“ ‘And this is life eternal,’ says the Great Teacher, ‘that they should know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ (John 17:3.) The best ancient and modern interpreters hold this verse to be a definition by Christ himself of the expression ‘life eternal,’ so often used by him, according to the record of John. De Wette says, ‘_And this is_ (therein consists) _the life eternal_; not, this is the means of the eternal life; for the vital knowledge of God and Christ is itself the eternal life, which begins even here, and penetrates the whole life of the human spirit.’ Meyer translates thus: ‘_Therein consists the eternal life_,’ and says, ‘This knowledge, willed of God, is the “eternal life,” inasmuch as it is the essential subjective principle of the latter, its enduring, eternally unfolding germ and fountain, both now, in the temporal development of the eternal life, and hereafter, when the kingdom is set up, in which faith, hope, and charity abide, whose essence is that knowledge.’(34) The same view, substantially, is presented by Olshausen, Lücke, Bengel, Alford, and many others.” Eternal life is the gift of God to the soul through Jesus Christ. It is God’s life communicated to man—the life of God in the soul of man. This is distinctly stated in the First Epistle of John (chap. 1:1), as the life which was from the beginning, the eternal life which was with the Father, but is manifested to us, giving us fellowship with the Father and with his Son. The root of this eternal life is in every human being. It is what we call “the spirit” in man, as distinguished from the soul and body. It is the side of each person which touches the infinite and eternal. Fichte, the most spiritual of German philosophers, says, “Love is life. Where I love, I live. What I love, I live from that.”(35) When we love earthly things, our life is earthly, that is, temporal; when we love the true, the right, the good, our life is spiritual and eternal. Then we have eternal life abiding in us. Then all fear of death departs. The great gift of God through Christ was to make the right and true also lovely, so that loving them, we could draw our life from them. When God becomes lovely to us, by being shown to us as Jesus shows him, then by loving God we live from God, and so have eternal life abiding in us.