I remember in that connection discussing with the late Father George Tyrrell, in the days before Rome’s excommunication fell on him, the divergent views as to immortality of Christianity and Buddhism; and at that time he held that the superiority of the Christian faith lay in its insistence on the personal immortality, conscious and self-contained, of every human being. Some years later, a month before his death, we discussed the matter again; and I asked him then, in what degree, if at all, his view as to personal immortality had changed. His answer gave me a curious instance of those scientific analogies by which Modernism has been seeking to deliver the Roman Church from its mediæval entanglements. “In the main,” he said, “I have only changed in my apprehension of what ‘personality’ really is. Just as one may find in an hysterical subject five or six pseudo-personalities which reveal themselves in turn, each one of which is a character quite separately and consistently defined, but not one of them (however completely in possession for the time) a real person, so it seems to me must we regard all those limitations of ‘personality’ which find expression in individual form. There is only one true personality, and that is Christ; anything less than the one all-embracing whole is but a simulacrum, concealing rather than revealing the true substance and form.” I cannot pretend to give his actual words, but I believe that I have accurately stated the sense of them; and you will see, I think, that they go a long way toward the adaptation of the Christian to the Buddhistic standpoint. That tendency, I believe, we shall find more and more at work in the Christian Church as time goes on--not merely because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold its own against the inroads of science--but because it gives also a better response to that socialising genius of the human race which is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate expression of good. That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient evidence. Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike; the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny. Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and consciousness.