Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/349

 tion. It is the mellow fruit ready to be gathered. It is the ripened grain. But at best it is not long attained, and this with grievous toil, when death ensues. If man did not continue to live on in a spiritual world where his acquirements are used, and where the opened degrees will attain spiritual fulness, the purposes of existence would be defeated and creation a failure. The continuity of design in the universe and in man, the onward drift of purpose, and the concentration of the universal whole into one thing but just produced at the end of life, when seen in its fulness, is so sweeping an evidence of the continuation of life in the spiritual world, that everlasting life may be rationally seen as an inevitable result of design and the law of use as taught in the Word. It is as easy to conceive the existence of a sun without an earth upon which to shine, or of an earth without vegetation, or vegetation without animal life, or animal life without man, as it is to comprehend the creation of the marvellously designed and endowed human form without a field for the realization and existence of man's highest use and last attainments. "For He is not a God of the dead but of the living: for all live unto Him."

The organization of man, as we have traced it, is observed to be such that the material body