536th ordinary GENERAL MEETING. 



HELD IN THE ROOMS OF THE INSTITUTE, DECEMBER 9th, 

 1912, AT 4.30 P.M. 



General J. G. Halliday in the Chair. 



The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and signed. 



The Secretary announced that since the last Meeting Mr. A. W. Oke 

 and the Rev. David Baron had been elected Members, and Mr. George 

 Cartwright, Sir Andrew Wingate, K.C.I.E., Mr. J. B. Karslake, Mr. 

 John Scott, J.P., the Rev. J. U. N. Bardsley, Miss F. A. Yeldham, B.Sc, 

 the Rev. John Ridley, Mr. H. P. Rudd, the Master of St. Catherine's 

 College, Cambridge, and Mr. W. Duncan White, Associates. 



The Chairman then called upon the Rev. Dr. Whately to read his 

 paper. 



IMMORTALITY. 

 By the Rev. A. R. Whately, D.D. 



IT seems hardly possible that the doctrine of Immortality will 

 always occupy the comparatively subordinate position to 

 which it is usually relegated by religious thought. God, the 

 world, and the individual give us the ultimate terms of all our 

 highest thinking. And the last is in a special way privileged : 

 for the thinker himself is an individual, whereas he is neither 

 God nor the world. In the long run, if he is ignored, the very 

 meaning of his religion will shrivel to nothing. If self- 

 renunciation is made the one ground-principle of the religious 

 life — if we are taught to regard the permanence of our very 

 existence as secondary and unessential — then self, taught to 

 despise its own selfhood, may with consistency despise all that 

 that selfhood contains or bears : its growth, its aspirations, its 

 conscience, its religion. Nothing can claim an eternal 

 significance for a being that is not eternal. If we ignore the 

 self-regarding impulses, we cannot consecrate them. And if we 

 do not ignore them, then they can have but one goal, a personal 

 standing in the eternal Kingdom of God. 



Let me endeavour first to set before you exactly the position 

 which I believe this doctrine to hold in the totality of human 

 thought, so far as I can do so in a few words. To all of us who 



