must be he, she must be she, and no
one else, throughout our mortal lives, and, for aught we can tell, for
ever; alone, each of us, with our own souls, our own thoughts, our own
actions, our own hopes, our own fears, our own deservings. Stay
alone:--with all these? Yes, and alone with one more. Each of us is
alone with God. Face to face with God, seen by Him through and through,
and directly answerable to Him at every moment of our lives, for every
deed, and word, and thought. And is that not a more terrible thought
than any? Ah! my friends, it may be. But it may be also the most
comforting of all thoughts, the only really comforting thought, if we
will but look at the question as the Psalmist looks at it, and cry with
him to God, "I am Thine, oh save the me whom Thou hast made."

There are those, and those who deserve a respectful hearing, who will
differ from all that I have been saying, and indeed from the beliefs of
999 out of 1000 of the human race in every age. They will say--This
fancy that you are an I, a self, individual and indivisible, is but a
fancy; one of the many idols which man creates for himself, by bestowing
reality and personality on mere abstractions like this I and self. Each
man is not one indivisible, much less indestructible, thing or being. He
is really many things. He is the net result of all the organic cells of
his body, and of all the forces which act through them within, and of all
the circumstances which influence them from without, ay, and of all the
forces and circumstances which have influenced his ancestors ever since
man appeared on the earth. But because he remembers many states of
consciousness, many moments in which he was aware of sensations within
him, and of circumstances without him, therefore he strings all these
together, and talks of them as one thing which he calls I; and speaks of
them as his remembrances of himself, when really the many things are but
links of a chain which is perpetually growing at one end and dropping off
at the other. To say, therefore, that he is the same person as he was
when a child, or as he would be when an old man,--is, when we know that
every atom of his physical frame has changed again and again during the
course of years, a popular delusion, or at least a misnomer used for
convenience' sake; as when we say that the sun rises and sets, when we
know that the earth moves, and not the sun. A man, therefore, according
to this school,