By the Rev. R. F. HORTON, M.A., D.D.

"Do we cease to live at death?" Naturally if we cease to live when we die, there can be no effective argument or evidence to show that we should live again in this world or in any other.

The personality would have ceased to be, and when it has once ceased to be, a resuscitation would be simply a new creation, and that new creation would not be the person that had lived before.

It is this that makes the argument for reincarnation so unsatisfying when you come to reflect upon it. The reincarnated life has no conscious or moral connection with its former experience, and consequently the supposed judgment in the renewed life has no shadow of justice; the reward is not deserved if the reincarnation is a favourable one, nor is the punishment deserved if the reverse.

The question, therefore, that confronts humanity, and has confronted it since the earliest records of human life upon this planet, is whether the death of the body involves the dissolution of personality.

Now putting aside for a moment the powerful argument which is derived from the Christian fact of the resurrection and looking simply at the argument of natural religion, we can certainly marshal an immense weight of evidence to show that the soul is not involved in the destruction of the body.

Take, for example, the Phaedon of Plato - that immortal description of Socrates arguing for his immortality as the hemlock poison worked and death crept up from his feet to his heart. It is true that the formal arguments advanced in that great piece of literature may not carry conviction, but behind those arguments which were relative only to that time and that world of thought in which Socrates lived, there is the indubitable fact that Socrates died in that way, and faced death with the cheerful confidence that he himself would escape from the perishing body and that his persecutors and judges would not be able to capture the soul in its flight.

Consequently his last command to his friends was to offer a cock to AEsculapius, the god of healing, because he felt that when the body should lie still and cold in death he himself would be whole and more utterly alive than he had been when he inhabited the body.

It may, however, be said that the conviction of Socrates carries no more weight than the conviction of the modern man of science, who carefully assures us that he has no expectation of a future life and no desire for it.

But let us look at that argument for a moment. Is the personal conviction of a mind and character like Socrates of no more intrinsic value than the personal conviction of a man who expects to cease to be directly a cup of poison or some other accident arrests the functions of his body ? Instinctively you reply that the personality of Socrates is incalculably greater and more significant than the personality of this poor materialist whose life is a mere breath, a shadow, that passes immediately away.

And why is the personality of Socrates impressing the world to-day, after more than 2,000 years ?

The answer simply is, because of his immovable conviction about his surviving death - a conviction which gives to his life and to all that he said and did a depth and a meaning which never has ceased to affect mankind.

On the other hand, the man who from any cause has surrendered the belief in a life to come dwindles and withers so that his personality becomes intrinsically insignificant, useless to the world as it is, and, of course, useless to himself.

But now what does this mean? If we turn from the individual to the whole body of human beings that are living to-day upon the globe the same argument immediately applies. The human race derives its significance, its value, entirely from its beliefs in a life that goes beyond any conscious earthly life.

Just so far as the race surrenders the faith in immortality which has been its appanage from the beginning, it dwindles and withers - it feels that it can give no account of itself. The possibilities of some terrestrial paradise or some indefinite improvement of the material conditions of life offer no sufficient reason for the deeper instincts and supports of the race.

If it attempts to picture to itself the ultimate condition of human society when all the present evils are removed and universal health and well-being are secured, it is immediately paralysed by the thought, "But what does that matter? And what has been achieved if all of the individuals which compose the race are simply passing away into nothingness like the autumnal leaves when the winter approaches?"

The argument, therefore, is much stronger than it appears at the outset, because it involves not only the individual life but the life of the race. The one intolerable thing for the race is that life should lose its significance and should sink back into the mere animal functions of nutrition and procreation, and significance cannot be given to life upon this planet so far as that life develops into that greatest of earthly phenomena, personality, unless to personality can be attributed the quality of continuance.

It may, of course, be said that this quality can be secured and this significance can be given to the life of the race if the selected individuals, the "supermen" as they would be called to-day, may secure continuance while the large mass of undistinguished and futile lives pass away into nothingness, and from a purely philosophical point of view that argument may be valid. But against it rises up all the sense of pity and consideration for even the lowest of human beings which we have learned from Christianity.

It is Christ's unique service to mankind that He taught us to see the greatness and absolute worth of even the most insignificant human soul. And in that way, by another line of argument, the certainty that some human beings must survive death is changed into a whole confidence that all human beings who are in any true sense personalities, continue and move on to reap the fruits of their life on earth in a life under new and perhaps more hopeful conditions.

Even the most sceptical and disappointed human heart that is touched by pity and love will write as its own epitaph, "A little trust that when we die we reap our sowing, and so goodbye!"