844 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



It is more and more conceded that Clirist and Paul, while 

 preaching a vivid Fatherhood and Godhead, as well as a gen- 

 eral Brotherhood for man, refrained from expressing any exact 

 view as to the nature and relation of an immortal existence. 

 But their followers by no means showed such caution or re- 

 serve, and so in the Christian church diversified doctrines 

 arose on the subject, till all culminated in the trivial though 

 typical scholastic questions of Thomas Aquinas. From that 

 time to the present a return to a neutral position has been 

 the tendency with most, and this attitude has been summed 

 up by Orr when he writes: "We have not the elements of a 

 complete solution, and we ought not to attempt it" (230: 397). 



But we may now consider whether the varied attitudes 

 represent real mental and physical states that are working 

 toward a definite goal of immortality, that man is reaching 

 or will reach, even though he may not have been surely cog- 

 nizant of its scope and trend. One feature in this connection 

 seems fairly evident. It is that a future existence of the body 

 after death becomes more and more an established belief side 

 by side with religious progress. But, though religion has 

 advanced to higher and higher platforms of thought and word 

 and action, it is exactly correct to say that we have as little 

 proof of a future or continued individual existence today as 

 had mankind 5000 or more years ago, so far as exact evidence 

 helps us. Nor, if the great majority of earnest Christian 

 thinkers and believers be squarely and firmly asked as to their 

 own assurance of immortality, or their sure grounds for ac- 

 ceptance of it as a physical or mento-religious reality, can 

 any of them give proofs that it rests on an unassailable basis. 



True, it forms one of the cardinal points in the history of 

 Christ and Christian teaching, as given in three of the gospels, 

 })ut Mark's gospel, alike the simplest and most ancient, is 

 broken off just at the point where this is most necessary to 

 the question at issue. Up to the present day there is no clear 

 proof, as we see it, for verification of a possible immortality 

 as understood in Christian teachings of many centuries. Fer- 

 guson borrows the question (S31: 119) when he says: "The 



