Dakota County Herald

HUMANITY APPROACHING DIVINE IDEAL.

By the Rev. R. F. Campbell.

Humanity is progressing towards some great end, an end higher than the perfecting of separate individualities. One generation goes on where another leaves off, and unfolds the divine ideas a little more fully.

Some day, we may hope, this idea will be realized in a human society as nearly perfect as the limitations of earth permit. We may reasonably hold that those generations which have passed on have not stood still either, and are still concerned with the work of evolving humanity, a mighty Whole, one with and in the glorified Christ.

"Then cometh the end." All illusions, all sense of separateness, will disappear: the material will make way for the spiritual, the phenomenal for the real, and the universe of universes, visible and invisible, attain to perfect conscious oneness in the eternal life of God.

This is the New Testament view of the matter. Seen in the large perspective of our present-day knowledge of the vastness of the universal order.

When we come to the question of the survival of individual consciousness after death we can say no more than that the evidence which would satisfy the ordinary religious mind might fail with the uninformed by the religious temperament. Nevertheless the lack may be in the latter rather than the former. The plane of spiritual experience is real and is felt by most to be higher than the purely intellectual, and it is in the plane of spiritual experience that certitude regarding the immortality of the soul has hitherto generally been attained.

There is the mind behind all, and the divine love that vibrates between soul and soul in response to the call of human need, like the ether that carries the electric force from point to point in the visible universe.

I see from the list of injured in connection with the terrible mining disaster of a few days ago that there is a possibility that an interesting correspondent has been killed. If so, perhaps he knows more now of the ways of God with men than I could ever tell him.

Death is no calamity to those whom it calls higher, but only to those who mourn their loss. And even that would be turned to joy if we could but know how things really are in the great beyond.