{27} MAN ETERNALLY RESPONSIBLE. Man will be held responsible in the life to come for the deeds that he has done in this life, and will have to answer for the stewardships entrusted to his care here, before the judge of the quick and the dead, the Father of our spirits, and of our Lord and Master. This is the design of God, a part of his great purpose. We are not here to live a few months or years, to eat, drink and sleep, then to die, pass away and perish. The Lord Almighty never designed man to be so ephemeral, useless and imperfect as this. I would pity the being who had such a conception as this of the Creator of the starry heavens, the planets, and the world on which we dwell, poor as it is in glory in comparison to the many others created. Is it conceivable that one possessing such power, majesty, intelligence, light and knowledge would create a world like this and people it with beings in his own image and likeness only to live and grovel through a short, miserable existence, then die and perish? No such thing! There is no death here, but there is life! God is the God of the living, and not of the dead. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and of the ancient prophets. They live! They live not only in the words they spoke, the predictions they made, and in the promises handed down from generation to generation to the children of men; they live not only in the record they made, in the doctrines that they taught, and in the hope that they held out for redemption, atonement and salvation, but they live in spirit, in entity, as they lived here. They are prophets, as they were prophets here, the chosen of God; patriarchs, as they were here; possessing the same identity, the same entity; and by and by, if not already, they will possess the same bodies they possessed while journeying in mortality. Those bodies will become purified, cleansed, and made perfect; and the spirit and the body will be reunited, never more to be separated, never again to taste of death. This is the law {28} and the promise of God, and the words spoken to his ancient prophets, come down to us through the generations that have followed.--_Improvement Era,_ Vol. 21, p. 357, Feb., 1918.