It may be that by the light of such reflections
the sense of identity will present no insuperable difficulty to the
conception of its contingency, or to the recognition that the mere
consciousness which fails to attach itself to a higher principle is no
guarantee of an eternal individuality.
It is only by a survey of individuality, regarded as the source of all
our affections, thoughts, and actions, that we can realize its intrinsic
worthlessness; and only when we have brought ourselves to a real and
felt acknowledgment of that fact, can we accept with full understanding
those "hard sayings" of sacred authority which bid us "die to
ourselves," and which proclaim the necessity of a veritable new birth.
This mystic death and birth is the key-note of all profound religious
teaching; and that which distinguishes the ordinary religious mind from
spiritual insight is just the tendency to interpret these expressions as
merely figurative, or, indeed, to overlook them altogether.
Of all the reproaches which modern Spiritualism, with the prospect it is
thought to hold out of an individual temporal immortality, has had to
encounter, there is none that we can less afford to neglect than that
which represents it as an ideal essentially egotistical and borne.
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