[p.239] Soldiers are companionable, of course, but they live less in and with each other than in and with the will which they serve or than in and with the separate world which at any moment may suddenly take them to itself. Their lives, accordingly, or their deaths, are aloof from each other, and are brought together only through their common subjection or their common destiny, through something which is without. But the mechanic is social in his own nature, in his own right. The very reality, too, of the world in which he works is, as in so many ways we have seen, maintained only by a divided labour. It is, then, a reality, or a labour, that bridges the chasm between one man's life and another's, as well as between all separate lives and the unity of all life. It makes the many lives "parallel" and harmonious--nay, it makes them actively and vitally sympathetic. Not, as is certainly true, at the expense of any one's real individuality, for each man has his place and his part, real and immortal, and not one falls unnoticed or unguarded to the ground; but, nevertheless, whatever all have and do, they have and do together. They live-and-die together. There is, in a word, but one death, as well as but one life, the life or the death, which all share, and which accordingly is definitely and specifically nowhere and nobody's. And in the light of this supreme unity, while any live, none can be merely dead, or while any die, none can be merely alive or living to themselves or their time alone. And, living and dying together, in and with each other, all are parties to the immortality of what is real. So, again, there is immortality for mankind--the [p.240] immortality of him whom I have called the mechanic. There is immortality, mine and yours and ours. We die, but not as dies the soldier, who leaves this life for another quite apart, securing there a companionship denied him here; we die a death that is never death alone, and we die as we live, in a companionship that is real now and throughout all time. Furthermore, our death is always, or always may be, self-denial, and self-denial, too, in its supreme moment, the moment of its greatest achievement, but our self-denial is also very different from that of the soldier. There is immortality, then, but what results has all that has now been said for the interpretation of history, for our feelings about the life and death of our fellows, and for the relevant doctrines of Christianity?[6]