“Universal,” for surely mere continuity--a stretching out of length without corresponding breadth--ought not to be the limit of our claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space. They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with those limitations of personality which they enjoy--the relations of _meum_ and _tuum_ upon which the possessive life of the senses is based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things--this narrowing of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done--I shall presently hope to show why--and most of our Western theology has built up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality, the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has disappeared. It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic Christianity, a yeasting of desire for an all round, or expansive, as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man’s spiritual need. But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose, to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know, looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience, man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and through martyrdom. It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have been run from a highly individualised standpoint; and that, for them, death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish worship and social values of the past.