But there is as much of the reasonable as of to us the marvelous in that which alone has ever made credible proffer toward the filling of the gulf whence issue all the groans of humanity.  Let Him be tested by the only test that can, on the supposition of His asserted nature, be applied to Him—­that of obedience to the words He has spoken—­words that commend themselves to every honest nature.  Proof of other sort, if it could be granted, would, leaving our natures where they were, only sink us in condemnation.

Why should I pursue the story further? and if not here, where better should I stop?  The true story has no end—­no end.  But endlessly dreary would the story be, were there no Life living by its own will, no perfect Will, one with an almighty heart, no Love in whom we live and move and have our being.  Offer me an eternity in all things else after my own imagination, but without a perfect Father, and I say, no; let me die, even as the unbelieving would have it.  Not believing in the Father of Jesus, they are right in not desiring to live.  Heartily do I justify them therein.  For all this talk and disputation about immortality, wherein is regarded only the continuance of consciousness beyond what we call death, it is to me, with whatever splendor of intellectual coruscation it be accompanied, but little better than a foolish babble, the crackling of thorns under a pot.  Apart from Himself, God forbid there should be any immortality.  If it could be proved apart from Him, then apart from Him it could be, and would be infinite damnation.  It is an impossibility, and were but an unmitigated evil.  And if it be impossible without Him, it can not be believed without Him:  if it could be proved without Him, the belief so gained would be an evil.  Only with the knowledge of the Father of Christ, did the endlessness of being become a doctrine of bliss to men.  If He be the first life, the Author of his own, to speak after the language of men, and the origin and source of all other life, it can be only by knowing Him that we can know whether we shall live or die.  Nay more, far more!—­the knowledge of Him by such innermost contact as is possible only between creator and created, and possible only when the created has aspired to be one with the will of the creator, such knowledge and such alone is life to the created; it is the very life, that alone for the sake of which God created us.  If we are one with God in heart, in righteousness, in desire, no death can touch us, for we are life, and the garment of immortality, the endless length of days which is but the mere shadow of the eternal, follows as a simple necessity:  He is not the God of the dead, or of the dying, but of the essentially alive.  Without this inmost knowledge of Him, this oneness with Him, we have no life in us, for it is life, and that for the sake of which all this outward show of things, and our troubled condition in the midst of them, exists.  All that is mighty, grand, harmonious, therefore in its own nature true, is.  If not, then dearly I thank the grim Death, that I shall die and not live.  Thus undeceived, my only terror would be that the unbelievers might be but half right, and there might be a life, so-called, beyond the grave without a God.