So it has been in regard to this subject. We Paganize and Judaize in our view of death. We reëstablish again what Christ has abolished. We make death something where Christ made it nothing. It is made the great duty of life to “prepare for death.” No such duty is pointed out in the New Testament. Our duty is to prepare every day _to live_; then, when we die, we shall be taken care of by God. We can safely leave the other world and its interests to Him who has shown himself so capable of taking care of us here. The gloom of death has been heightened by artificial means. Mourning dresses, solemn faces, funeral addresses, the grave,—all have had an unnatural depth of awe added to the natural sense of bereavement. The Orthodox Church has deliberately and systematically Paganized and Judaized in what it has said and done about death. Its object has been always to make use of the great lever of fear of a hereafter in order to enforce Christian belief and action. Hence Death has been made the king of terrors, the close of probation, the beginning of judgment, the awful entrance to the final decision of an endless doom. All this is wholly unchristian, unknown to apostolic times, a relapse towards Paganism. It is utterly opposed to the great declaration that “CHRIST HAS ABOLISHED DEATH, AND BROUGHT LIFE AND IMMORTALITY TO LIGHT THROUGH THE GOSPEL.” What is called faith in immortality, therefore, is of two kinds: it is an instinct, and it is a belief. In the New Testament these are plainly distinguished. In the passage just quoted, it is said that Jesus “brought life AND immortality to light.” Jesus himself says, “I am the resurrection AND the life.” “He that believeth in me hath eternal life abiding in him, AND I will raise him up at the last day.” Life is a matter of consciousness. It is a present possession, something abiding in us now. Immortality, or the resurrection, is an object of intellectual belief. It is something future. We _feel_ life; we believe in the resurrection. We will pass on, in the next sections, to consider each of these. § 4. Eternal Life, as taught in the New Testament, not endless Future Existence, but present Spiritual Life. It is only necessary carefully to examine the passages in the New Testament where the phrase “eternal life” (ζωή αἰώνιος) occurs, to see that it does not refer to the duration, but to the quality, of existence. _Temporal life_ is that life of the soul which through the body is subject to the vicissitudes of time. _Eternal_ (or everlasting) _life_ is that life of the spirit which is independent of change, and is apart from duration. God’s being was regarded by the Semitic races as outside of time and space, as a perpetual Now, without before or after. (“I am the _I Am_.” Exod. 3:14.) Man, made in the image of God, becomes a “partaker of the divine nature” (2 Peter 2:4) by the gift of eternal life. That “eternal life” is not an endless temporal existence appears,—