Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/244

224 desire for an all round, or expansive, as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man's spiritual need. But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose, to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know, looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience, man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and through martyrdom.

It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have been run from a highly individualised stand-*point; and that, for them, death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish worship and social values of the past.

"God would think twice," said a courtly