, the faculty of
self-giving, a god-like within answering to the God without. It is
because these things--those which "avail for highest purposes"--make
man personal and mark him off, broadly speaking, from the lower,
sub-human life out of which he has emerged, that we believe in the
permanence of human personality, of the spiritual element in man, in
the survival of the soul _as individual and personal_, and not merely
as "part of the eternal Being of God." A simple illustration will help
us to enforce our {239} point of view. In the process of porcelain
manufacture the half-finished ware is placed in "seggars" or coarse
clay shells for protection in the glaze or enamel kiln. These
temporary shells, having served their purpose, are broken up and ground
down again into a shapeless mass under heavy revolving rollers; but no
one would dream of treating the graceful vases and figures they
enclosed for a time after the same fashion. The parallel is fairly
obvious: the protecting clay envelope broken to pieces, merged and
mingled with other clay, to be so used and broken a hundred times; the
precious product carefully taken from its coarse shell and preserved.
The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns unto
God who gave it: returns, but not as it came forth from Him, but
differentiated, individual, shaped and coloured; returns, not to be
absorbed and lost in an "all-indissoluble All," but, as we hold, for
still further processes of perfecting.

And if we are asked for the ground whence we derive the latter
assurance, we answer, It is founded upon our belief, not in a
"universal substance" or an "all-inclusive consciousness of being," but
in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By no possibility can
these two conceptions be made to harmonise or to pass into one another;
on the former view, as we have seen, the significance of the individual
soul is and must be _nil_--on the latter, the value of the soul is
infinite, because it is {240} the object of the Divine Love, created by
God "unto Himself," in order to experience and respond to His
affection. On the former view, we are finite modes of infinite
Being--on the latter, we are children of the Father.

It is because we have believed the love which God hath to us--the love
made manifest supremely in Jesus Christ--that we echo so confidently
the poet's "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust": the Christian doctrine
of immortality flows quite n