1 98 Immortality [CH. 



in which freedom and love and self-determination are 

 being won by limited beings. 



Now in arguing thus we implicitly maintain, what in 

 our religion we often explicitly deny, that the person- 

 ality of man is not merely like (o/tioto?) analogous to 

 the personality of God, but is identically the same 

 (opoiovcrios) the same in likeness as the personality 

 of God. All personalities are not one; we are not the 

 personality of God; to maintain this would be to close 

 our eyes to the most prominent feature of all person- 

 ality: its uniqueness and individuality. But when we 

 speak of the personality of man and of God we do mean 

 exactly the same thing by the term. Of course, we allow 

 that man's personality is incomplete; but in so far as it 

 is personality at all we mean that it is God-like. The 

 personality of men is the same as the personality of God. 

 Now when we speak, in common phrase, of a man as 

 having a marked personality, we mean that he is strongly 

 differentiated from his fellows, master of his fate in a 

 wider sense than they, and always the same. Years after 

 we last met him, if we meet him again we shall recognise 

 him, and feel that, however he may have grown, he is 

 the man we used to know. The idea of enduringness is 

 inseparably linked with the conception of personality. 

 More, we cannot reasonably give two meanings to the 

 word enduringness. When we speak of the personality 

 of God we mean the same as when we speak of the per- 

 sonality of man. We find the same triunity, the same 

 modes of functioning. If in all these things man and God 

 are the same, is it logical, is it reasonable to contend 

 that in the one quality of enduringness God differs from 

 man? We know as a fact of experience that man does 

 endure: this is really one of our reasons for contending 

 that he and God are alike personal. If we say that his 

 enduring has a period set to it, God's not, we implicitly 

 deny that man's personality is the same as God's ; all 



