A Baccalaureate Sermon 195
and the Life, let us take up the tasks which await us, dwell-
ing in the world but not being of it; dwelling in the body
but using it for the sake of the soul of which it is the tran-
sient instrument; laboring to draw up all the other Kingdoms
into that celestial order for which we are born.
Back of the determination to live as spiritual beings there
must be the primary and invincible conviction that we
actually exist as imperishable spirits; and let us enter some-
what upon the grounds of this conviction.
Belief in and the arguments for immortality are so bound
to faith in God, so bound to conviction concerning His
existence and power and character, that the effort to think
of immortality on any other basis must end by a return to
the divine basis; must leave the human being straining for
further light and compel him to turn to God and the
love of God to confirm and establish the hope. Yet the
“prophecy of reason”, even apart from the conclusive
religious evidence, points to the imperishableness of the
human spirit.
Dwelling only in a brief way upon some of the considera-
tions not primarily religious, we find powerful promise of
immortality in the expansion of faculties in the individual
man from childhood to maturity; in the increasing control
by the inward personality over the outward body and out-
ward material things and forces; in the possession of ac-
cumulated and stored up knowledge, even though the body
is doomed to pass. Unless the mind is to survive and have
further use for its stores and capacities, nature would show
that no purpose is guiding us; reason and logic would be
overthrown, and the great hopes of man would come to
crushing and indescribable defeat.
No; the promise of survival and the possibilities of life
beyond this life are not to end in death; and the permanence