Man as an entity for himself must have the natural limitations of the part. Conceived by God man is eternal in the divine sense, but conceived by himself man’s eternal life is clothed in the limitations we call time. The eternal is a constant present without beginning or end, without past or future. What is present to man must suffer these limitations; in other words, man must be born, must go through an evolution, or what is the same, become to himself what he has been eternally to God. In this respect man’s relation to God may be compared to the relation of a newborn child to its earthly father. To him the nature and scope of the child is perfectly clear, but the child is unconscious of it and must awaken to an understanding thereof, that is to say, must become to itself what it already is to its father. Living beings form a continuous series in the absolute organism. This series is such that the higher beings form the conditions and supports of the lower. This connection must be entirely reversed during evolution itself, which naturally proceeds from the lower to the higher. In time therefore the generation and development of the lower beings must precede that of the higher. We have also seen that the evolution of the former is identical with the upbuilding of the organisms of the latter, and we understand now that the whole process _must_ essentially follow the course which, as we have previously shown, it does in fact, actually take. It is further the inherent idea of time that man’s eternal entity cannot appear whole and undivided. He must plot it out along a series of successive moments which make room for only one cell-generation at a time. As the cell’s entity again has a less comprehensive content than man’s, its lifetime must be correspondingly shorter. CHAPTER XIII. Recapitulation. The theory we have here advanced may naturally seem startling; for what could be more foreign to common conceptions than the assertion that science today gives us full evidence of a death and a resurrection that commence during our life in time? Considering this, it may be appropriate to recapitulate the salient points in our line of thought. From prehistoric times up to our own days all people at all stages of evolution have to a man been convinced that the body in some way and in some form contains an imperishable and essential part which man cannot do without in a future life. With this intuitive and purely instinctive faith as a basis, the steps in the following historical evolution become fully natural and logical consequences.