Moreover, if there is no awakening after death, then those who believe in an awakening will suffer naught from such a delusion, but, without ever being conscious of it, will share the common human fate of extinction; while, if there is an awakening after death, such an awakening can not be a pleasant thing for those who did not believe in it. This, indeed, is where faith has the advantage, to speak quite practically; for if it should be mistaken, it will fare no worse, in this life or later, than the opposite view; but if it shall find itself on the right path, it will fare better. III Still, our hope in a further life is only a hope and not a demonstrable certainty. Yet perhaps it is a well-grounded assurance, resting first of all on the fact that capacities and powers are placed in men for whose complete development human life is too short, and which would therefore be pointless if they did not attain to a further evolution. This is particularly manifest in the case of all men who die young. Again, we have the very definite testimony of Christ, whose whole conception of life would otherwise rest upon a huge error. The resurrection of the personality is one of the most indubitable and the most definite promises of Christianity, and without it Christianity would have a very dubious amount of truth and a very doubtful value for life; no “resurrection of the body,” of course, in the literal sense of the Christian confession of faith, as many conceive it, but in the sense in which Christ, and Paul too on occasion, announced it and in which alone it can satisfy us also. For though we do not wish to lose our individuality, nor rise again, as Job rightly says, as “a stranger to ourselves” (in which case there is no continuation of _our_ life and the whole question no longer has any meaning), yet we shall surely not desire to live on with all “the weaknesses of the flesh”; and under any circumstances there is need of a thorough transformation, laying deep hold upon the whole nature of man, a transformation for which the Catholic church, indeed, assumes a special preparatory stage.