live therein; and so, also, that the very
God or Life of the World will one day perish, as all that is born must
surely in the end die. But they who fret upon such grounds as this must
be in so much want of a grievance that it were a cruelty to rob them of
one: if a man who is fond of music tortures himself on the ground that
one day all possible combinations and permutations of sounds will have
been exhausted so that there can be no more new tunes, the only thing
we can do with him is to pity him and leave him; nor is there any better
course than this to take with those idle people who worry themselves
and others on the score that they will one day be unable to remember
the small balance of their lives that they have not already forgotten
as unimportant to them-that they will one day die to the balance of
what they have not already died to. I never knew a well-bred or amiable
person who complained seriously of the fact that he would have to die.
Granted we must all sometimes find ourselves feeling sorry that we
cannot remain for ever at our present age, and that we may die so much
sooner than we like; but these regrets are passing with well-disposed
people, and are a sine qua non for the existence of life at all. For if
people could live for ever so as to suffer from no such regret, there
would be no growth nor development in life; if, on the other hand,
there were no unwillingness to die, people would commit suicide upon the
smallest contradiction, and the race would end in a twelvemonth.

We then offer immortality, but we do not offer resurrection from the
dead; we say that those who die live in the Lord whether they be just
or unjust, and that the present growth of God is the outcome of all past
lives; but we believe that as they live in God-in the effect they have
produced upon the universal life-when once their individual life is
ended, so it is God who knows of their life thenceforward and not
themselves; and we urge that this immortality, this entrance into
the joy of the Lord, this being ever with God, is true, and can be
apprehended by all men, and that the perception of it should and will
tend to make them lead happier, healthier lives; whereas the commonly
received opinion is true with a stage truth only, and has little
permanent effect upon those who are best worth considering. Nevertheless
the expressions in common use among the orthodox fit in so perfectly
with facts, which we must all acknowledge, that it