If God be recognised as the supreme Spirit of Life, love must be seen to be the expression of life, and the perpetuating principle of life. Life is a whole, and the Spirit of Life pervading all form is manifested by the intercommunion[118] of all its parts. Thus, the formation of flower and fruit secure the perpetuation of plant life, with whose existence is entwined the preservation of other forms of life. With higher organisms propagation is achieved by the same principle of sacrificial love, the intercommunion of all forms of life being necessary for the continuity of life as a whole. Thus considered, love appears as a symbol, the outer sign of the sacrament of life, wherein individuals are united in spirit, and as a consequence of this union obtain increasing consciousness of their immortality. The attainment of such spiritual consciousness entails the subservience of personal identity to the consciousness of kinship with the Whole of Life. Christ's gospel of love, with its repeated assertions of the necessity for self-surrender as prefatory to the acquirement of spiritual joy, finds a parallel in the pursuit of happiness undertaken by men and women in the occurrences of everyday life. Do not the joys of love in its human relations between[119] friends, husband and wife, parents and children, rest on a mutual surrender of self-interest? The rite of communion can thus be resolved into a sacramental work of art, whose outer sign is love, and whose inner meaning is life. Through Christ's symbolic work of art, the vesture of God which manifests the Spirit of Life is seen to rest upon all form. The symbols chosen by Him to summarise His teaching are of an exact appropriateness. By His illustrations of bread and wine, designated by Him as His flesh and blood, the gospel of love and the scientific doctrine of the common derivative union of all forms of life are brought together and shown to be the inseparable accompaniment of the whole of manifested life. Therefore the declaration, "This is my body.... This is my blood ..." is not only true of the physical relationship which He Himself bore to Nature as the vesture of the Spirit of Life, but is applicable in its verity to every man who, in obedience to Christ's[120] command to "Do this in remembrance of me," comes to recognise in his employment of the prescribed formula the true expression of his own union with the elements of Nature, and his own relation to the supreme Spirit of Life as a child of God, made manifest through love. Christ's words are not therefore to be repeated only as a quotation of a formula applicable solely to Himself as a being differing from all other men, by reason of a divine origin possessed by Him alone; but as living truth, capable of realisation by every thinking man and woman as an epitomised testimony to the essential unity of all forms of life, a unity manifested in form by the perpetuating principle of love.