For the Christian the barrier that finally checks the advance of life is not death but a self-concentrated self. It is freedom misused and lost, freedom turning against the life that has striven to bring it to birth. Perversity builds that barrier and human life cannot pass it or—shall we not say with the Christian?—God cannot pass it. This alone thwarts the divine purpose for man and brings about the 'second' and only true death.

We have nothing to urge against this teaching of religion; we see the second death beginning in every man who is perverting freedom from its life-furthering office. We see in him that which he seems to have being taken away. Moreover, we are prepared to believe that the first death, willingly accepted (as we have also seen) as an element in purposive and potent life, is but the gate through which men pass to more of life. We may have our moments of doubt, because we cannot see with our eyes the other side of that gate, and the sense-habit is strong within us; but reason demands, as the Christian religion declares, that life that is growing here and is big with promise unfulfilled shall go on there.

The Christian seems to know much of the other side of that gate that other people do not know. He talks of heaven, of paradise, of hell. We understand him when he talks of hell; there is so much evidence of that here and now. But we are less clear about his paradise, less clear still about his heaven. What does he really mean when he speaks, all too positively and definitely (we think), about these two?

Undoubtedly most Christians have meant a good many things at which not a few of them will smile now. They have meant things that were certainly not of the mind of Christ, but of the unilluminated and uncriticizing and biased minds of other men. Sometimes they have pictured a man who is, even to our eyes, a mere beginner in the divine art of life, plunged, as it were, into a very sea of God, sent with all his mere beginnings to live as he may amid God's unveiled glories. That is not a picture which instructed and enlightened Christians favour now. Our friend to whom we so constantly appeal will tell us of Paradise, where Jesus and the thief were to meet together. He will speak of 'intermediate' purifying and enriching states through which the beginner passes, learning his art of life. He will assure us that he knows of very few who even to his poor vision seem fit to 'go to heaven,' fit, that is, to endure the full glory of beauty and holiness and truth resplendent and realized in the 'beatific vision' of God. And in this he commends himself. He is an evolutionist of the coming worlds, this believer in an advance through them towards the splendours of the City of God. And after all he has the collective voice of Christendom speaking with him. Only a minority of Christians from the beginning until now have not been evolutionists of the worlds to come.

No doubt the Christian arranges his pictorial conceptions of those worlds too systematically, and marks off grades as life never does. But in the main life has kept its hold upon him and he has been unable not to see that it must go on, move, change, grow, on the far side of death. We have no quarrel with his principle in this regard, though we may contest the mechanical fashion in which, not rarely, he applies it. And when he speaks of the 'beatific vision' of the City of God, our hearts are stirred in response. We too seek a 'continuing city' of life in its grandeur. We, too, see the promise of that city here, even in the very failures of our own. And when the Christian tells us of his Lord's Prayer—Thy kingdom come, as it is in heaven, we feel that heaven is not alien from us or from our desires and our hopes. If heaven is indeed the crown and consummation of personal and social life on earth, then it is to heaven we ourselves are looking forward, looking, fearing, longing. We, too, have our vision of a kingdom where love shall be the king, and self-seeking, with all its dreadful consequences, be done away. We can see it is this that ruins our cities of earth, this alone. And where this is not, there indeed will be our kingdom come, as well as God's.

An Eastern's imagination may depict the 'holy city, the new Jerusalem,' in her 'light,' as 'pure gold, like unto clear glass'; he may exhaust that imagination in details of chalcedony and emerald and pearl; that is his way. But when he says that 'the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it,' he gives speech to our mind through his. For this, this, is the 'goal of human endeavour' for us. We have watched the advance of life towards our own cities and in turn watching them have discovered what they lack and what, in their poverty of attainment and abundant promise, they foretell if life goes on beyond the gates of death. So, sharing the Christian's faith that indeed it does, we share his vision.

Only as a social being is any man a man at all. Only when the promise of other men is fulfilled, is his promise fulfilled. No man (we see that plainly) can be 'saved' alone; he must be saved in his nations, by true community in a life grown to be harmonious with life everywhere, in and with the source of all life. Only in God can any man fulfil his destiny as a man among men who must be one with them if he is not to 'perish everlastingly.' We and the Christian agree—once we see what he means and he sees what we mean. And it is through Jesus Christ that we discover the meaning of the Christian. We may, perhaps, not unsuitably, urge him to try to discover ours in the same way. For it is only when he has wandered from the side of Christ and forgotten or misinterpreted the mind of Christ that there is trouble between us.

It is easy to forget and misinterpret, very easy to substitute for divine spirit and life and the divine 'word,' a machinery of logic or tradition or institutional arrangement. But it is destructive of the possibility of mutual understanding between us. Again, we must urge, it is machine-like scheming that divides, not real religion or knowledge of life. 'Ye have made the word of God of none effect through your tradition' is a prophet's saying of the widest application in the affairs of men. But when we recognize this, even on one side only of a dividing line, the process of correction has begun. And as a matter of fact there is recognition now on both sides, and day by day it extends itself and its influence. Science and philosophy and religion are met together as they have never in the history of the world been met before, open-eyed, conscious of the common heritage of training in the battle of the world and in the struggles of practical life, which has biased every one of us and been the chief agent in turning the common search after truth by men of good will into a war of opinions.

To confess that we are all, in so far as we are honest seekers, 'builders of Jerusalem' after our own manner and degree, is the first and perhaps the hardest step to take towards full co-operation between us. What children we are, that we do not know it! Yet, in truth, we cannot know it until on both sides we give up the fond belief, the delusion, that we are not seekers but have either attained or received, either attained the full truth of the world and ourselves by knowledge, or received it through an external and externally given revelation. Once we know that we are all pilgrims and that the divine city lies ahead for every one of us, both in knowledge and in life, we may travel together.

With the Christian we may work for the divine kingdom. We share his belief and his trust in the omnipotence of redeeming love. Nothing, we see, can redeem this earth but love. There is love to be seen faintly, amid dark and conflicting shadows, in the biologist's picture of a world-Eden, where it is after all and in spite of all 'creation's final law.' But the fulness of its glory is unveiled only in the love of Christ, passing our knowledge.

'Conceiving our life in this manner, the material evolution of the world becomes the incarnation and the expression of a spiritual meaning, of a divine event which is actually in process of coming to pass. No longer, for example, do we think of the earth's movement round the sun as a meaningless rotation: we think of it as preparing the conditions which enable life to rise to its sublimest height, we see the whole creation saturated in sunlight. Not in vain are the heavens starred with innumerable fires. They speak to us of worlds to which they give life and being, warming them with their heat, brightening them with their beams. And the end to which all these lives are moving, of every flower that blooms, of every bird that sings, is also the central principle of the entire evolution of the universe—the embodied Word of God. For the purpose of the whole is nothing other than the incarnation of the divine, the participation of the created in the eternal life of the uncreated, of which the God-man is the perfect revelation.... If God be indeed the end of all existence, he must needs fill all things with his being. If God is love, his arms are round the entire universe, and there is no creature anywhere unloved by him.'