The Final Goal 319 



man is free and responsible, his plain duty is to seek 

 truth and pursue it, so that he may learn the way 

 of righteousness and never flag. Carlyle has told 

 us: " Love not pleasure; love God. This is the ever- 

 lasting Yea, wherein whoso walks and works, it is 

 well with him." And why so ? For this reason, that 

 the finite spirit in man comes from the Eternal, who 

 maketh for Righteousness. It is the Divine Spirit 

 immanent in man, and this explains why the self- 

 sacrifice and love inculcated in the teachings of Jesus 

 are bringing about the salvation of the world. They 

 have so appealed to the true self — the soul — the 

 immanent spirit of the Divine in man — that the " cloak 

 of self " is discarded. Man has ceased to be " Time's 

 fool," and become one with Eternity. This is the ex- 

 planation of Kidd's axiom that " The most distinctive 

 feature of human evolution as a whole is that the race 

 must continue to grow ever more and more religious ; 

 religious character is being evolved as a first product, 

 and intellectual capacity only in so far as it can be 

 associated with this quality." We endeavoured to 

 show that the concept of the Eternal, the Great First 

 Cause, the All-righteous, All- wise, Omnipotent Designer 

 and Controller of the Universe was a necessity of 

 Thought to which we were compelled by logical pro- 

 cess from the study of observed phenomena. Indeed, 

 any other concept, any negation of the idea of the 

 Eternal is unthinkable. The purely material concept 

 is impossible to human reason, and has been abandoned 

 by the world of science to-day. We say this notwith- 

 standing Sir Ray Lankester and the Mechanist school, 

 whose theories are as impossible of belief and as want- 

 ing in continuity of method or demonstration of law as 

 any fairy-tale of Jules Verne. In the last century no 

 man was considered deserving of scientific reputation 

 who did not uphold the purely materialistic stand- 



