A creature which by reason of its organisation lacked the intellectual capacity to imagine its death, could not know the desire for immortality. Before man arrived at that stage[41] in his evolution when he was able to foresee his death as an inevitable occurrence, we may suppose that he knew no craving for life after death. But the instinct of self-preservation, common to all forms of life, becomes in him the natural precursor of the hope of immortality—that spiritual desire which gives a special and divine character to humanity. That intellectual development which gives the capacity to foresee the inevitableness of physical dissolution is thus responsible for the apprehension of a spiritual survival of death. Recognition of the truth that the life of the world continues after the individual has suffered physical death carries with it some consciousness of the circulation of other vital force. Knowledge of death is thus preliminary to man's perception of the continuity of life, and a necessary preparation for his acquisition of such consciousness of impersonal vitality as leads to his apprehension of a Spiritual God, whence he perceives his own vitality to be derived. With recognition of God as the[42] Divine Spirit of Life, his hope of immortality is justified of its conception. For if the life of God be in man, his spirit cannot die. Is not this self-knowledge the spiritual birthright of all men, to which Christ referred in the words, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (St John iii. 3)? Out of a knowledge of death, consciousness of spiritual life is evolved, from which springs the desire for immortality. "Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead" (1 Cor. xv.). The evolving intellect of man has given him knowledge of the inevitableness of death as the termination of physical existence, and from this evolution of intellect is born the spiritual apprehension of the resurrection of the dead—of that immortality of the Divine Spirit of Life which is the veritable essence of the teaching of Christ, and which finds endorsement in the modern scientific interpretation of the laws of Nature. Does not the evolutionary theory of the descent of man,[43] by showing his spiritual development to be in accord with the scientific explanation of his origin, endorse the words of Christ relating to his spiritual inheritance of immortality? Hope, the outcome of the imaginative or creative faculty in man, is the pioneer of knowledge, for it is by that reaching out of the human mind into realms of speculative thought that ideas and apprehensions, if true, become gradually clothed with evidence of their truth, according as the spiritual and physical evolution of man makes him more capable of approaching the illimitable and infinite glory of God.