PERSONAL SURVIVAL
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I have read Dr. Albert Peel's article with much interest, but with the feeling that there is more to be said. Dr. Peel has no desire for personal survival, and believes that such values as his life stands for are sure to be preserved. I would ask how these values can conceivably be preserved otherwise than in and with the beings that have acquired them. If all ends for the individual at his death, if this world is not a place where souls that will endure are made, if in some vague way we are reabsorbed in God, what is the conceivable purpose of the whole process ?
I am assuming what, indeed, is apparent, that Dr. Peel is not one of those who think that we humans are in process of building up and expanding God himself, or even of making a God out of our own growing ideals as we go on—a strange inversion indeed. To me it seems that the permanence of the individual is a necessary condition of any real obligation of man to God.
We know that we can have no individual permanence on this earth, and that the human race cannot continue to exist on it indefinitely. Thus the idea that we can be satisfied with doing our best to help our fellow men seems inadequate and unsatisfactory, seeing that all of theta—the living and the generations yet unborn—must be like ourselves, devoid of any significance or any purpose if death ends all.
The love of our neighbour can only be implanted and nourished in us by the love of God, and such a love needs the conviction of our own permanence if it is to be more than an unreal and intangible fiction.—I am, Sir, E. H. B.
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