The heavenly life, or what we do not here distinguish from it--personal immortality, is a characteristic doctrine of Christianity. It is certainly in part to be found among the heathen philosophers; but with them it had only the significance of a subjective conception, because it was not connected with their fundamental view of things. How contradictory, for example, are the expressions of the Stoics on this subject! It was among the Christians that personal immortality first found that principle, whence it follows as a necessary and obvious consequence. The contemplation of the world, of Nature, of the race, was always coming athwart the ancients; they distinguished between the principle of life and the living subject, between the soul, the mind, and self: whereas the Christian abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species. But the immediate unity of the species and individuality is the highest principle, the God of Christianity,--in it the individual has the significance of the absolute being,--and the necessary, immanent consequence of this principle is personal immortality. Or rather: the belief in personal immortality is perfectly identical with the belief in a personal God;--i.e., that which expresses the belief in the heavenly, immortal life of the person, expresses God also, as he is an object to Christians, namely, as absolute, unlimited personality. Unlimited personality is God; but heavenly personality, or the perpetuation of human personality in heaven, is nothing else than personality released from all earthly encumbrances and limitations; the only distinction is, that God is heaven spiritualised, while heaven is God materialised, or reduced to the forms of the senses: that what in God is posited only in abstracto is in heaven more an object of the imagination. God is the implicit heaven; heaven is the explicit God. In the present, God is the kingdom of heaven; in the future, heaven is God. God is the pledge, the as yet abstract presence and existence of heaven; the anticipation, the epitome of heaven. Our own future existence, which, while we are in this world, in this body, is a separate, objective existence,--is God: God is the idea of the species, which will be first realised, individualised in the other world. God is the heavenly, pure, free essence, which exists there as heavenly pure beings, the bliss which there unfolds itself in a plenitude of blissful individuals. Thus God is nothing else than the idea or the essence of the absolute, blessed, heavenly life, here comprised in an ideal personality. This is clearly enough expressed in the belief that the blessed life is unity with God. Here we are distinguished and separated from God, there the partition falls; here we are men, there gods; here the Godhead is a monopoly, there it is a common possession;