ETERNAL LIFE A STPPY OK ITS IMII. KATIONh AM AIlLHATIONS vv BAKON IWIWHU VON HtH KI, Sturrr t j , I WAS as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee Thou boldest me fast by my right hand. Whom have I in heaven but Thee And beside Thee I desire naught upon earth. Though my flesh and my heart fail Thou, God, abidest my rock and my portion for ever. PS, Ixxiii. 23, 23, 25, 26. HEREIN is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us. We love, because He first loved us. i JOHN iv. ro iy. THOU hast created us unto Thyself, Lord and our heart finds no rest until it rests in Thee. ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, i. i, i. PREFACE THE history of the following book is indeed simple yet somewhat unusual. The Rev. Dr. James Hastings invited me to contribute to his Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics and his instructions concerning Eternal Life, the first of the articles thus undertaken by me, were to make the paper as long as the - subject-matter might seem to deserve or require. He was, in this, doubtless thinking primarily of his Encyclopaedia as a whole whereas I myself became so engrossed in my subject that I allowed my composition to grow as long as its great subject-matter pressed it to become. The result, anyhow, was that the article, when sent in, was found tp be far too long for the scope of the Encyclopaedia and Dr. Hastings kindly arranged with Messrs, T. T. Clark, the publishers of the Encyclopaedia, to issue my article as a separate book the present volume, Both Dr. Hastings and Messrs. Clark have been very patient and truly generous in vi Preface their dealings with me throughout these agree ments and I now beg to thank them cordially. This little private history is recounted here in order to explain how any writer possessed of even average modesty could venture on so be wilderingly vast a subject. I sincerely doubt whether I would ever have dared directly to undertake a volume upon this subject-matter. Yet this task, thus originally undertaken as but one of several articles, did not, somehow, appear preposterously ambitious the work, once it was started, seemed to grow under my hands and nothing as yet attempted by me has flown so readily from my pen. The subject had doubt less been occupying my mind and life for many a year and thus there is some reason to hope that these pages may, in their turn, live for a while and that they may, here and there, help some religious students and strugglers. This is presumably the right place for saying a few words about certain peculiarities of the book, in the order of their appearance within its pages. The Method is very deliberately an analysis of more or less advanced states of soul of con siderable spiritual experience and of considerable articulation of such experience it is not a history Preface vii claiming to begin with the beginnings, or at least with the really early experiences and utter ances of mankind. Much is now made of the savage, the supposedly brute-like beginnings of man and a purely historical, an entirely genetic method and account is now often demanded. Yet, as a matter of simple fact, we really know man only as man and the interior significance of his earlier and earliest acts and utterances we understand, where we understand them at all, only from analyses of his more advanced and more articulate condition. I am, of course, fully aware that Buddhism and the Dionysiac Cult appeared late in the history of man...