the visual, auditory, tactile, motor, and other bodily produced images, what have we left? Very little if anything. Yet how could we have visual experiences without eyes, or touch-experiences without hands? And, setting aside. the questions what sort of consciousness we could have, and how we could communicate with our friends, what would they mean to us apart from their bodies? Take away the look of your dear one, her facial expression, the light in her eyes, the sound of her voice, the grace of her movements, the touch of her hand, what have you remaining to attract and interest you?

(4) Modern psychology has no longer any use for the concept of "soul." But if there is a "soul," a something inhabiting the body as a tenant, and separable from it at death, where does it abide, how does it get into the body, when does it get into the body, when does it leave the body, and how? Do portions of the parents' souls separate themselves, join together with the joining of the germ plasms at conception, to form a new immortal soul? If so, does it remain immortal if the incipient foetus is ejected from the woman's body, if miscarriage takes place, or the child is still-born? Or does a new soul come somewhence at the moment of birth, and enter the child when it first breathes? The more clearly we realize the continuity of the physical processes of conception, pregnancy, and birth, the more difficult it becomes to know where to interpolate a soul.

(5) A similar continuity is seen to pervade the course of evolution, whereby man has emerged from a brute ancestry. If man is immortal, must not his brute ancestors have been immortal, and their descendants in the diverging, non-human lines? A rather disagreeable alternative seems to be offered. On the one hand, you may say that at a certain point in his ascent, man acquired immortality. If so, there was a time, in the slow evolution of the human type, when

parents who, like all their ancestors, were doomed to die, gave birth to a child who was blessed with an immortal future. By what miracle was this momentous change effected? It seems unfair to the generations preceding. On the other hand, if you postulate no such moment of acquisition of an immortal soul, you must grant immortality to all the animals and then perhaps to the plants too, for the vegetable and animal kingdoms merge gradually one into the other, just as brutehood grew insensibly into manhood. Many animals are, indeed, more intelligent and more affectionate than human babies, or underwitted men, idiots, and doubtless primitive savages; one would like to imagine one's pet dog immortal. But when it comes to tigers and snakes and mosquitoes and bedbugs and cholera microbes, our imagination halts!

(6) Where is the heaven to which souls go at death? It was easy enough for the ancients to picture a heavenly region up above the dome of the sky, easy enough for the evangelist to think of Jesus as having ascended into heaven and sitting there on the right hand of God. But we have long since learned the naïveté of that primitive world-view. We can no longer believe, with Dante, in an island in the Western sea, to which Ulysses could sail, where the mountain of purgatory reaches up to paradise. Nor can we believe that sulphur springs and volcanic steam bubble up from a hades under the earth where departed souls groan in torment. The stellar universe, as we scan it with our telescopes, offers indeed unlimited ports to which we may conceive of ourselves as going; but there seems something grotesque about the fancy of our winging our way to Sirius or the Pleiades. And whatever heaven may lie beyond the stars, millions of millions of miles away, we cannot easily feel so sure of it as the pre-Copernicans did of their paradise of God just above the ninth sphere.

All these skeptical reflections give us, however, nothing but a series of difficulties in the way of belief. They may be met by the reminder that we naturally cannot conceive our future life, because we have no experience thereof. We see only one side of the veil; and all we know is that the departed no longer figure in our earthly existence. In the nature of the case, we cannot disprove immortality; nor does the lack of evidence, in this case, constitute a presumption against it, since, if a future life is a reality, there is no reason to suppose that it is such as to be in contact with, and revealed to, this present life. The relation of mind to brain may be conceived in such a way as to make them separable; and it is easy to formulate answers to the other objections, which, if they have no positive evidence to support them, have equally no evidence against them. We may turn then with open minds to consider the leading arguments for the belief in immortality.

What are the leading arguments for the belief?

(1) The older Christian preaching based its argument for immortality upon the supposedly indubitable fact of the resurrection of Christ. But a critical study of the Gospel narratives has long since shown them to be late, confused, mutually contradictory, and in many respects obviously legendary; more than that, they are at odds with the earliest Christian preaching, as vouched for in the letters of Paul. Paul and the apostles undoubtedly believed themselves to have had revelations of the risen Lord; and that these were genuine revelations we may well believe. But just what their experiences were we shall never know; and that they were mistaken in taking them for revelations of the risen Christ must be admitted to be possible.1 In any case, that the Messiah, a unique figure with a unique mis1 See above, pp. 82-84 and 288.

sion, should have risen from the dead does not prove that ordinary men can do so. Christ's own words on the matter, and those of Paul and the other early Christian writers, are so sharply at variance with our modern conception of the future life that we cannot use them to support our own faith except by reading into them a meaning foreign to their original intention. For the future life anticipated by Christ, and all of his immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and followers, was a life on earth, with a renovated Jerusalem for its capital, to be preceded by the great Judgment Day, and inaugurated within that generation. Our modern hopes have grown so far away from that naïve conception that the faith of Christ in God and that of the disciples in Christ can hardly serve us as more than a stimulus to an equally daring though necessarily different and less tangible faith.

(2) Another Biblical support for faith, still often used, is Paul's analogy of the seed.1 Briefly, the idea is this: as a sced seems to die when buried in the ground, but really gives birth to a new life, so may the human body, when dead and buried, pass into a new form of life. When read in the vague and sounding periods of the King James Bible, Paul's rhetoric easily wins assent from the unthinking. But a moment's thought suffices to show how empty it is. There is really no analogy between the buried seed and the buried body; the one, still living, and finding itself in an environment favorable to its growth, proceeds to develop into a plant; the other, which is really dead, disintegrates and returns to dust. The greater life that develops, by physical laws, out of the living seed is still a physical life, continuous with that which preceded; the new life postulated to succeed that of the human body is a non-physical life, invisible, intangible, utterly out of relation to the physical world, in 1 1 Cor. 15: 35-44.

which the germination of the seed is a natural and intelligible event. Moreover, at best, the plant produced from a seed is a different plant from that which bore the seed; there is no analogy here that points toward immortality of the individual. Every tree and herb dies in its time; it is only its descendants that survive. The human body has similarly its seed, buried in the mother's womb as the plant's seed is buried in the earth, there to give rise to a new life, which, however, has no continuity of memory or purpose with the parent life. This is the true analogy of the plant seed; there is an indefinitely continued life of the germ plasm, transmitted from body to body. But this is not personal immortality; the individual is only a transient by-product, surviving long enough to hand on the life force to its descendants.

(3) Perhaps the belief in immortality is oftenest held today as a corollary of the belief in God. Since God is good, it is felt, he cannot be so cruel as to deny us our deepest longing, to live on and to have our dear ones live. But the argument is over hasty. If God is not omnipotent, we cannot be sure that he can secure immortality for us. If he is omnipotent, we might suppose that he would not deny us immortality; but in view of the fact that we are denied so much that we should have supposed, a priori, that a good God would give us, we cannot be sure that he will not deny us this too. Many evils exist, in spite of God's existence; why not death too? If we were ignorant of the actual fact we might argue with equal cogency that since God is good, he could not be so cruel as to send suffering into the world, pain that crushes, agony that kills. Surely the parallelism of the two arguments should show that both are inconclusive. The fact is, we know as little about God's nature and power as we do about our own future; our trust in a personal Ruler of the universe, who is to triumph over evil,