But it is noteworthy that although the Christian idea of immortality is dissociated from that of the survival of the individual in the race, as well as independent of the belief in the transmigration and reincarnation of spirit in ways other than by the transmission of personality from parents to their children, it is by no means antagonistic to, but rather comprehensive of, all these ideas of the continuity of being. Christ's teaching adequately gathers together the truth in all the scattered and imperfect ideas of spiritual survival latent in the tenets of the religious creeds and theories to which reference has been made. But whereas the Hebrew and Chinese ideas inculcate the keeping apart of races and of nations, with a clinging to past tradition necessarily detrimental to progress; and whereas the transmigration and reincarnation theories constitute a practical annihilation of the survival of individual consciousness,—the Christian conception makes for union among men of all peoples of all times, showing immortality[141] to consist not only in men's relationship to past and future generations of their own race, or by connection with the inter-evolution of other organisms, but also and chiefly in their recognition of God as the supreme Spirit of Life manifested through love, and known to them as the Father of their beings. Perception of this truth establishes union among all men, and gives them consciousness of their assured spiritual and individual immortality. Thus considered, the Christian idea of human immortality may be seen to be a natural growth from the conception of the survival of the individual in the race. It is as remarkable a testimony to the development of spiritual consciousness, regarded as a whole, as is the evolution of prayer from its form of specific petition to that of spiritual acquiescence. For here again we can perceive how spiritual has accompanied physical evolution—how the evolving apprehension of the soul has kept pace with the confirming comprehension of the mind of man. And here again we see[142] how the doctrine of Christ unites past tradition with new developments of intellectual aspiration, His method of instruction following the perfect order of Nature, wherein nothing is irregular or unreasonable, and whereby the indwelling Spirit of Truth affords perpetual evidence of the development of spiritual consciousness through natural evolution. The changing of the old order is a necessary accompaniment to progress. When Christ announced His mission to be that of fulfilment and not of destruction, was He not inferring the expansion of knowledge physically perceived into apprehension of its spiritual significance—an expansion which, foreseen by Him to be the accompaniment of the future development of man, would call for continual verification by the critical testimony of the Spirit of Truth? The insistence laid by Him upon the necessity of the realisation by men of