Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and many repairs. Parts of us have gone to other people, parts of other people have come, to us. We have shed and have absorbed quite as much spiritually as materially; and though through our material changes we retain a certain likeness, so that friends meeting us after a seven years’ absence recognise us again in bodies no particle of which have they ever seen before; and though similarly we can recognise our inner selves across wider intervals of time, have we any reason to suppose that our identity is more fixed in the spiritual substance than in the material? For myself, I hope not. May one not prefer the idea of interchange between life and life, to the notion that one is to remain for ever fixed and self-possessed--a thing apart? The more we are compounded of other lives, the more we have contributed to the lives of others--the more can we recognise our entrance into the only eternal life that we can demonstrably be sure about, or that can (so it must seem to many of us), be sensibly desired or deserved. Is Eternal Bliss, in the individual sense, a more tolerable doctrine than eternal Hell-fire? Though, indeed, this latter may be but a scientific statement of fact perverted and made foolish by the theologians. For life, after all, is but a form of combustion for ever going on, and outside of it we know nothing. No doubt the atoms of our being, whether physical or spiritual, will forever form part of it; but I see no reason why our spirits should not be as diffused, through proper elemental changes, as our bodies are now being diffused from day to day; or why I should repine that I personally shall not always be there to preside over the operation and find it good. Even if, at the far end of this earth’s history, everything is again to be reabsorbed in the heat and light out of which it came, I can trust the suns and planets to fulfil their mission of progress--or the will of God--quite as well as, or better than, in my own small sphere I can trust Constitutional Governments or Established Churches. And since these lesser lights, in their foolish and providential dealings, do not confound my faith, neither do the stars in their courses fight against it. Rather do they confirm me in my sense that even the most acute perceptions with which human life is endowed fail of themselves to justify me in any claim to a larger lease of life than can naturally belong to them; for I see in the universe things far greater than any individual man, doing service and sustaining the life of countless millions, (which without them could not live at all), without any prospect of so great a reward.