stence when the will has
some work to do. It is not conterminous with life; there is a life which
is below consciousness, and there may be a life above consciousness, or
what we mean by consciousness. We must remind ourselves that we are
using a spatial metaphor when we speak of a centre of consciousness, and
a temporal one when we ask about a continuing state of consciousness;
and space and time do not belong to the eternal world. The question
therefore needs to be transformed before any answer can be given to it.
Spiritual life, we are justified in saying, must have a richness of
content; it is, potentially at least, all embracing. But this
enhancement of life is exhibited not only in extension but in intensity.
Eternal life is no diffusion or dilution of personality, but its
consummation. It seems certain that in such a state of existence
individuality must be maintained. If every life in this world represents
an unique purpose in the Divine mind, and if the end or meaning of
soul-life, though striven for in time, has both its source and its
achievement in eternity, this, the value and reality of the individual
life, must remain as a distinct fact in the spiritual world.

We are sometimes inclined to think, with a natural regret, that the
conditions of life in the eternal world are so utterly unlike those of
the world which we know, that we must either leave our mental picture of
that life in the barest outline, or fill it in with the colours which we
know on earth, but which, as we are well aware, cannot portray truly the
life of blessed spirits. To some extent this is true; and whereas a bare
and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the
truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best
we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so. There are,
it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create
images of the bliss of heaven. One is that the eternal world, thus drawn
and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our
minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in
space, or expected to come into existence somewhen in time. This is the
heaven of popular religion; and being a geographical or historical
expression, it is open to attacks which cannot be met. Hence in the
minds of many persons the whole fact of human immortality seems to
belong to dreamland. The other danger is that, since a geographica