never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in
proportion as they are keen, of any others which are both intense and
lasting we have no experience and can form no idea. . . . To beings
constituted as we are the monotony of singing psalms would be as
great an affliction as the pains of hell, and might even be
pleasantly interrupted by them."

This is trenchant enough, and yet we perceive that the critic is setting
up his rest upon the very fallacy he attacks--the fallacy of using
'Eternity' and 'Everlasting Life' as convertible terms.
He neatly enough reduces to absurdity the prolongation, through endless
time, of pleasures which delight us because they are transitory: he does
not see, or for the moment forgets, that Eternity is not a prolongation of
time at all, but an absolute negation of it.

There seems to be no end to the confusion of men's thought on this
subject. Take, for example, this extract from our late Queen's private
journal (1883):--

"After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room
for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very
old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to
sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would
be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where
there would be no partings: and then he spoke with horror of the
unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe that there
was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain all away in
a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possible, God,
who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being."

It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable interview--these two, aged and
great, meeting at a point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel
themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and exchanging beliefs upon
that unseen world where neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than
that they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not Tennyson
yielding to the old temptation to interpret the future life in terms of
this one? Speculation will not carry us far upon this road; yet, so far
as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the
infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What
cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with
feeling? Or what o