"If the soul hungers and thirsts for God it will reach him. If, at the last moment, a man's whole nature cries longingly in faith to Christ,—that will save him, waft him, draw him into the divine abode. And this explains the Christian plan of so-called salvation. Faith in Christ is the master passion, and love the magnet that draws the soul to its own kind. It may be set down as true that vice and sin have no vitality. Wickedness is death. Virtue and love of God are life."
But the question recurs just here, Is there absolutely no possibility of immortality for him who does not advance beyond a certain conscious and partly automatic intelligence on the physical plane? Does the gate of possibilities, does the door of opportunity close with this brief mortal life? To that question science as well as faith answers "no." The law of Evolution is the law of eternal possibility and opportunity. The spark of immortality—the divine spark, implanted by God, when he made man in His image,—this is eternal in its nature, and unquestionably survives death. But immortality is the result of man's co-operation with the Divine. God has implanted the spark. He has placed man in an environment of discipline and of opportunity. The individual may be whatever he, himself, decides and chooses to be. Not all in an hour, or in a year; not, perhaps, even in this entire lifetime; but sometime and somewhere he who is unfaltering in his allegiance to his ideal shall realize it at last. And the degree of immediateness and celerity with which he realizes it depends entirely on the degree of spiritual energy that he brings to bear on his purpose. The higher the potency, the swifter the result.
Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
Science as well as ethics recognizes the reality of the unseen potencies. Science is, indeed, pointing the way. "The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter," says Professor William James, "is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism," and he adds:—
"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as an ideal impulse originates in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing it in a way for which we cannot otherwise account); we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in the world. When we commune with it, work is absolutely done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects in another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal."
Not unreal. On the contrary, the unseen is the realm of that which is alone real and abiding. The positiveness of the divine life is a quality that has too little recognition from the world of philosophy and speculation. It is an infinite reservoir of infinite energy, from which may be drawn at any moment, peace, courage, and power. "Man can learn to transcend the limitations of finite thought at will. The Divine Presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague twilight, or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy. It is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense perception to the phenomena of seer-ship, from the thought of self to a distinctively higher realm. For example, if the lower self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Nor is it done by hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focussed and made to do work, to set fire to wood."
In these words there is very clearly set forth a certain spiritual achievement of a definite nature. It is simply the act of liberating the spiritual self from entanglement with the lower self,—the summoning into ascendency of the higher powers. This intense degree of spiritual energy may be achieved with the force and suddenness of a special creation.
The physical universe in which man finds himself is not only surrounded by the spiritual universe, but the two are so absolutely interpenetrated that he may live in both, and, as a matter of fact, whoever lives the life of the spirit does live now and here, as an inhabitant of both these realms. The spiritual universe is the reservoir of energy. "The things that are seen are temporal, but those that are unseen are eternal," and faith, as the substance of those things not seen, is a definite potency which is practically related to daily affairs. That is to say, it is an absolute power, by means of which one can fulfil the practical duties of every day. The degree of one's ability to draw from this energy and assimilate it into his life measures his degree of success.