At Professor Huxley’s own request three lines from a poem by his wife are inscribed upon his tombstone: 

  Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep;
  For still He giveth His beloved sleep,
  And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.

But in such a sentence what possible meaning can be put into the expression “His beloved”?  Can we conceive of God as really loving us, taking us into His secrets, using us in His purposes, letting us spend and be spent in the fulfilment of His will, and then putting us to an endless sleep?  If Jesus leads us into the life with God which we Christians know, He renders immortality indispensable if God is to maintain His own Self-respect.

Others may do without everlasting life; to some an endless sleep may seem welcome; life has been to them such a mistake and a failure, that they would gladly be quit of it forever; but to followers of Jesus its continuance is a passionate and logical longing.  Ibsen puts into Brindel’s mouth the words:  “I am going homewards.  I am homesick for the mighty Void; the dark night is best.”  Jesus acclimatizes man’s spirit to a far different home, and sets in his heart an altogether different eternity.  So insistent are the demands of our souls for the persistence of life with our God in Christ, that “if we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most pitiable.”

Already we have passed into Jesus’ second great contribution toward answering our question of the second life.  He assures us of it because of the character of the Father we come to know through Him.  Jesus’ faith in His own resurrection was based on His personal experience of God.  The words from a Psalm, which the early Church applied to Him, sound like an utterance some disciple may have overheard Him repeating: 

  Thou wilt not leave My soul in the grave,
  Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy devoted One to see corruption. 
  Thou madest known unto Me the ways of life;
  Thou shalt make Me full of gladness in Thy presence.

Love is stronger than death, and for Jesus God is love.  It was this which made Him “the God of the living.”  Jesus could not imagine Him linking Himself with men, becoming the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, and allowing them to become mere handfuls of dust in a Hittite grave.  His love would hold them in union with Him forever.  Jesus “abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—­through the good news concerning God.  When He succeeds in convincing us that the universe is our Father’s house, it requires no further argument to assure us of its “many mansions.”  The unending fellowship with Jesus’ God of all His true children is an inevitable inference from what we know His and our God to be.  We do not base our confident anticipation of everlasting life merely upon some saying of Jesus, which we blindly accept because He said it, nor even upon the report of His own resurrection from the grave;