I believe this vital fact to be so strong that entire regeneration is a certainty. Where hitherto this force has lain dormant or been dispersed, disunited and weak in spiritual utterance, it is now a collective force concentrated in millions of lives. All over the earth it is now gathered en masse, and that stupendous aggregate, vivified, sharpened, and intensely accentuated by untold suffering will revolutionize all former weak and fatalistic acquiescence in the inevitability of war. Millions of men have descended into hell, they are there now, but they will arise again from amongst the dead, and ascend one day into the Heaven of peace, and thence they will judge the quick and the dead by a new standard. The standard of the God within, whose voice has been heard at last from out the din of battle. It is the same God who has said to the East:—
"Have perseverance as one who dost forever more endure. Thy shadows (physical bodies) live and vanish, that which is in thee shall live forever, that which in thee knows is not of fleeting life, it is the man that was, that is, that will be, for whom the hour shall never strike."
To-day we all use, in some cases automatically, the powers and aptitudes developed in us in the long and painful evolution of the physical form. As evolution proceeds we will gain a vastly greater control over the subconsciousness, and in æons to come "in the flight of the alone to the alone" union will be achieved. The two will be merged in one.
The Lord Buddha has said that to enter Nirvana is to become fully conscious of our fundamental oneness with the universal life.
"I and my Father are one." Christ's sense of oneness with the Father was essentially Nirvanic.
We have not yet accustomed ourselves to think of evolution in any terms but the material, as a power inherent in matter, Darwin's physical evolution stood for pure materialism. Bergson now carries us a step farther. He introduces us to a spiritual principle. His creative evolution is a spiritual activity seeking freedom of expression in matter. Darwin's struggle for existence is by Bergson transmuted into life, expressing itself through material forms, and life and matter are in constant conflict. Again he points out that the spiritual principle, life, has not "had it all its own way." It has experienced checks, but in two modes of activity it has succeeded, in instinct and intelligence. Thus he draws for us the grandiose upward sweep of a Divine activity. Curbed, it is true, by the crust of matter, but finding ever higher capacities, and higher expression towards that ultimate reality which is creative life and to me is union with that higher self lying in the subconsciousness of all men.