from those we love.

The life of the late Mr. Chamberlain was evidently happy as well as
good. That of his son, I have no doubt, is the same. But of the lot
of the myriads whose lives, through no fault of their own, are, or in
the course of history have been, unhappy, often most miserable, what is
to be said? If for them there is no compensation, can we believe that
benevolence and justice rule the world? If the world is not ruled by
benevolence and justice, what is our ground of hope?

The negative conclusion rids us, it is true, of the Dantean Hell, which
paints the Deity as incomparably worse than the worst Italian tyrant,
and, as it is to be everlasting, concedes the final victory to evil.

We discard all ghost stories and spiritualist apparitions as at most
signs of a general craving. We resign all reasoning like that of
Butler, who describes the soul as indiscerptible, assuming that it
exists separately from the body. Nor can we be said to have anything
that bears the character of Revelation. That the Founder of
Christianity looked for a future life, with its rewards and
punishments, is evident. But he brought no special message, lifted not
the curtain of mystery, did nothing to clear our minds upon the
subject. His apologue of Dives and Lazarus shows that to Him as to us
the other world was a realm of the imagination.

Is there anything in man not physical, or apparently explained and
limited by the transient conditions and necessities of his present
state, anything which gives an inkling of immortality? Our utilitarian
morality is the offspring and adjunct of our condition here. But is
there not an aspiration to character which points to something more
spiritual and higher than conformity to the utilitarian code? Heroism
and self-sacrifice are not utilitarian.

We can hardly allow the investigation to be closed by the mere mention
of the talismanic formulary Evolution. There may be something still to
be said on that subject. Evolution cannot have evolved itself, nor
does it seem capable of infallible demonstration. It no doubt
postulates vast spaces of time for its action. But within the space of
time of which we in any way have knowledge, apparently no case of
spontaneous evolution has taken place. Rudimentary likeness between
the frame of the ape and that of man seems hardly in itself a proof of
the generation of man from the ape.

On no subject, however, does one who is not a man of sci