By the late Monsignor ROBERT HUGH BENSON

On purely natural grounds - apart, that is to say, from the revelation that God has made to man on the subject - perhaps the strongest argument for the immortality of the individual soul is the ineradicable instinct of moral responsibility.

It is surely utterly impossible to explain away this deep conviction, felt by every normal person, that each man is himself responsible for his past, and will have to face the results of his past actions, by the theory that it is no more than a kind of inherited social instinct. How, therefore, unless personal identity be preserved, can this conviction be justified?

A second reason, again drawn from experience quite apart from revelation, for believing in personal immortality may be found in the argument from love.

Human love is, by common consent, the most sublime of human emotions; the relationships we form in this life are not only sacred, but fundamental; and it is their deepest characteristic that they demand continuance. The love of friends, the love between parents and children - these things cannot be explained away, as materialist philosophers sometimes pretend to explain away the love between husband and wife, as merely physical in their origin and end. Yet, if personal immortality be a dream only, these profound emotions and relationships are completely deceptive. For in their very essence they demand permanence and eternal renewal.

A third natural argument for personal immortality is slowly emerging from the researches of psychologists. These are beginning to establish the fact that in the hour of dissolution, when mortal faculties are beginning to fail, and the senses become obscured, certain activities - and those emphatically not such activities as may be compared to the leap of a dying candle flame - begin to reveal themselves.

It is, for example, entirely accepted by all who have given thought to the subject, whether by personal investigation or by the study of evidence, that at or about the time of death examples continually and frequently take place of what is known as "telepathic communication" between the dying person and those with whom he is in mental sympathy.

Many theories have been formed on the subject, but at least there emerges from them all the solid fact that certain of the deepest faculties of man, so far from sharing in the dissolution and failure that accompany the death of the body, are actually released by such dissolution into an activity never before experienced.

What conclusion can be drawn from these facts except that the mortality is not entire - that the deepest identity of a man, that is to say, can energise and exist apart from his body?

For Christians, of course, the question is settled. It is quite impossible for anyone who accepts the Resurrection of Christ as a fact to be content with vague doctrines of "absorption into the Soul of the World," or of that Pantheism towards which the non-Christian thought of the present day is so rapidly moving of the writers in this book, "Death means final extinction of consciousness," but faith in what lies beyond this present world of sights and sounds is with me a vital part of self-consciousness. "I know," said the Patriarch of old, "that my Redeemer liveth . . . and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."

Is not the experience expressed in those all-familiar words a part of every man's self-consciousness? In the case of this man Job, his primal belief concerning physical death was not the result of any argument, but it was a part of his rational and conscious life. He could not get away from it. I doubt if any man is actually able to rid himself completely of this belief. Dr. Max Nordau himself, seems to me to admit this consciousness of the "Hereafter" when he bemoans the fact that men shrink back from the notion of "Nothingness after Death." To him it is a piteous spectacle to see men "desperately clinging to the fond self-deception of a continuation of some sort of life after death." But the fact remains that throughout the ages there has been such a spectacle. "Looking at the religion of the lower races as a whole," says Dr. Tylor in his "Primitive Culture," "we shall at least not be ill-advised in taking as one of the general and principal elements the doctrine of the soul's future life." This is a statement that seems to be beyond dispute. The answer of all the ages is not "Nothing," but "Something" after Death.

Even the pagan attitude was affirmative rather than negative. The philosophy of the king's counsellor in the court of the old Saxon dynasty is very suggestive of this. It is told in connection with the narrative of the conversion of King Edward of Northumbria, according to the historian. When missionaries of Augustine came and waited before the Saxon monarch and his lords, they were at first inclined to repudiate them and their doctrine. At last one of the counsellors arose and said: "Thou know-est, O King, that ofttimes on a winter's night, when we are assembled within this dimly lighted hall to do business, a swallow will come from the night, pass from darkness into darkness again. So it is with the human soul. We come we know not whence, and we go we know not whither. If, therefore, these new teachers can tell us aught concerning whence we come and whither we go, let us hear them."

"Final extinction of consciousness" was evidently not acceptable even in pagan belief.

Of course, a man may set himself against all such beliefs in the "Hereafter." He may make believe not to believe, but he does not thereby rid himself of this universal consciousness. His rational self wars against his unbelief. His attitude of unbelief is not only un-Biblical, but wholly unphilosophical as well.

Socrates, when asked where he would choose to be buried, made reply: "Bury me where you will, if you can catch me." There you have the wisdom of the wisest of ancient philosophers. Like Job of old, he declined to entertain the conception that "Death was the extinction of consciousness." Though after the flesh worms destroy the body was a fact present to the mind of Socrates as well as to that of Job. But he did not infer from it that there was "Nothingness after Death."

To my mind it is not only utterly un-Biblical and unphilosophical, but also irrational to give Death the importance in life that is involved in the denial of the "Hereafter." Doubtless Death is a crisis in so far as it involves change and transition. But it surely is not the last law of life. "The maid sleepeth," said our Lord Jesus Christ. Could any view be more delightfully suggestive?

"Is immortality really something so ardently to be yearned after?" says Dr. Nordau.

In answer to that, I can only say for myself it is the most ardent desire of my life.

When we formulate our doctrine concerning the "Hereafter" it is not of ourselves alone we must think, but of those who love us. "Lead, kindly light," is a bewildering hymn to me, but I shall never cease to bless the writer of it if only for those lines:

"And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since and lost awhile."

Take away this hope of the "Hereafter," and what is left for us but despair? As the Apostle says: "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." But that is a philosophy that cuts the nerve of every noble effort and heroic achievement in life. We may as well write "Ichabod" over the national life if this belief is to prevail. I recently had the privilege of addressing an audience of working men on the subject of "Self-culture," and at the close one who was present declared that he did not consider the subject had any meaning for him, inasmuch as he believed in "the extinction of consciousness after Death." I replied that I quite endorsed his view. To my mind, as to his, it seemed unnecessary to consider the question of self-culture if a man regarded himself as nothing better than the brute that perisheth.