We have dwelt at length on the self-consciousness and self-determination of God, as these unite in him as an absolute personality, for the reason that the immortality of the human spirit finds its condition and its security here. If God is a person, and self-conscious, self-determining, and self-active, man is immortal, for in him the elements which constitute the essential nature of God appear. Man is a person and a spirit, made in the likeness and image of God. He is, therefore, as imperishable and indestructible as God is. He has thought and is therefore self-conscious; he has a will, and is therefore self-determining; he has power, and is therefore self-active; he maintains his identity through change, and is therefore a person. But the finite person finds his life through the infinite Person. He finds his knowledge by partaking of truth, the realized thought of God; he finds his freedom by the observance of law, the expressed will of God; he finds his peace by partaking of the life that was in Christ, the manifested love of God. As the fundamental and prior thing in the being of God is thought, so the fundamental and prior thing in the being of man is thought. His progress in the practical matters of life will be in proportion to his thought. His political status will be in proportion to his thought; his religious attainment will be in proportion to his thought. Schleiermacher said “Feeling is the source of religion—a feeling of dependence.” But one cannot have a feeling of dependence without having the thought of dependence. One cannot feel that he depends unless he thinks of himself as dependent. Matthew Arnold said that religion was morality touched by emotion. But there cannot be morality without the thought of some rule by which conduct ought to be guided. Even the African savage, who worships a snake, thinks there is something in the snake entitled to his adoration. Thought is the clearest self-explication of the human spirit. In thought it comes to itself and knows itself. Take thought out of the spirit of man, and you take out its essential nature. Its immortality, even were it possible, would then not be worth contending for. One had as well be blotted out, as to lose the only element of his spirit by which he is able to recognize himself as such. Looking upon thought as the center and kernel of the human spirit, we see that to deny the immortality of the human spirit is to assume that thought is destructible; and this is a flat contradiction, for destruction has no meaning, except in relation to thought. It is of the very nature of thought to be eternal. No thought ever dies, or can die. All the determinations of God’s thought are eternal. The mind of God has within it all determinations of thought; those past, those present, and those to come. Some of these determinations of the divine thought have taken the form of objects in the inorganic world, some have taken