will totter to the fall. And this, too, is the more surprising since he was the most devout and religious of the three. Such utterances as the following abound: "The quest for trade is an incentive to men of business to devise, invent, improve, and economize in the cost of production." "Market prices of products and of securities are hourly known in every commercial mart and the investments of the people extend beyond their own national boundaries into the remotest parts of the earth." "My fellow citizens, trade statistics indicate that this country is in a state of unexampled prosperity." "We have a vast and intricate business, built up through years of toil and struggle, in which every part of the country has its stake which will not permit of either neglect or of undue selfishness." "The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem." And thus it runs to the end. Our contention is, not that these things should have been unsaid, but that along with them other and more important truths should have been emphasized. We may not need less commercialism, but we do need more evangelism-a fact that Mr. McKinley's assassination tragically emphasized.

The danger confronts us of thinking that "material prosperity is the touchstone of success." Wealth can add many comforts to our present life, but it can never be made the panacea for all the ills and aches to which humanity is heir. We must read again, and so read as to have the Master's words burned in our souls, "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." "Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?"

O.E. Mandeville

ART. X-PERSONALITY AND THE IMMORTAL HOPE THE Christian doctrine of immortality is essentially a truth of revelation. Here philosophy has no demonstrations to furnish. All that philosophy can be expected to do is to strengthen and confirm us in the living faith we have already found through our spiritual relationship with the risen Christ. But philosophy's confirmations are of great importance, and are stronger to-day than they have ever been before. Undoubtedly the most powerful drift in present-day philosophic thought is toward a supreme emphasis on the freedom of the human spirit, that is, toward personality. The days of naturalism are numbered; it has been weighed in the speculative balance and found wanting. Any philosophy will be found wanting which attempts to set forth our rational and emotional life in terms of matter and motion. This is now realized even by such a philosopher as Professor James when he seeks to graft a branch from absolute idealism on the old naturalistic trunk. But the attempt is not a success. In his Human Immortality (Boston, 1898) Professor James expounds his doctrine that the brain is transmissive of conscious life, not creative, as the older naturalism taught. Material things and the whole natural order mask the one Infinite Reality, which is the sole ground of those finite streams of consciousness we call our private selves (p. 15). Through the brain as the transmitter, he tells us, come gleams of eternal light from the great "mother sea of Reality beyond."

But it must be pointed out that thus to talk of the "Eternal Reality" and other impersonal and abstract conceptions is vain so far as shedding light on immortality is concerned. For if that physical organ called the brain be the transmitter to the individual of conscious life from the great "mother sea of Reality beyond," what becomes of the conscious life of the individual when the transmitter is broken? And for religion, at any rate, immortality can mean nothing short of the continuance of ourselves as ourselves. The immortal hope that faith can cherish demands assurance of the continuance of our conscious life, that is, a personal

immortality, after the material instrument of the soul which we call the body has fallen away. Here, of all places, it is useless to try to feed our hearts with abstractions. The impersonal conceptions of the "Eternal Reality" and the great "mother sea of Reality beyond" afford no light or comfort for our faith. In its net results for morality and religion the abstractions of an impersonal philosophy are soon seen to be no better than the dreary wastes of materialistic agnosticism. We must ever keep it in mind, then, that the question of Immortality is the question of personal immortality. Professor Howison puts it rightly when he says (Limits of Evolution, 1905, p. 285), "The real sting of death is the apprehension of each of us that he may perish in dying; and no hope of the changeless persistence of any Eternal Consciousness, divine or other, can afford us any consolation if this dread of our own personal extinction be not set at rest." How now does the present-day drift toward a personal philosophy give strength to this personal immortal hope? We answer, first, that the teaching of the most critical metaphysics of to-day concerning the identity of a changing thing brings strong confirmation to our Christian faith in personal immortality. We do not have to go very far into metaphysics to learn that there is a deal of mystery about a thing which changes and yet remains the same thing. Take an old worn and faded coat, for example. Its color is not the same as when it was first bought; it has shrunk and is therefore smaller in size; needed repairs have introduced some new material, etc. The crucial question is how it can remain the same coat when so many of its qualities have changed. Yet the owner knows it is the same coat which he bought some months ago and has worn all along. We know that the objects and the persons that change about us nevertheless remain the same objects and the same persons. Now, if we try to think of the coat as an independently existing reality, we shall soon be forced to conclude that the mystery of the identity of a changing thing is an abyss from which there is no way out. On the plane of the material and impersonal the problem of a thing which changes its qualities and yet remains the same is quite insoluble. For the modern metaphysical critic has taken away all the older devices, such as the notion of the

thing-in-itself," that is, the thing existing apart from its qualities, and "mere" matter, that is, matter without qualities; and "pure existence" as a kind of core of being back of all qualities. The student of modern metaphysics knows too well how these uncritical prejudices have served as strong towers to the agnostic and the dogmatist alike when they were hard pressed in the speculative battle. But to-day these towers are in ruins. The chief value of the Hegelian criticism of Kant's idealism was in the clearing away of the last vestiges of crude realism that remained in the idle notions of the "thing-in-itself" and "pure" being.

There is no solution of the problem of the changing thing which yet remains identical with itself, until we see that change itself can exist only for the permanent and abiding; and the permanent can never be found in the world of material things which are ever changing-from the ephemera which lives its brief day in springtime to the mountains which the frost and storms of ages are changing and slowly wearing away. The permanent can only be found when we enter the realm of conscious being-when we come to the personal. In other words, the only solution of the above problem is in the words, We know. We exist as abiding and permanent over against the changing thing, and we know it. In the case of the coat, we recognize the changed qualities, but mentally affirm the coat of a year back to be the same coat. In the language of philosophy, we postulate the changing thing as remaining identical with itself throughout its material changes. This mental affirmation of identity is a free act of the self-free in the sense that it is compelled by nothing outside the nature of the mind itself. Thus the problem of a changing thing remaining the same thing throughout its changes finds an answer, and change itself becomes intelligible only as we see that the personal self is the only reality which abides above the constant flow of material change.

Now, our bodies are material things, and as such are subject to continual change. We are conscious of great changes in them as the years go on. Almost every sense quality-size, form, color, weight, etc.-changes many times in the course of a lifetime. It would puzzle the uncritical man of common sense logically to

justify his own identity through forty or fifty years of physical change. The scientist would make it clear to him that every material particle in his body had been replaced six or seven times. An inspection of his own portrait taken from time to time would convince him that all his physical qualities had changed. As the man of advanced years it would be exceedingly difficult for him to trace his direct physical connection with his youth of forty years before. But as over against all this he would say, "But I know that I am the same person and have been all along;" and this personal affirmation of his identity is the key. Back of all material change is the abiding personal spirit, which knows itself as abiding. The body is the material instrument of this spirit, and, as over against all change which time and disease may bring about in it, this spirit continues to know itself as abiding through all the succession of physical changes. This is the mystery and the glory of personal selfhood. And now it is but another step to suggest that if the self has known itself as abiding throughout the very considerable changes which have taken place in its material instrument, the body, will not the self know itself as abiding through the final change in the soul's instrument, which men call death? But the objection may be urged, "Yes, but that final change in the body is its destruction. The harper can make music with a harp which grows old and gets played out; but the harper can make no music with his harp when the strings have snapped and the sound-board is broken." The rejoinder would be, “True, but remember that strings and sound-board did not produce the music. The harper himself made the music, and who shall say that the harper will not make music, and nobler music, with new strings, new sound-board—with a new harp!" And so through all material changes in our physical organism the conscious personal spirit asserts itself as abiding, and upon this rests the whole structure of our rational life, and upon this we may also rest our Christian faith that death has no power to end the larger life of the spirit. This is a lofty height which philosophy has acquired only after much laborious climbing of thought through many, many years. And from these heights we may look over, and through the mists catch glimpses now and again of a conscious personal life beyond.