n which
salvation is granted, I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be
damned' (looking dismally). Dr. Adams: 'What do you mean by damned?'
Johnson (passionately and loudly): 'Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished
everlastingly.'"

No one disputes that for many ages the lives of even the just and good
were burdened by such oppressive fears. Perhaps, indeed, the just and
good were more burdened than the wicked; for to the wicked their own
sins seldom appear so deadly black, and when a Balkan priest lately
displayed pictures of eternal torment as warnings to a savage
mountaineer's enormities, he was met by the reply, "Even we should not
be so cruel." But to the greater part of thinking mankind, Maeterlinck's
reassurances upon the subject, even if they could be established, would
appear a little out-of-date, and I do not believe that, even where they
linger, such terrors form the basis of the fear of death. Was there not,
at all events, one strenuous Canon of the Established Church who
defiantly proclaimed that he would rather be damned than annihilated?

"Men fear death," says Bacon's familiar sentence; "men fear death, as
children fear to go in the dark." It is not the dread of pain and
torment; it is the dark that terrifies; it is Kingsley's horror of
annihilation; it is the hot life's fear of ceasing to be. I grant that
many are unconscious of this fear. In word, at all events, there are
multitudes, perhaps the greater part of mankind, who long for the
annihilation of self, who direct their lives by the great hope of
becoming in the end absorbed into the Universe. Their perpetual prayer
is to be rid of personality at the last, no matter through what strange
embodiments the self must pass before it reach the bliss of nothingness.
Similar, though less doctrinal, was the prayer of Job when he counted
himself among those who long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for
it more than for hid treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad
when they can find the grave. "Why died I not from the womb?" he cried:

"For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should
have slept; then, had I been at rest, with kings and counsellors
of the earth, which built solitary places for themselves."

How far the loss of personal consciousness by absorption into universal
infinity is identical with the eternal rest desired by Job might be long
disputed. Sir Thomas Browne, having heard of the Brahmin or Buddhist
conceptions