The old Greeks, whose wonderfully rich experience of life, penetrating insight, powers of analysis, and gift of literary expression enabled them to coin the words to fitly represent their thoughts, knew how to describe both love and life better than we, having a mintage of thought for each in its threefold form. As they discriminated eros, philé, and agapé in love, so also they put difference between psyché, bios, and zoé in life.
What other ranges of existence and developments of being there may be for God's chosen ones in worlds to come, we dare not conjecture, but this we know. Carleton had even then, as I saw him marked for an early change of worlds, entered into threefold life.
1. The lusty boy and youth, the mature man with not a perfect, yet a sound, physical organization, showed a good specimen of the human animal, rich in the breath of life,—psyché.
2. The long and varied career of farmer, surveyor, citizen, Christian interested in his fellows and their welfare, with varied work, travel, and adventure, manifested the noble bios,—the career or course of strenuous endeavor.
3. The spiritual attainments in character, the ever outflowing benevolence, the kindly thought, the healing sunshine of his presence, the calm faith, the firm trust in God, gave assurance of the zoé.
These three stages of existence revealed Carleton as one affluent with what men call life, and of which the young ever crave more, and also in that "life which is life indeed," which survives death, which is the extinction of the psyché or animal breath,—the soul remaining as the abode of the spirit. In body, soul, and spirit, Charles Carleton Coffin was a true man, who, even in the evening of life, was rich in those three forms of life which God has revealed and discriminated through the illuminating Greek language of the New Testament.
True indeed it was that, while with multiplying years the animal life lessened in quantity and intensity, the spiritual life was enriched and deepened; or, to put it in Paul's language and in the historical present so favored by Carleton, "While the outward man perisheth, the inward man is renewed day by day."[Back to Content]