such matters the real implications of logic are little
noticed. The religious skepticism nourished by physical science is
in all respects really as irrational and baseless as it is actual.
For example, the resurrection of Christ, admitting it to be a
fact, did not create the immortality it was considered to
illustrate. If he rose, it was because men are immortal, and men
are not immortal because he rose. If he did not rise, men are
immortal all the same, provided human immortality be a truth; if
it be not a truth, the resurrection of Christ would be an isolated
abnormal event without any logical validity on the question. The
truth or falsity of human immortality, therefore, is a question of
the creative plan of God and the essential nature of man, to be
decided on the intrinsic evidences, and cannot logically be
affected one way or the other by any individual historic
occurrence limited to a certain time and place. Yet it is a
practical necessity that any great popular faith, if it rests on
authority, will be shocked and weakened by everything which shocks
and weakens that authority, no matter how adventitious it is. If
one cannot believe in the preternatural resurrection of Christ,
that surely is no valid reason for denying the natural immortality
of the soul, but only a good reason for seeking to learn if there
be not adequate grounds for this faith quite independent of
scripture text and priestly assertion.

Precisely the same reasoning holds in relation to the doubts about
spiritual realities bred in the minds of those whose studies are
conversant exclusively with material realities. The professors of
physical science, thoroughly familiarized with things which
combine and dissolve, often come to fancy that everything is
phenomenal and evanescent, that there is no immaterial substance,
that spirit is not entity but process, that thought and feeling
and will are mere transient functions of transient matter. Thus
all faith in the individuality of mind is pulverized at the
fountain head. There can be no question but that such is the
common influence of a constant contemplation of the physical
aspects alone of physical things. Mentality, consciousness, is
regarded as the prismatic bow in the cloud, a spectral show that
appears and vanishes, with no permanent substance. At the present
time, in Christendom, the one conquering power in literature, the
one fascinating absorption of thought in society, is that
connected w