"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of the Father which is in heaven" (St Matt. vii. 21). [135] Not merely by calling upon the name of Christ, but by obeying His injunction to realise with Him our union with God as the Spirit of Life, and to make our wills one with the Divine Will, is the certainty of our spiritual inheritance revealed to us. For, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (St John xvii. 3). We know the true God through form, through the expression of God, through the Word, learning from Christ to apprehend the Spirit of Life behind the Name or Manifested Life. "I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world.... I have given them the word ... thy word is truth" (St John xvii.). The mental development of man gives him vantage-ground whence he can, if he will, obtain with a clearness, certainty, and completeness proportionate to the intellectual elevation he has attained, on the one side a retrospective view of his descent, and on the[136] other a perspective discernment of his possible destiny. In other words, the whence of his being is more remotely traceable, and the whither of his evolution more definitely perceptible, according as his growing powers of thought and reason enable him to deduce from his present circumstances certain data bearing on the past history of his life. Knowledge of facts pertaining to his descent, by enlarging his consciousness of himself in his relation to the Whole of Life, offers an explanation of his present status that is at the same time a basis for the forecasting of his future possible fate, testifies to the continuity of his being, and brings his conception of immortality within reasonable bounds of justification. But confirmation of his ideas of human immortality is dependent upon an ability to attain an intellectual vantage-ground high enough to permit him to trace to its source the history of his life, and to throw a previsionary understanding over the destined end of his evolutionary career, wherein the blend[137]ing of his physical and spiritual immortality is gradually revealed to him. For in the same way that an examination of the evolution of prayer leads to the observation of a change from specific petition to spiritual acquiescence—a change which we may interpret as evidence of the development of the soul of man, and of the collective consciousness of Creation—so in the study of the life-history of mankind we reach a point whence we may behold the unbroken continuity of his physical evolution merging into that of spiritual evolution. That is to say, the physical immortality of mankind as a whole (the varied manifestation of the Spirit of Life through changing species) is crowned by individual consciousness of spiritual immortality, wherein the purpose of the incarnation of life finds fulfilment.