ideas and not in facts, no teaching
could well have been more radically contrary to its modes of thought;
and the doctrine once accepted, the spirit of proselytizing came with
it.

I have called this idea a new one to the first century of our era, and
so it was in Europe and Syria. But in India, Sakyamuni, probably five
hundred years before, had laid down in sententious maxims the
philosophical principle which underlies the higher religious doctrine of
a future life. These are his words, and if through the efforts of
reasoning we ever reach a demonstration of the immortality of the soul,
we shall do it by pursuing the argument here indicated: "Right thought
is the path to life everlasting. Those who think do not die."[262-1]

Truth alone contains the elements of indefinite continuity; and truth is
found only in the idea, in correct thought.

Error in the intellectual processes corresponds to pain in sensation; it
is the premonition of waning life, of threatened annihilation; it
contains the seed of cessation of action or death. False reasoning is
self-destructive. The man who believes himself invulnerable will
scarcely survive his first combat. A man's true ideas are the most he
can hope, and all that he should wish, to carry with him to a life
hereafter. Falsehood, sin, is the efficient agent of death. As Bishop
Hall says: "There is a kind of not-being in sin; for sin is not an
existence of somewhat that is, but a deficiency of that rectitude which
should be; it is a privation, as blindness is a privation of sight."

While the religious doctrine of personal survival has thus a position
defensible on grounds of reason as being that of the inherent permanence
of self-conscious truth, it also calls to its aid and indefinitely
elevates the most powerful of all the emotions, _love_. This, as I have
shown in the second chapter, is the sentiment which is characteristic
of _preservative_ acts. Self-love, which is prominent in the idea of the
perfected individual, sex-love, which is the spirit of the multiform
religious symbolism of the reproductive act, and the love of race, which
is the chief motor in the religion of humanity, are purified of their
grosser demands and assigned each its meet post in the labor of uniting
the conceptions of the true under the relation of personality.

The highest development of which such love is capable arises through the
contemplation of those verities which are abstract and eternal, and