The belief in immortality precedes modern science in human experience. It means more in the spiritual life and progress of the race. The limitation of physical science has been that in the enthusiasm of its discoveries it has so closed the material and forces of the universe as to exclude immortality. We have made a great deal of the service of science to theology, but here we see the debt being more than paid by the scientific theologian who thinks evolutionary ideas through and helps science to see itself in some of its deeper and larger aspects.
Dr. Smyth starts from the soul's sense of its own survival value. He shows how progressing science supports this conviction in its new Conception of the soul as a center and source of energy. The question of immortality becomes, therefore, not whether the soul entity of the Older thought can maintain its existence, but whether an integrated living energy can cease to be.
The writer shows how the soul shapes and uses matter in continuous embodiment. From these proved facts of continuity and embodiment he goes on to the greater fact of a continuing process of embodiment unbroken by death because involved in the very nature of life as life is revealed by science.
One excellence in the book is the naturalness and even unconsciousness with which its thought passes from the scientific to the spiritual, blending them into one as in the writer's mind science and spiritual truth make one seamless garment clothing the soul in immortality.
The book is compressed thought abounding in suggestion, and will repay many readings. It is as complete a statement in small compass of the rational and spiritual faith in immortality as has appeared.
—Yale Divinity News, Vol. 5 [1908]