uld
not be wholesome for its spiritual life. It exists only to spend and be
spent in bringing the children of God everywhere one by one under the
sway of His love and presenting them perfect in Christ, and in putting
His Spirit in control of homes, industry, amusements, education,
government, and the whole life of human society, until we live in
"realms where the air we breathe is love."

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE EVERLASTING

Various factors combine to make it hard for men today to believe vividly
in life beyond the grave. Our science has emphasized the closeness of
the connection between our spiritual life and our bodies. If there be an
abnormal pressure upon some part of the brain, we lose our minds; an
operation upon a man's skull may transform him from a criminal into a
reputable member of society. It is not easy for us to conceive how life
can continue after the body dies. Diderot put the difficulty more than a
century ago: "If you can believe in sight without eyes, in hearing
without ears, in thinking without a head, if you could love without a
heart, feel without senses, exist when you are nowhere and be something
without extension, then we might indulge this hope of a future life."

Our modern view of the universe no longer leaves us a localized heaven
and hell, and we have not the lively imaginations of those older
generations to whom the unseen world was as real as the streets they
walked and the houses in which they lived. One goes into such a burying
place as the Campo Santo at Pisa, or reads Dante's _Divina Comedia_, and
the painters who adorned the walls with frescoes depicting the future
abodes of the blessed and the damned, and the poet who actually
travelled in thought through Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, were as
keenly aware of these places as of neighboring Italian towns. We lack a
definite neighborhood in which to locate the lives that pass from our
sight.

Religious authority is based, today, upon experience, and obviously
experience can give no certain knowledge of things future. We are
disposed to treat all pictures of the life to come, whether in the Bible
or out of it, as the projections of men's hopes. They are such stuff as
dreams are made on.

And at present we are absorbingly interested in the advance of _our_
world's life; we dream of better cities here, rather than of some
golden city beyond our horizon; we care far more intensely for lasting
earth-wide peace th