on, but without a perfect Father, and I say, no; let me
die, even as the unbelieving would have it. Not believing in the Father
of Jesus, they are _right_ in not desiring to live. Heartily do I
justify them therein. For all this talk and disputation about
immortality, wherein is regarded only the continuance of consciousness
beyond what we call death, it is to me, with whatever splendor of
intellectual coruscation it be accompanied, but little better than a
foolish babble, the crackling of thorns under a pot. Apart from Himself,
God forbid there should be any immortality. If it could be proved apart
from Him, then apart from Him it could be, and would be infinite
damnation. It is an impossibility, and were but an unmitigated evil. And
if it be impossible without Him, it can not be believed without Him: if
it could be proved without Him, the belief so gained would be an evil.
Only with the knowledge of the Father of Christ, did the endlessness of
being become a doctrine of bliss to men. If He be the first life, the
Author of his own, to speak after the language of men, and the origin
and source of all other life, it can be only by knowing Him that we can
know whether we shall live or die. Nay more, far more!--the knowledge
of Him by such innermost contact as is possible only between creator and
created, and possible only when the created has aspired to be one with
the will of the creator, such knowledge and such alone is life to the
created; it is the very life, that alone for the sake of which God
created us. If we are one with God in heart, in righteousness, in
desire, no death can touch us, for we are life, and the garment of
immortality, the endless length of days which is but the mere shadow of
the eternal, follows as a simple necessity: He is not the God of the
dead, or of the dying, but of the essentially alive. Without this inmost
knowledge of Him, this oneness with Him, we have no life in us, for _it
is life_, and that for the sake of which all this outward show of
things, and our troubled condition in the midst of them, exists. All
that is mighty, grand, harmonious, therefore in its own nature true, is.
If not, then dearly I thank the grim Death, that I shall die and not
live. Thus undeceived, my only terror would be that the unbelievers
might be but half right, and there might be a life, so-called, beyond
the grave without a God.

My brother man, is the idea of a God too good or too foolish for thy
belief? or