the dead." Let us have faith in God. Do we long to do something for the conversion of obdurate minds ? Let us love one another more. Let us put an end to all bickerings and animosities among Christians. That is an order. Shall we not at length make up our minds to try what obedience to that order will effect?

1 Luke xvi. 31.

CHAPTER XII

THE CERTAINTY OF IMMORTALITY

WE bury our dead in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.' And yet the feeling of certainty we have by the grave-side, with the sound of the earth falling upon the coffin in our ears, is not the immediate certainty of our conscious experience. It is not like the certainty of our vision of the fellow-mourners standing around, of the solid ground and the over-arching sky; nor like the certainty of sin, of repentance, of forgiveness, of the effort towards the perfect life. The certainty of the life after death has not been verified in our case: we are still on this side the river, the river itself we cannot see, still less the region beyond. Have we then any certainty of the world to come? As matter of fact, innumerable souls have rejoiced in confident expectation of stepping upward into the light of the new

heavens and new earth; but also as matter of fact many have said sorrowfully

O could we make our doubts remove,
Those gloomy doubts that rise

And see the Canaan that we love
With unbeclouded eyes!

This intermittent faith is not an absolute distinction from the other certainties. While as yet the perfect life is a goal towards which we strive, our belief is liable to vary in intensity; still the repeated verification of a belief makes it an automatic certainty, operating without effort, and impregnable to assault. With a belief wholly beyond our power to test in experience, the same feeling does not occur. The certainty of immortality differs somehow it is either faint and flickering, or it is inferential, owing its conclusiveness to logical deduction. In the second alternative, our work is to discover the premises on which the reasoning is based.

Let us in the first place look at the facts with with the eyes of a scientific spectator. Here we come across two instructive observations. The first is the fact that immortality is not an exclusively Christian idea. Other religions older than Christianity possessed it-Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hindoos, Scandinavians, conceived in

various pictures the condition of those who had entered the other world. In the present day, Brahmans and Buddhists and Moslem believe in the after-life. The belief seems to be almost universal in the religions of mankind; although individual men and women may practically neglect this article of their creed.

Now this ancient and wide-spread existence of the belief before and outside of Christianity, dispels the notion which some have entertained that the belief is a Christian invention. Paley's definition of virtue as the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness,' coupled with the proposition which heads his evidences, in effect makes the belief both the basis and the substance also of the Christian religion, implying that even knowledge of God and of His will, would not suffice as a motive to right conduct, unless supported by self-interest. This misrepresentation has tended on the one hand to weaken belief in immortality, and on the other to produce a prejudice against Christianity. We gain a step towards truth, when we note that Jesus Christ did not originate the belief, but adopted it as a part of the Jewish religion, and did so, although

1 In his 'Moral and Political Philosophy,' chapter vii.

it was markedly absent from the ancient Hebrew faith, which looked for God's reward in this life, not after death, and was actually opposed by the Sadducees in his own time.

It appears, then, that the expectation of immortality is a product of natural evolution. I imagine that primeval man found mortality as difficult to believe as his later successors find immortality. Certainly in his conscious experience in this world man is neither born nor dies. He is an eye-witness of what he calls birth and death of other individuals; but he cannot remember his own birth, nor can he anticipate in consciousness his expected death. Some savage tribes ascribe death to witchcraft when not produced by war or accident; that is, they regard death as abnormal. This perhaps may account for the wide-spread diffusion of the notion of immortality among so many races and religions. If we do not accept this hypothesis, some other origin must be sought. The unequal distribution of happiness and misery in this life, and the many cases in which bad men flourish and good men are afflicted, have suggested the belief that the gods will redress these inequalities in another life. This thought might naturally occur first to the oppressed poor and to the persecuted