ll our wanderings and errors and in the darkest
moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and
that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light. And if
the God whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot
conceive a living God without a body--we, together with each of the
myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be
the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an
ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would
be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this
cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline
apocatastasis?

Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of
Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis,
the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a
Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all
things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order
that God, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a
collective redemption and a society beyond the grave.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant
origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new
force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his
religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in
living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to
God through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge
that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and
also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural
feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of
Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the
Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to
the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing
near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to
die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will
bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the
_commerce with all the saints_" (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_,
vol. iii., Sec. 43). The commerce with all the saints--that is to say, the
eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal
happiness not as the contemplat