II. Its nature and extent. Of its nature we know little, since reason has not the materials for a science of immortality, and revelation is silent except as concerns the moral and practical bearings of the great fact which it affirms with intense energy. What is known through reason or revelation on this theme may he summed up as follows: 1. There is a life for man after the death of the flesh, which life is spiritual, in a spiritual body, amid spiritual surroundings. 2. This life is in the completed like ness of the life of Christ, who is the Son of God and the Head of humanity; therefore a life of blessing, beauty, and glory, of wisdom, power, and holy love—imperishable, incorruptible, eternal: to it pertain consciousness, identity, and a complete moral and spiritual personality. 3. This immortality is naturally possible to every individual person of the human race; being provided and secured in the very creation of the human race in and through the Son of God as the archetype of humanity, so that through him all men are constituted by their nature sons of God: 4. This immortality, naturally possible, becomes actual in the case of every human person who does not through willful love of evil refuse the eternal life of purity, holiness, and love : thence it becomes actual through Christ in the case of any heathen who sincerely and faith fully seek after God and goodness in the use of such light as they have : thence also it may be considered as applying to infants devoid of willful and personal wickedness.
5. This life, naturally possible to all men, does never become actual in the case of any who willfully refuse the light, and so reject the life. 6. These are not presented in the Bible as having immortality, or as entering into the eternal life, since immortality means deathlessness, and they are presented as under the power of death; yet to assert that they have no continued or future existence of any kind is to assert what no man knows or can prove: on the contrary, their future existence, certainly for a time, is indicated; and its everlasting continuance cannot, to say the least, be disproved. Thus, in fine, immortality, or the eternal life of a human spirit joined to the life of God, our thought can take firm hold upon; it is positive, radiant, unquestionable; while as to the eternal death, it is an "outer darkness" with no firm foothold for our thought as to its nature or its scenes. Upon these points, therefore, it is wise to restrict dogmatic assertion. See