which inspired their fathers aforetime, is insensibly vanishing away.' Such prophecies, however, lose their impressiveness when we remember how often we have heard their like before. We cannot see how we are worse off in our hold upon this hope than what are called the ages of faith. We analyse our feelings more closely than they did, and we are not afraid, as they were, of the reproach of heresy. Indeed orthodoxy, among large sections of the laity, has become almost a term of reproach. Authority, too, counts for less with us than it did with them. They gave credit to extravagant stories to which we pay no heed, because we know how easily such stories originate. Still, the pains and pleasures held before them as deterrents or inducements cannot have weighed upon them very persistently, or they would not have been as reckless transgressors as we know many of them actually were. We do not trifle in this way with prospects which we deliberately regard as serious. At all times men must have been conscious of the defective light in which we pursue our journey, and of the thick wrappings we must strip off before we can reach reality.

The writer I have quoted thought that the question of human immortality admitted of scientific proof. He believed that doubt must cease if it could be conclusively shown that the dead were in a position to communicate with the living. Many eminent men, worthy of the highest respect, have shared this opinion. They would, however, themselves admit that they have been unable so far to convert any considerable number of their countrymen. An influential member of the Society for Psychical Research informed us a few years ago that the membership of the society after twenty years of strenuous and not unfruitful labour remained stationary at something less than 1500. He drew the conclusion that there were only 1500 persons in the whole wide world who took an annual guinea's worth of scientific interest in finding out whether they had anything to look forward to after death, and if so, what.† Surely, however, the fact may mean, not that the abstaining

*Science and a Future Life,' p. 2.
† Schiller, Humanism,' p. 318.

multitude lacked interest, but that they believed the particular avenue proposed to them to be fallacious.

For my own part I cannot identify 'immortality' with any such life as these researches have disclosed or indicated. When I affirm my belief in immortality it is not of such a survival I am thinking. On the other hand, I could imagine myself believing in such a survival while yet I did not believe in immortality. The life we desire is not our present existence under other conditions, but a better life, a life changed not in duration but in quality; and of such a transformation these researches have hitherto brought us no evidence.

My own belief-and when we speak of hope we must needs be personal--is not the result of any reasoning process. Nor can I find that the belief historically considered has originated in the conscious reason. It precedes the action of the conscious reason. We find it in some shape in the infancy of the world. It makes its appearance almost at the dawn of history. Nor does it to-day seem to rest upon arguments or the operations of the logical faculty. People who already hold it, or whom it holds, bring arguments, sometimes powerful ones, in its support. But it is not the arguments which have brought it to them. Perhaps no one whom it did not already possess was ever reasoned into it. No one whom it did possess was ever shaken in his assurance by reasonings. The belief is a craving of the whole soul, of which the reason is only a part. We justify it but we do not create it by reasonings.

If I now turn from the belief itself to the expression given to it in different times and places I find myself amidst infinite variety. Question the nations of the earth as to what they mean by this their faith, and they give us answers marked by every degree of childishness or sublimity. We are in the presence of the changing pictures of the kaleidoscope. Each nation may indeed have its authoritative creed. But the creeds do not keep pace with the movements of the living soul. They come in time to be left behind, and to appear as monuments representing what was rather than what is.

Look, e.g., at the people of whose early religious experience we know most, the Jews. It is customary to

say that the hope of immortality is absent in the earlier of the two sections of the Christian Bible and present in the later. We think we see it clearly in the New Testament, while we miss it in the greater part of the Old. This summary distinction can hardly satisfy any reflecting reader of the book. The ordinary inscription upon Jewish tombstones is the prayer that the soul of the dead man may be bound up in the same bundle of life with the Lord his God. Could there be any clearer expression of the hope of immortality than this simple quotation from the Old Testament (1 Sam. xxv. 29)? The early Hebrew believed that his nation's survival embraced and assured his own. It was not that he was content to perish if only it endured. He thought that he and it were bound up in the same bundle of life. Beneath the whole company, and enfolding the great aggregate and each of its constituent units, were the Everlasting Arms. Within this sheltering embrace he rested in security, asking, with no note of self-pity, that God might show him His work, and reserve His glory for future generations. No doubt the most fervent piety did not, then any more than now, overcome the shrinking from death or light up the unimaginable future with assuring radiance :

'While earnest thou gazest,
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error,
Perplexes the bravest

With doubt and misgiving.'

We should, however, be doing the holders of a hope such as is revealed in the 90th Psalm a grievous injustice if we were to say that they had no anticipations of immortality, and place them in consequence upon a lower religious level than their descendants who looked forward to an individual resurrection. The difference was one rather of expression than of vital belief. The hopes were essentially the same although they assumed different forms. Indeed, many Christian conceptions of immortality may well seem inferior to some of the Hebrew hopes to which we refuse the name.

In truth, wherever we follow the hope of future life, we are confronted by wavering images and pictures that

will not abide our scrutiny. The soul is reaching forward towards a reality which is beyond its present grasp. It is moved by a desire which it cannot express in stable language or adequate imagery. It feels, but it cannot describe its feeling. It hopes, but cannot delineate its hope. Question those in whom the hope is strongest and most unwavering, and they are unable to tell you what it is they desire. Do they wish for an endless continuance of their present existence? No. Do they desire to meet their friends and associate with them on the same terms as heretofore? Alas for us! the most cherished relationships generally present to us some characteristic for which we are forbidden to desire permanence. The great Augustine, although he loved his mother passionately, was obliged to entreat God for her sins. The truth is, it is not life in time that is desired, but life above time, untouched by its vicissitudes, free from its imperfections.

It will, indeed, be urged that, amidst all wavering hopes and shifting fancies, the desire for the preservation of personal identity remains constant. We may be willing to leave all else in suspense if only we can have the assurance that we can recognise ourselves and our friends hereafter. The question thus propounded is final and irreducible only in appearance. The Gospel assures us of a 'change' by which the new life will be preceded or initiated, but it does not enable us to circumscribe this change or to settle its limits. Our affections are certainly as noble and indestructible as anything within our present experience. They constitute a prophecy of which we may have a good confidence that it will not remain unfulfilled.

The question, however, 'Shall we see and know our friends in heaven?' is one which the deepest piety will hardly dare to ask. It will be restrained by the refusal of Christ to answer directly a similar question, and His assertion of the transient and provisional nature of earthly relationships. Those who put such questions are only endeavouring to lift earthly weights and measures into a region where they have become valueless. What the Apostle points to in his memorable chapter on the

* Matt. xxii. 30.

Resurrection is the placing of whatever is worthy of life in a position of permanent security. What is good in human lives is gathered up and assured of perpetuity. Flesh and blood and all that they imply are left behind. What is worthy is taken up into some larger and better state of being. Death is thus robbed of his apparent victory and becomes the gate of an enduring life. Such assurances may not wholly avail to overcome the bitterness of bereavement; what assurances can ? They do, however, abound in sober, stable consolation, because they deliver us from the fear of death and clothe our last enemy with the garb of a beneficent friend who opens before us a welcome prospect.

We conclude, then, that the hope of future life is a craving implanted within the soul, but that the thoughts and images of every-day life, no less than the reasonings of the metaphysician, fail us when we attempt to picture the satisfaction towards which this craving reaches. We perceive a light which we have the strongest reason for believing to be a light from heaven, although the earthborn mists hide the goal to which it leads.

So the great hopes of the past have led humanity to satisfying but unexpected destinations. They may have been frustrated to the eye, but they have been fulfilled to the heart. The race which has given its religion to Europe has in one sense been the victim of a long series of cruel illusions. It has had to mourn through the centuries over the graves of its shattered hopes. In another aspect it is the most startling example of hope fulfilled. An outcast among the nations, despised and rejected of men, it has become the religious teacher of its revilers and persecutors. History, while it seldom realises our express predictions, does yet bear witness that God does not betray the soul that trusts Him.

We have the firmest confidence in the ultimate solution of problems which now baffle our utmost efforts, although we cannot tell what form the solution will take. So we may have a firm assurance that there is a destined haven for the human soul, a haven which it would ardently desire, could it analyse and express its aspirations, although we cannot describe the haven nor settle its boundaries. This is precisely what I understand religious faith to be. Faith is fidelity to the soul's best