r other blind races like your
own; but it certainly seems unlikely that so strange and lamentable
a spectacle should be duplicated. One such illustration of the
extraordinary deprivations under which a rational existence may still be
possible ought to suffice for the universe."

"But no one can know the future except by inspiration of God,'9 I said.

"All our faculties are by inspiration of God," was the reply, "but there
is surely nothing in foresight to cause it to be so regarded more than
any other. Think a moment of the physical analogy of the case. Your eyes
are placed in the front of your heads. You would deem it an odd mistake
if they were placed behind. That would appear to you an arrangement
calculated to defeat their purpose. Does it not seem equally rational
that the mental vision should range forward, as it does with us,
illuminating the path one is to take, rather than backward, as with you,
revealing only the course you have already trodden, and therefore
have no more concern with? But it is no doubt a merciful provision of
Providence that renders you unable to realize the grotesqueness of your
predicament, as it appears to us."

"But the future is eternal!" I exclaimed. "How can a finite mind grasp
it?"

"Our foreknowledge implies only human faculties," was the reply. "It is
limited to our individual careers on this planet. Each of us foresees
the course of his own life, but not that of other lives, except so far
as they are involved with his."

"That such a power as you describe could be combined with merely human
faculties is more than our philosophers have ever dared to dream," I
said. "And yet who shall say, after all, that it is not in mercy that
God has denied it to us? If it is a happiness, as it must be, to foresee
one's happiness, it must be most depressing to foresee one's sorrows,
failures, yes, and even one's death. For if you foresee your lives to
the end, you must anticipate the hour and manner of your death,--is it
not so?"

"Most assuredly," was the reply. "Living would be a very precarious
business, were we uninformed of its limit. Your ignorance of the time
of your death impresses us as one of the saddest features of your
condition."

"And by us," I answered, "it is held to be one of the most merciful."

"Foreknowledge of your death would not, indeed, prevent your dying
once," continued my companion, "but it would deliver you from the
thousand deaths you suffer through uncertai