I am struck, every time I read the Gospels, by the insistence with which the words, “_Et nunc_,” “_And now_,” are repeated over and over again. And certainly Dostoevsky too was struck by it. Everlasting bliss, the bliss promised by Jesus Christ, can be attained here and now, if only the human soul will forswear and deny itself. _Et nunc._... Eternal life is not, or rather is more than, a thing of the future, and if we do not reach it in this world, there is little hope of our ever attaining to it. Listen to these admirable pages from Mark Rutherford’s _Autobiography_: “As I got older, I became aware of the folly of this perpetual reaching after the future, and of drawing from to-morrow--and from to-morrow only--a reason for the joyfulness of to-day. I learned, when, alas! it was almost too late, to live in each moment as it passed over my head, believing that the sun as it is now rising is as good as it ever will be, and blinding myself as much as possible to what may follow. But when I was young I was the victim of that illusion, implanted for some purpose or other in us by Nature, which causes me on the brightest morning in June to think immediately of a brighter morning which is to come in July. I say nothing now for or against the doctrine of immortality. All I say is, that men have been happy without it, even under the pressure of disaster, and that to make immortality a sole spring of action here is an exaggeration of the folly which deludes us all through life with endless expectation, and leaves us at death without the thorough enjoyment of a single hour.” Cheerfully would I cry: “What betides life eternal, without ever-present consciousness of that eternity even now? Eternal life can be present in us here below. We are partakers in it from the moment we are resigned to die to ourselves and accomplish the surrender which enables us to resurrect straightway into eternity!” Neither behest nor ruling: simply the secret of the supreme felicity revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. “_If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them_” (John xiii. 17). Not “_happy shall ye be_” but “_happy are ye_.” Here and now we can share in that perfect bliss. What serenity! Time indeed ceases to exist: eternity lives, we inherit the Kingdom of God. Yes, here is the mysterious essence of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and of Christian ethics too; the divine secret of happiness. The individual triumphs by renunciation of his individuality. He who lives his life, cherishing personality, shall lose it: but he who surrenders it shall gain the fullness of life eternal, not in the future, but in the present made one with eternity. Resurrection in the fullness of life, forgetful of all individual happiness.--Oh! perfect restoration! Such glorification of feeling and inhibition of thought is nowhere better indicated than in the following passage from _The Possessed_ which complements the one I read a few moments since: