"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it" (St Luke ix. 24).
In these words Christ, conscious of Himself as a manifestation of the supreme Spirit of Life, and speaking as Incarnate Love, urges a similar spiritual realisation on His fellow-men; so that they also, through voluntary self-surrender in the communion of love, may obtain spiritual union with the Source of Life, and become consciously clothed with the vesture of God.
VI
SPIRITUAL CORRESPONDENCE
Careful examination of the articles of most religious creeds reveals so remarkable a connection between the ideas of prayer and immortality inculcated therein, that in an attempt to trace and summarise the effect of either of these devotional outcomes of the religious sense over the spiritual evolution of mankind, it is expedient to subject them to a dual consideration.
The infinite diversity of the human mind is made strikingly apparent by the different ideas of the significance and utility of prayer existing at various periods in the history of religion; and if this exercise of the evolving soul of man be recognised as yielding the basis of those conceptions of human immortality which, when defined as the goal of established creeds, distinguish such from all purely philosophical systems of thought, the difficulty of dissociating these two devotional factors in the development of spiritual correspondence becomes even more clearly apparent.
It is noteworthy that most interpretations of the function of prayer, although acknowledging its fundamental purpose to be that of providing a means of direct communication between God and man, vary according to the different conceptions of the nature of God of which prayer is the logical corollary, and from which all ideas of immortality are derived. For instance, the notion of God as a Person, made in the image of man, and endowed with his characteristics and powers in a superlatively human degree, is naturally accompanied by belief in the efficacy of prayer as a means of modifying the circumstances of life by permitting them to deviate from the normal operating sequence of cause and effect, into irregular acquiescence with the particular and changing desires of individuals. Such an interpretation of the use of prayer is chiefly characteristic of the religious history of the childhood of the human race; but it also represents a type of mind surviving to-day under the domination of ecclesiastical Christianity which, inculcating the theory that the government of God in the world is directed towards the especial benefit of mankind at the expense of the so-called "lower creation," is largely responsible for those ideas of inconsistency between the principles of religion and science which have led to controversial warfare between these two educative influences of the human mind.
Most of the conceptions of immortality which accompany belief in a purely personal Deity trend towards an actual epitomised realisation of all that appears possible to obtain from God through the medium of prayer. The savage, attributing to his deity the power of capriciously inflicting upon him pain and pleasure, misery and happiness, prays for the satisfaction of his personal desires, and for immunity and protection from bodily harm. His ideas of immortality hover consequently about the imagined summarised reality of his prayers—Heaven being conceived of as a place where the human joys for which he has prayed can be realised in a magnified degree for ever; and Hell as the threatened compendium of all his fears, the culmination of pains and perils, to escape which he offers up propitiatory and supplicating prayer.