Thus, at the close of this inquiry, we find ourselves left with two ultimate realities--two, not one; alike, not identical; related, and _therefore_ distinct, for a relation can only subsist between one and another: the realities of God and the soul. _Gott und die Seele, die Seele und ihr Gott_--these two, eternally akin, yet in their kinship unconfounded, make up the theme and the content of religion; and any attempt to obliterate the distinction between them in some monistic formula, any tendency to surrender either the Divine or the human personality, any philosophy which seeks to merge man in God and God in the {242} universe, is fatal to religion itself. We have been told of late that "there is no Divine immanence which does not imply the allness of God"; we reply that there is no sane and sober theology which will not feel called upon to challenge this fundamental error. God, immanent in the universe as life and energy, is not the universe; man, the partaker of the Divine nature, indwelt by the Spirit of God, is other than God. These are commonplaces, truly; yet in the presence of more than one contemporary movement aiming to set these basal truths aside--truths whose acceptance or rejection involves far-reaching issues in faith and morals--there may be some excuse and even some necessity for reiterating them so persistently and at such length as has been done in these pages. Man is inalienably akin to God--man is everlastingly other than God; upon this note we are content to close. In that fact we have, not only the ultimate explanation of the phenomenon of religion, the ultimate foundation of ethics, the ultimate ground of the felt need of salvation, but also the ultimate hope of immortality--that reasonable hope, expressed by the Hebrew seer for all time in words of sublime and intuitive insight: _Art not_ THOU _from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One_? WE SHALL NOT DIE. [1] _First and Last Things_, pp. 80, 238. [2] Ballard, _Christian Essentials_, pp. 10-12. [3] _The Riddle of the Universe_, p. 72. [4] _Life Everlasting_, p. 85. To the same effect is Huxley's statement declaring that while he would "neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man," immortality itself struck him "_as not half so wonderful as the conservation of force or the indestructibility of matter_." [5] _Man's Destiny_, by John Fiske, pp. 114-116. [6] Cp. Illingworth, _Divine Immanence_, p. 8. [7] _The Riddle of the Universe_, p. 7. [8] _Op. cit._; see ch. vi., _passim_. [9] See the _Hibbert Journal_, April 1908, pp. 565-567. [10] _Divine Immanence_, p. 39.