ABSTRACT
The relation of time to life is an interesting problem. The relation of time to spiritual life is still more interesting. The sense of creature-temporality due to the overpowering sense of time runs counter to the promise of immortality. But spiritual life is nothing if it cannot inspire the hope of immortality. The sense of creature-temporality is to be surpassed and the finite selves must find a place in the eternal setting of life—not in the sense of a continuity temporarily suspended but subsequently recovered. Such a continuity the finite selves may enjoy in the natural course. Life is here guided by the law of alteration. Death may give the promise of resurrection, but such a spiritual progress through the occasional appearance and disappearance of the soul from the field of its activity and expression cannot be the inspiration of spiritual life. Life and death may play the role together to make life's attractions more vivid, life's joys more sweet. Death may prove to be not the enemy of life, but its inspirer. It may lose its sting, but this cannot withdraw the curtain of death and allow us to enjoy the continuous play of life. Death has an important function in the drama of life, but the secret urge in man has been always to enjoy the perpetuity of life without a temporary break and close. The secret of the attraction of mystic life lies not in offering currents of life but in offering its unceasing continuity with its fine blessedness. Hence the mystic is always bent upon developing in him the insight which can rise above the discrete sense of time and appraise life in its unbroken continuity. The text says: "Knowledge gives immortality."
