t in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their
worldly interests in this life. This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is
worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.

No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do. It has nothing
to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order--and
what an order!--upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal
rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs to a lower
plane--that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics.
The vital sense has to do with living.

But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of
the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest
foundation. This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most
intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty
effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that
the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains
for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal
life of the soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and
absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the
conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less
terrible is its immortality.

But when we have overcome the first, the only real difficulty, when we
have overcome the impediment of reason, when we have achieved the faith,
however painful and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal
consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty, what
impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to ourselves this
persistence of self in harmony with our desire? Yes, we can imagine it
as an eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as
a journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness, without
ever an arrival, we can imagine it as ... But who shall put fetters upon
the imagination, once it has broken the chain of the rational?

I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it
is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to
do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God
into a great Judge or Policeman--that is to say, we are not concerned
with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor
earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or
personal. It is not I myself alone, i