ON IMMORTALITY. 153 



and that an immortal one, must be granted us to reach 

 that perfection, whose pursuit reason prescribes as the 

 true end of our being, but which on earth is never 

 reached by even the most virtuous, and which in even 

 .any time short of eternity can only be indefinitely 

 approximated to without being ever fully attained. 



Thus the metaphysicians in general, and Kant in 

 particular, had tried to ground their beliefs in the, soul's 

 immortality. The theologians had reached the same 

 conclusion by a different route. The future life was a 

 revelation from God Himself. It could not confessedly 

 have been deduced with any certainty from reason alone. 

 Nor was it an invariable element in every revelation, 

 since there appears no trace of it in the Mosaic, and little 

 in the Old Testament revelation taken generally. In the 

 Christian revelation, however, the doctrine of the resur- 

 rection to a future life is, as St. Paul assures us, the most 

 central and vital point. According to the Christian 

 theology, an immortal soul is lodged in every man, not 

 immortal in its own essence, as the metaphysicians had 

 made it, but as the gift of God, who has so bade it and 

 declared it to us. The soul existing in every one is, how- 

 ever, impure and sinful in its own nature, owing to the 

 original sin of Adam which all his posterity has inherited, 

 and requires the blood of Christ to purify it, the action 

 of the Holy Spirit to sanctify it. It has ingrained spots 

 and essential taints, which ever tend to 'deepen and to 

 develop into worse evil as life proceeds, and it must be 

 inevitably and irrevocably lost unless its further corrup- 

 tion be arrested, unless it be wholly regenerated by the 

 grace of God, the efficacy of the Spirit, and the merits of 

 the Redeemer, according to the Christian scheme of salva- 

 tion, as generally understood. But even in the worst 

 cases (except, indeed, under the Calvinistic theology), the 



