fact that the individual man is only a fragment of the whole. We admit, moreover, that it is the duty of the individual man above all things to realise this fact, to lose sight of his own individuality in the recognition of that great corporate community of which he forms but a single member. We hold, further, that the inculcation of this duty has been the special glory of Christianity considered as a moral system, that it was the religion of Christ and not the philosophy of Auguste Comte which first said, "He that loveth his life shall lose it." In that aphorism Christianity itself declared that exclusive individual contemplation constituted a waste of being. Yet, strange to say, it is just here that Christianity has vindicated the claims of the individual. Why does it hold that exclusive selfcontemplation is a waste of being? Simply because it holds that exclusive self-contemplation is a weakening of the individual, that the love of life is the loss of life. Christianity, like Comtism, would teach men to contemplate the welfare of that universal body of which each is but a member, but it would teach them that lesson by a precisely opposite method. Comtism would say that the doctrine of individual immortality must be sacrificed that a man may cease to live for himself; Christianity says, on the other hand, that it is only by ceasing

to live for himself that a man can ever realise the strength of his own personality and the ground of his own immortal hope. And experience has amply verified this Christian doctrine. All life has proved, all consciousness has testified, that the individual only really begins to live when he lives in the race. It is in the recognition of the truth of our membership in a corporate body that each of us rises into a sense of personal dignity, into a perception of individual power. As long as the life feels itself to be a unit separated from other lives, it must inevitably feel itself to be personally weak and insignificant; its personal strength only comes when its enthusiasm comes, and its enthusiasm only comes when it is lifted out of itself. On this ground also, therefore, we hold that the doctrine of evolution has rendered service to the doctrine of immortality. In opening up to man a view of his individual fragmentariness, it has revealed to him the best method in which his fragmentariness can be redeemed. In teaching him to lose sight of himself, it has caused him to find himself; in awakening him to the interests of that mighty whole of which his life forms a part, it has given to that life itself a strength which it knew not before.

We have now reviewed the main points in which the modern doctrine of evolution seems to come into contact with man's primitive hope of immor

tality. It will be manifest that, when all has been said, it is only the fringe of the subject that has really been touched, that really can be touched, by the doctrine of evolution. There are a multitude of questions remaining behind to which that doctrine can give no answer, either affirmative or negative. What is the nature of the soul's future? what is to be the mode of the soul's existence? what is the prospective region of the soul's habitation? How many are they whose immortality shall be an immortality of Divine fulness? These are questions which in all ages have pressed for an answer, but which can receive no possible answer from the system of evolution. It is not possible that a system which is expressly concerned with the laws of time shall be able to throw light upon a state which transcends time. We must be content, therefore, to take from the doctrine of evolution that which it lies within its province to give, and to leave to the researches of the theologian the questions whose solution is beyond the range of science.

One thing, indeed, we may say. The system of nature agrees with the system of revelation in presenting us with two different modes of estimating the value of life. In the field of science and in the field of revelation alike, we have two measurements of life-a measurement according to its duration, and a measurement according to its intensity.

There are lives which last longer than others, and there are lives which, without reference to the period of their lasting, are fuller than others, more rich in the present amount of their being. These distinctions, which we meet on the very face of nature, have been taken up and strongly emphasised by the page of revelation. It cannot be denied that the Bible recognises a twofold immortality-an immortality which consists in the uninterrupted duration of years, and an immortality which is constituted by the fulness of present life. In the one case it measures existence by its length, in the other it measures it by its largeness. The first of these immortalities it seems to recognise as something which, by Divine gift, has been made natural to man; the second it uniformly regards as something which can only be reached by man as the result of hard and strenuous struggle. This second order of immortality is what the Bible calls distinctively eternal life. It means by that phrase something different from mere duration, for it speaks of it as something which may be already possessed by man-" He that hath the Son hath eternal life." This second and higher immortality is, in truth, a thing identical with the indwelling of the Divine Spirit in the soul. It is not something which is to be reached by the indwelling of that Spirit; it is itself the life of the Spirit, and is reached in the first and faintest experience of that