a
logical inference from it.

(3) Perhaps God _is_ "a deceiver" who knows that he is not? Assumption
of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of a
God who is honorable and candid according to our conception of honor and
candor is another.

(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implanted in
us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be--it is--impossible to
gratify that desire in this life. Still, another life is not implied,
for God may not have intended us to draw the inference that he is going
to gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have
intended whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion's
illustration, and it may be that God's knowledge and power are limited,
or that one of them is limited.

M. Flammarion is a learned, if somewhat theatrical, astronomer. He has a
tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home in the marvelous
and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar phenomena. To
him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is the master of the
show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothing of logic, which is
the science of straight thinking, and his views of things have
therefore no value; they are nebulous.

Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having
absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of
after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony, in
assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it--if it is
enjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given--and it is the
only testimony worth a moment's consideration--is a disputed point. Many
persons living this life profess to have received it. But nobody
professes, or ever has professed, to have received a communication of
any kind from one in actual experience of the fore-life. "The souls as
yet ungarmented," if such there are, are dumb to question. The Land
beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously
described: if not explored and surveyed, yet carefully charted. From
among so many accounts of it that we have, he must be fastidious indeed
who cannot be suited. But of the Fatherland that spreads before the
cradle--the great Heretofore, wherein we all dwelt if we are to dwell in
the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody professes knowledge of that.
No testimony reaches our ears of flesh concerning its topographical or
other features;