prospective. frigid atmosphere about us, and my inmost soul—the immortal thinking and hoping part of mein every faculty and quality of it - shivered at the bold scientist's conclusion. The little unmistakable, almost inaudible cough that the doomed man had been fighting on the way, with drops and lozenges, seemed feebly to echo or mock the irreversible dictum, and kept me lamenting the inconceivable desolation of a human heart without a hope of a future Everything existence. "Everything is prospective," wrote Emerson, "and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma. We must infer our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to hive innumerable experiences which are of no visible value, and we may revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust them. Shall I hold on with both hands to every paltry possession? All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which the great Providence prepares for Something us, it must be something large and generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to the style of our faculties, of memory, of hope, of imagi large and generous. of Lord nation, of reason." "Certainly," quaintly reasons Lord Herbert of Cherbury, "since Reasoning in my mother's womb this plastica, or for- Herbert. matrix, which formed my eyes, ears, and other senses, did not intend them for that place, but as being conscious of a better life, made them as fitting organs to apprehend and perceive those things which should occur in this world; so I believe, since my coming into this world my soul hath formed or produced certain faculties which are almost as useless for this life as the above-named senses were for the preexisting state: - and these faculties are faith, hope, love, and joy, since they never rest or fix upon any transitory or perishing object in this world, as extending themselves to something further than can be here given, and indeed, acquiesce only in the perfect, eternal, and infinite." "We forget nothing," uttered Thackeray. "The memory sleeps, but wakens again; I often think how it shall be, when, after the last sleep of death, the reveille shall arouse us The reveille after the last forever, and the past in one flash of self-sleep. consciousness rush back, like the soul, revivified." "God himself," thought Hawthorne, "cannot compensate us for being born for any period short of eternity. All lum of eternity. the misery endured here constitutes a claim for another life, and still more, all the happiness; because all true happiness involves something more than the earth owns, and needs something more than a mortal capacity for the enjoyment of it." The pendu Eternity! The pendulum of it! which "beats epochs as ours do seconds." The magnificence of the professor's conception, that if the fixed stars were annihilated we should not be conscious of it for many years, spite of the rapidity with which light travels, gives little idea of duration. without end or beginning. "What have we to do with old age?" asks Emerson of Carlyle in one of his letters. 'Our existence looks to me more than ever initial. We have come to see the ground and look up materials and tools. The men who have any positive quality are a flying advance party for reconnoitring. We shall yet have a right work, and kings for competitors." INTUITION AND WORSHIP. "The impossibility I find myself under of proving there is no God, is a demonstration to me that there is one," is a sentence of La Bruyère. "Consult Zoroaster and Minos and Solon, and the sage Socrates, and the great Cicero; they have all (says necessary to Voltaire) adored a master, a judge, a father: this sublime system is necessary to man; Adoration it is the sacred bond of society, the first man. foundation of holy equity, the curb of the wicked, the hope of the just. If the heavens, despoiled of their augustness, ceased to manifest him; if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. King! if you oppress me, if your majesty disdains the tears of the innocent, my avenger is in the sky learn to tremble!" Flacourt, in in his History of the Island of Madagascar, gives a sublime prayer, used by the A sublime people we call savages: "O Eternal! have mercy upon me, because I am passing away: O Infinite! because I am but speck: O Most Mighty! because I am weak: O Source of Light! because I draw nigh to the grave: O Omniscient! because I am in darkness: O All-bounteous! because I am poor: O All-sufficient! because I am nothing." Arbousset, a French missionary to South Africa, recounts an extraordinary interview with a Kaffir chief, Interview to whom he was imparting the message Kaffir chief. of Christianity. "Your tidings," said the 66 wild black man, prayer. with a Asked himself sorrowful questions. The intuition of God. years ago I went to feed my flock. The weather was hazy. I sat down upon a rock and asked myself sorrowful questions; yes, sorrowful, because I was unable to answer them. Who has touched the stars with his hands? The waters are never weary; they flow from morning till night, from night till morning. Who makes them flow thus? I cannot see the wind. Who brings it? Who makes it blow and roar and terrify me? Do I know how the corn sprouts ? Yesterday there was not a blade in my field; to-day I returned to the field and found some. Then I buried my face in both my hands." A French scientist passed his childhood in that period of the French Revolution in which religion was proscribed, the churches of his province shut, and sacred words forbidden to be used. "Nevertheless," he says, "I remember that the aspect of the sky made me dream. I always saw in it something that was not of the world. I searched there above for something I did not see, but whose existence I divined. Yes, the intuition of God was within me." "Posterity will perhaps with truth assert," thought Draper, "that Paradise Lost has wrought more intellectual evil than even its base |