REV. A. R. WHATELY^ D.D., ON IMMORTALITY. 11 



both transcendent and immanent, above the world yet in the 

 world, so it is with the spiritual man. Our regenerated self- 

 consciousness — born anew in God — should show us that the 

 higher self is one with the lower, embraces the spheres of 

 common experience, and is the final arbiter in our reasonings on 

 human destiny. For Eeason itself must be its servant. Self- 

 consciousness is essentially intellectual. It is not mere self- 

 envisagement, but self-understanding. It is intuition ; but all 

 our intuitions are ideas, though something more, and as such 

 they must take their place in the general system of our ideas. 

 Note, for instance, how Mr. A. G. Benson, in his latest book, 

 " Thy Eod and Thy Staff," takes intellectual hold of his newly 

 won intuition of an imperishable selfhood, and makes it at home 

 in the structure of his thought. Immortality will not be wholly 

 rational to us unless the Immortal in us captures the machinery 

 of Reason. 



Various conditions are required for this. At present I 

 merely want to insist that the belief in immortality need not be 

 merely secondary and inferential, nor yet rest upon mere 

 external authority : that it may, like our belief in God, become 

 an inward possession ; and that the reason of this is that the 

 fear of extinction in or after death pre-supposes the quality of 

 mortality — a question of present fact — and that this quality of 

 mortality is directly excluded from the higher self-consciousness 

 that sees self in God. 



The moral and religious conditions for realizing this higher 

 self -consciousness need not detain us now, but they must never 

 be forgotten. To live the eternal life is the way to realize our 

 deathlessness. Then the general problem of human destiny 

 beyond the grave can be approached from that standpoint. But 

 what concerns us now — assuming the presence of those spiritual 

 impulses and ideals that our religion demands — is simply to 

 consider what intellectual conditions are necessary to bring home 

 the assured hope of immortality. 



Obviously, if we are agreed so far, it will be plain that mere 

 logic, working with definitions and abstractions, will not suffice. 

 Nor will equally abstract discussions based on science, though 

 they may possess a relative value. The intellect can perform 

 two services, however. First, it can bring the idea of immortality 

 into relation with our other religious ideas, which are also them- 

 selves not mere ideas, but objects, more or less, of appropriation 

 and experience. Our ideas about God and our relation to Him 

 must determine what we understand by our own selfhood. 

 Pantheism, for instance, corresponds to an imperfect self- 



