t he was a philosopher.

And now I keep the Midway Inn myself, and watch from the hill-top
the passengers come and go--some loth, some willing, like myself of
old--and listen to their talk in the coffee-room; or sometimes in a
private parlour, where, though they speak low and gravely, their
converse is still unrestrained, because, you see, I am the
landlord.

Sometimes they speak of Death and the Hereafter, of which the child
they buried yesterday knows more than the wisest of them, and more
than Shakespeare knew. The being totally ignorant of the subject
does not indeed (as you may perhaps have observed in other matters)
deter some of them from speaking of it with great confidence; but
the views of a minority would quite surprise you, and this minority
is growing--coming to a majority. Every day I see an increase of
the doubters. It is not a question of the Orthodox and the Infidel,
you must understand, at all, though _that_ is assuming great
proportions; but there is every day more uncertainty among them,
and, what is much more noteworthy, more dissatisfaction.

Years ago, when a hardy Cambridge scholar dared to publish his
doubts of an eternal punishment overtaking the wicked, an orthodox
professor of the same college took him (theologically) by the
throat. 'You are destroying,' he cried, 'the hope of the
Christian.' But this is not the hope I speak of, as loosing, and
losing, its hold upon men's minds; I mean the real hope, the hope
of heaven.

When I used to go to church--for my inn is too far removed from it
to admit of my attendance there nowadays--matters were very
different. Heaven and Hell were, in the eyes not only of our
congregation, but of those who hung about the doors in the summer
sun, or even played leap-frog over the grave-stones, as distinct
alternatives as the east and west highways on each side of my inn.
If you did not go one way, you must go the other; and not only so,
but an immense desire was felt by very many to go in the right
direction. Now I perceive it is not so. A considerable number of
highway passengers, though even they are less numerous than of old,
are still studious--that is in their aspirations--to avoid taking
(shall I say delicately) the lower road; but only a few,
comparatively, are solicitous to reach the goal of the upper.

Let me once more observe that I am speaking of the ordinary
passengers