This unity of Nature is attested by the intercommunion maintained between its parts through the mutual surrender of individual advantage and personal identity, which sacrifice enables the perpetuation of the whole of manifested life to be carried on. [121] "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it" (St Luke ix. 24). In these words Christ, conscious of Himself as a manifestation of the supreme Spirit of Life, and speaking as Incarnate Love, urges a similar spiritual realisation on His fellow-men; so that they also, through voluntary self-surrender in the communion of love, may obtain spiritual union with the Source of Life, and become consciously clothed with the vesture of God. [122] VI SPIRITUAL CORRESPONDENCE Careful examination of the articles of most religious creeds reveals so remarkable a connection between the ideas of prayer and immortality inculcated therein, that in an attempt to trace and summarise the effect of either of these devotional outcomes of the religious sense over the spiritual evolution of mankind, it is expedient to subject them to a dual consideration. The infinite diversity of the human mind is made strikingly apparent by the different ideas of the significance and utility of prayer existing at various periods in the history of religion; and if this exercise of the evolving soul of man be recognised as yielding the basis of those conceptions of human immortality which, when[123] defined as the goal of established creeds, distinguish such from all purely philosophical systems of thought, the difficulty of dissociating these two devotional factors in the development of spiritual correspondence becomes even more clearly apparent.