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there were outlying tracts of his nature over which the blight never wholly prevailed;-that he was, after all, worth saving. And like this sympathy of God for us in our worst and darkest hours, must surely be the sympathy of a glorified soul for its sinful brother. Like Him, he must hate the sin which stands revealed in the blaze of heaven in blacker hues than moral realities ever wear in the dim twilight of earth. But, like Him, he must feel ineffable tenderness and pity for the spirit wearing that foul stain, and a godlike will to help him to perfect purification. It would not be too much, indeed, to imagine the very converse of the eternal parting of Elsewhere," even the self-losing of the purer soul in its infinite longing for the pardon of the sinful one, and its flight through all the worlds of space, locked in an embrace, not,-like Paolo and Francesca's,-of a common guilt, but of a common prayer.

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And, again, at the summit of existence, far up above the clouds and storms of sin and penitence, in the high realm of everlasting Peace, will Love have no more place? Then the greatness of man must consist in somewhat else than the greatness of God! God has not been content to "lose Himself in light," and live alone in His ineffable radiance throughout eternity. He has filled the universe with life and love, and His own awful joy, so far as we may catch the glitter of its sheen, must consist in Love-in loving those whom He blesses, and blessing those whom He loves. Whatever other mysteries of joy are hidden in Him, what delight He may

take in the beauty of His glorious works or the rhythmic dance of the clusters of suns, or yet in sources of happiness utterly inconceivable and unknown to us, there must remain even for Him one joy greater than these, the joy of infinite love and eternal benediction. As we climb up, age after age, the steps of the interminable ascent, nearer and more like to Him,

"Aloft, aloft, from terrace to broad terrace evermore,"

we must share that joy; and if we could "lose ourselves" at all, it would rather be in the ocean of Love than in the unbreathable ether of a purely intellectual existence. Christ must have become more godlike, and therefore more loving, during the millenniums since he trod the Via Dolorosa. Assuredly he has not attained a stage whereunto Goethe might fitly have preceded him.

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There is, however, no greater mistake, I imagine, than the fundamental one of supposing that any "self-losing,' "absorption," or merging of personality of one kind or another, can possibly form a step of progress hereafter. The advance through inorganic, vegetative, animated, conscious and self-conscious existence, and again from the lowest savage to the loftiest philosopher or heroic martyr, is all in the direction of a more and more perfect, complete and definite personality. The severance of the Ego from the Non-ego may indeed be held in one sense to be the supreme result of all the machinery of the physical life; and the whole history of Thought tends to shew that a better recognition of the distinction has

been at the root of the superiority of the Western over the Eastern and classic nations. Morality, of course, is grounded in it; and the ages before Personality was clearly self-conscious, were necessarily, like the years of infancy, ages before Morality. To suppose that there is a height in the range of Being, whereto having attained, this supreme, slowly-evolved Personality suddenly collapses like a volcanic island, and subsides into the ocean of impersonal being, in which "He" becomes "It," is to suppose that the whole scheme of things is self-stultifying a great "much ado about nothing”—the building up of a tower which should reach to heaven, but which is in truth only a child's house of cards, to be swept flat as soon as the coping is laid on it.

The meeting of two souls here or hereafter in perfect affection is not, as our inadequate and misleading metaphors often seem to imply, a blending in which personality is lost, but rather the act wherein personality comes out into most definite form. As in strong moral effort or vivid religious consciousness, so in the not less sacred. outburst of pure human love, the intensity with which we admire, revere, sympathize with, embrace soul to soul, the soul of a friend, is like the heat which brings out all the hidden scriptures on our hearts. We are never so truly ourselves as when we go out of ourselves. And as Emerson says that "the first requisite for friendship is to be able to do without friendship," so it is those natures which are most self-sustained, and possess the most vigorous and defined personality, with smallest of blurred

and slovenly margins, which are most capable of vivid and stringent friendship. And, on the other hand, there are people who may rather be said to slop over into each other,—to invade each other's personality and lose their own, than to be united, as true friends ought to be, like the Rhone and the Arve, absolutely clear and distinct, even when running side by side in the same channel.

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IV. The Moral Condition of the Dead is (as I have remarked) the one point concerning them on which the thought of Christendom has persistently fastened. it has fixed on a view of that moral state which originated in a comparatively dark and rude age of ethical feeling, and must necessarily have given place long ago to higher conceptions, were it not for the stereotyping process by which the Cyclopædia of Religious Knowledge supposed to be contained in the two Testaments has been closed against either correction or amendment for eighteen centuries. While our clergy say as little as they can help about the eternity of torment, we are all aware that any serious attempt to remove the doctrine from the Church formularies, or even to place the dogmas of the Resurrection of the Body, and the physical penalties with which it is threatened, in the category of open questions, would be met by invincible opposition. We have conquered from the adherents of the Book of Genesis the million ages of past geologic time; but the million millions of ages of future torment in the Lake of

Fire we have by no means won from the disciples of the Book of the Apocalypse. They will give up almost any doctrine sooner than this. As Theodore Parker said, they cry out in dismay when such a thing is named“What! give up Hell? our own eternal Hell? Never, Never, Never!"

We shall accomplish very little, however, towards the removal of this dreadful cloud from the souls of men, by merely pointing out how gloomy it is, or even by proving how it darkens the face of the Sun of Righteousness. Consciously or unconsciously, it is felt by the orthodox to be a necessary part of their whole scheme of theology; and the Atonement, which is their Rainbow of Hope, would fade and disappear were that black cloud to pass away from behind it. Our only course is to do justice to the profound sentiment of the infinite solemnity of moral realities, the "exceeding sinfulness of sin," out of which sprung such ideas; and then, if possible, shew how the same sentiment, guided by the calmer reflection and more refined ethical judgment of a later age, may project other ideas of the future world, vindicating the Divine Justice and Love, no longer as in the awful diptych of an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, but in one harmonious picture of a world of souls all ascending by various paths, thorny or flower-strewn, towards the Father's Throne. It cannot be doubted, I apprehend, that it was the intense sense of the horror and ill-desert of sin which impressed itself on the minds of the first teachers of Christianity as the correlative of

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