s the
following. It is justly said that at the bottom of all the great
discussions of modern society lie the two momentous questions, first
whether there is a God, and second whether the soul is immortal. In
other words, whether our fellow-creatures are the highest beings who
take an interest in us, or in whom we need take an interest; and, then,
whether life in this world is the only life of which we shall ever be
conscious. It is true of most people that when they are talking of
evolution, and the origin of species, and the experiential or
intuitional source of ideas, and the utilitarian or transcendental basis
of moral obligation, these are the questions which they really have in
their minds. Now, in spite of the scientific activity of the day, nobody
is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any
poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the face of the two supreme
enigmas. Nobody will say that there is much of that striving and
wrestling and bitter agonising, which whole societies of men have felt
before now on questions of far less tremendous import. Ours, as has been
truly said, is 'a time of loud disputes and weak convictions,' In a
generation deeply impressed by a sense of intellectual responsibility
this could not be. As it is, even superior men are better pleased to
play about the height of these great arguments, to fly in busy
intellectual sport from side to side, from aspect to aspect, than they
are intent on resolving what it is, after all, that the discussion comes
to and to which solution, when everything has been said and heard, the
balance of truth really to incline. There are too many giggling
epigrams; people are too willing to look on collections of mutually
hostile opinions with the same kind of curiosity which they bestow on a
collection of mutually hostile beasts in a menagerie. They have very
faint predilections for one rather than another. If they were truly
alive to the duty of conclusiveness, or to the inexpressible magnitude
of the subjects which nominally occupy their minds, but really only
exercise their tongues, this elegant Pyrrhonism would be impossible, and
this light-hearted neutrality most unendurable.

Well has the illustrious Pascal said with reference to one of the two
great issues of the modern controversy:--'The immortality of the soul is
a thing that concerns us so closely and touches us so profoundly, that
one must have lost all feeling to be indiffer