While the religious doctrine of personal survival has thus a position defensible on grounds of reason as being that of the inherent permanence of self-conscious truth, it also calls to its aid and indefinitely elevates the most powerful of all the emotions, _love_. This, as I have shown in the second chapter, is the sentiment which is characteristic of _preservative_ acts. Self-love, which is prominent in the idea of the perfected individual, sex-love, which is the spirit of the multiform religious symbolism of the reproductive act, and the love of race, which is the chief motor in the religion of humanity, are purified of their grosser demands and assigned each its meet post in the labor of uniting the conceptions of the true under the relation of personality. The highest development of which such love is capable arises through the contemplation of those verities which are abstract and eternal, and which thus set forth, to the extent the individual mind is capable of receiving it, the completed notion of diuturnity. This highest love is the “love of God.” A Supreme Intelligence, one to which all truth is perfect, must forever dwell in such contemplation. Therefore the deeper minds of Christianity define man’s love of God, as God’s love to himself. “Eternal life,” says Ernest Naville, “is in its principle the union with God and the joy that results from that union.”[263-1] The pious William Law wrote: “No man can reach God with his love, or have union with Him by it, but he who is inspired with that one same spirit of love, with which God loved himself from all eternity, before there was any creation.”[264-1] Attractive as the idea of personal survival is in itself, and potent as it has been as a moment of religious thought, it must be ranked among those that are past. While the immortality of the soul retains its interest as a speculative inquiry, I venture to believe that as an idea in religious history, it is nigh inoperative; that as an element in devotional life it is of not much weight; and that it will gradually become less so, as the real meaning of religion reaches clearer interpretations. Its decay has been progressive, and common to all the creeds which taught it as a cardinal doctrine, though most marked in Christianity. A century ago Gibbon wrote: “The ancient Christians were animated by a contempt for their present existence, and by a just confidence of immortality, of which the doubtful but imperfect faith of modern ages cannot give us any adequate notion.”[264-2] How true this is can be appreciated only by those who study this doctrine in the lives and writings of the martyrs and fathers of the primitive church.