"Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving."

- F. W. Robertson.

"How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die; that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever."

- Johnson.

The great Nazarene said, "To know God is eternal life"; and we are also told by one of His immediate followers that He brought life and immortality to light.

The question of immortality is one about which there has been a vast deal of speculation and discussion, pro and con. It was a question which agitated the minds of the people during the life of Jesus, and we find in the controversy that the Sadducees were arrayed on one side and the Pharisees on the other. Both Scribes and Pharisees had some faith in immortality. Among the early Christians there were dissensions, and the Apostle Paul based his theory of immortality on the law that if one rose from the dead then all must rise.

We might go ages back of the time of Jesus and find belief and disbelief in immortality. With the Egyptians and others of the Semitic race, immortality was largely conditional on the preservation of the body, but at a very early date the great Aryan race, as represented by the Hindu people, had thoroughly imbibed the thought of immortality. Besides their sacred writings, the next best proof is the burning of their dead bodies, which would tend to show that their belief in immortality has been and is stronger now than among Christians; because Christians still continue to bury their dead, and, like the early Egyptians, make immortality to a large degree conditional upon the body. The church burial service still holds to the thought of the soul's returning to God who gave it and the body to the earth; and when, at some time in the distant future, the archangel Gabriel blows his trumpet, then shall soul and body be reunited.

This phase of Christian theology is, if anything, more distinctively Egyptian than it is Christian. It is not at all in accord with Christ's idea, for He declared: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." We find that Jesus, when questioned on one occasion, said, "Before Abraham was I am," and when those opposing Him retorted by saying that Abraham had been dead these many years, He answered that God is not a God of the dead, but a God of the living.

Jesus said to know God is eternal life; not through knowing Him as separate or apart from our lives, but through feeling His presence ever with us, realizing that we are one with all life and intelligence. To Jesus there was no separation: "I in thee, and thou in me, that we may be made perfect in the One." His thought was an animating, intelligent force ever present in His own life, that had power to lay down or take up the physical form at will, showing absolute control of the body.

There is proof that a great majority of the early Christians believed in an immortality which was in no way conditioned by the body. They looked at the physical form as being fitted for the needs and requirements of this earth, but they had been taught that in the Father's house were many mansions, and that in the laying aside of the fleshly garments they would become clothed with spiritual garments; that, tho the tabernacle of this house were dissolved, they had a building not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

The New Testament thought of immortality is based on the oneness of life and intelligence. It lays little if any stress on a physical resurrection. The Church has forgotten about the spiritual resurrection of Jesus, but it has celebrated for many hundreds of years the physical resurrection. It was not the same body that went into the tomb that came out of it, but a body that He was free to make visible or invisible at will. Some may contend that the marks of the nails in the hands and feet and of the spear in the side were in themselves sufficient to prove that it was the same body. To offset that, again, the body was not recognized by Mary at the tomb, was not recognized by the disciples who journeyed with Him a half day's journey. We have many instances of stigmata, where, through dwelling on the thought of the crucifixion, people have had the prints of the nails in their own hands and feet. Remembering that Jesus said, "It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing," we must see in the resurrection a deeper meaning than that which is purely physical, and that the resurrection is above all things a spiritual resurrection. That is what Jesus meant when He said, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." Through the evolution of the same eternal, unchanging love that brought to pass the spiritual resurrection of Jesus, shall all men attain to the life everlasting. There is no separation between the human and the divine. The resurrection of Jesus was a spiritual resurrection, the passing from the consciousness of the partial to the consciousness of the whole, - the divine; the laying aside of everything that could hamper or hold the soul in bondage.

The misconceptions which followed the original Christian ideas came from putting a too literal construction on the allegorical Book of Revelation and the loss of the spirit or religion which had animated Christian bodies up to the time of Constantine the Great. A study of church history will show that from this time the spirit was lost sight of and the Church lived in the dead letter of Christian thought. In the dark ages superstition and materialism combined to utterly destroy all that was vital and true, so that scarcely a vestige of the Christ religion was to be found in the Church. While the Reformation tended to bring back something of the old spirit of religion, nevertheless, no real light came from it on the subject of immortality, or the life to come.