Unless this be true the man has not _laid hold_ on Immortality. So we
see that this lower plane of considerable intelligence and
consciousness, related exclusively to the visible and the tangible, must
be eliminated from our conceptions of Immortality. There is nothing at
all in this that can possibly survive death. Doctor John Fiske gives a
fine and comprehensive definition of that degree of achievement which is
above the level of death when he says:--

"In the highest of creatures the Divine immanence has acquired
sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution
of the flesh, and assert an individuality untrammelled by the
limitations which in the present life everywhere persistently
surround it."

Here we have the initial truth. The acquirement of "sufficient
concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the
flesh,"--_and_ "to assert an individuality untrammelled by the
limitations of the present life,"--when man has progressed so far as
this, then, and then alone, has he _achieved_ immortality. He has laid
hold on its initial phase. For immortality is infinite beyond
conception. It is as infinite as space, and as the idea of God. To have
achieved enough of this "concentration and steadiness"--which is merely
another phrase for spirituality--to survive death, is no more achieving
immortality, in its wholeness and completeness, than learning the
alphabet is the achievement of scholarship in its infinite resources. It
cannot be conceived of as complete, but, instead, as an endless chain of
infinite possibilities, of ever new and ever widening vistas.

One of the noblest men and loftiest thinkers of the day, referring, in a
private letter, to this sermon of Doctor Parkhurst that inspired such
wide discussion, thus wrote:--

"That paragraph from Doctor Parkhurst expresses my idea regarding
immortality. There must be a master (good) thought or passion. It
is the angel with wings that wafts the soul where the man most
longed to be in life,--with the purest and best. 'As one thinks, so
he shall be,' is sound doctrine. All this embodies what I once read
of Sappho, who counselled her pupils to cultivate their thoughts
and grow, or they would have nothing to carry with them, nothing to
make a soul of, nothing to survive the grave.

"I believe that on this idea rests the scheme of life through faith
in Christ. As He i