Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
No angel from the countless host
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature’s sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which all her harvests were not worth?”
No such high revolt of spirit was occasioned so long as death was a mere biological event, terminating one life to give room for another. This cry of soul means the discovery of the infinite preciousness of personal life. The mind now turns in on itself and takes a new account of its stock, and as a result man began to solve the problem of death in an enlarged way. He was no longer satisfied with a form of survival based upon his experiences in dreams, trance and hallucination; he came to feel that he must have a destiny which fitted his spiritual worth as a man. He finds within himself intimation of powers and possibilities beyond those required for the struggle of life here. He feels by that same insight which carries him out beyond the seen to a rational faith in the unseen that is necessary to complete it, that this little arc of earthly life with its revelations of spiritual value and its transcendent prophecies of more must find fulfillment somewhere in a form of life that rounds it out full circle.
The argument does not build on a passion of desire, as some doubters have said. We do not assume immortality just because we want it. It rests upon the moral consistency of the universe, upon the trustworthy character of the eternal nature of things. The moral values which are revealed in fully developed personality are certainly as real, as much a fact of the universe, as are the tides or the orbits of planets. If we can count upon the continuity of these occurrences and upon our predictions of them, just as surely can we count on the consistency of the universe in reference to spiritual values. If there is conservation of matter there is at least as good ground for affirming conservation of moral values. If biological life can pass over the slender bridge of a microscopic germ-plasm and can carry with itself over that feeble bridge the traces of habit and feature, the curve of nose and the emotional tone of some far-off dead ancestor, and all the heredity gains of the past, may we not count upon the permanence of that in us which allies us to that infinite Spirit who is even now the invisible environment of all we see and touch?