It gave Christianity its growing influence over the heart of humanity.
It is this message of immortality that makes religion vital to the human
world to-day, and essential to the foundation of peace on earth.

We must not forget in our personal griefs and longings, in our sorrows
for those whom we have lost and our desire to find them again, in our
sense of our own mortal frailty and the brief duration of earthly life,
the celestial impulse which demands a life triumphant over death.

The strongest of all supports for peace on earth is the faith in
immortality. The truth is, the very character of our being here in this
world demands continuance beyond death. There is nothing good or great
that we think or feel or endeavour, that is not a reaching out to
something better. Our finest knowledge is but the consciousness of
limitation and the longing that it may be removed. Our best moral effort
is but a slow advance towards something better. Our sense of the
difference between good and evil, our penitence, our aspiration, all
this moral freight with which our souls are laden, is a cargo consigned
to an unseen country. Our bill of lading reads, "To the immortal life."
If we must sink in mid-ocean, then all is lost, and the voyage of life
is a predestined wreck.

The wisest, the strongest, the best of mankind, have felt this most
deeply. The faith in immortality belongs to the childhood of the race,
and the greatest of the sages have always returned to it and taken
refuge in it. Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Plutarch, Montesquieu and
Franklin, Kant and Emerson, Tennyson and Browning,--how do they all bear
witness to the incompleteness of life and reach out to a completion
beyond the grave.