ve or be effective within the narrow
circle of time and sense. Nevertheless he has the courage to say: "The
future life, like the belief in God, is best treated as an hypothesis
that is yet in process of verification."

But this hypothesis explains what else were inexplicable. It works. And,
confronting the hypothesis of immortality, he insists that a future life
must embrace retribution. "As a man sows, so shall he also reap."
Immortality is not to be regarded as a sentimental compensation for our
terrestrial experience, but as the essential continuity of our spiritual
evolution. "For many, no doubt, it will mean an experience of probation,
and for all one of retribution."

He sees clearly and gratefully that "the moral range of the work of
Christ in the human soul, His gifts of grace, forgiveness, and power,
lift men at once on to the plane of the spiritual and fill their
conception of life with a new and richer content." But he does not shut
his eyes to the fact of the moral law, and with all the force of his
character and all the strength of his intellect he accepts "the great
principle that as a man sows, so shall he also reap."

In this way Dr. Selbie prepares his students, not only to meet the
intellectual difficulties of the future, but to stand fast in the
ancient faith of their forefathers that the moral law is a fact of the
universe. He helps them to be fighters as well as teachers. They are to
fight the complacency of men, the false optimism of the world, the
delusive tolerance of materialism. There is no need for them to preach
hell fire and damnation, but throughout all their preaching, making it
a real thing and a thing of the most pressing moment, must ring that
just and inevitable word, Retribution. In a moral universe, selfishness
involves, rightly and inevitably, suffering--suffering self-sown,
self-determined, and self-merited.

He is the last man in the world from whom one would expect such teaching
to emanate. He seems, in his social moments, a scholar who is scarcely
aware of humanity in his delicious pursuit of pure truth, a man who
inhabits the faery realm of ideas, and drinks the milk of Paradise. But
approach him on other ground and you find, though his serenity never
deserts him, though he is always imperturbable and unassertive, that his
interest in humanity and the practical problems of humanity is as vivid
and consuming as that of any social reformer.

There, in Oxford, among his book