y taken by
hungry successors. Thus the torch of life is passed briskly, with
picturesque and stimulating effect, along the manifold race of
running ages, instead of smouldering stagnantly forever in the
moveless grasp of one. The amount of enjoyment, the quantity of
conscious experience, gained from any given exhibition by a
million persons to each of whom it is successively shown for one
hour, is, beyond all question, immensely greater and keener than
one person could have from it in a million hours. The generations
of men seem like fire flies glittering down the dark lane of
History; but each swarm had its happy turn, fulfilled its hour,
and rightfully gave way to its followers. The disinterested
beneficence of the Creator ordains that the same plants, insects,
men, shall not unsurrenderingly monopolize and stop the bliss of
breath. Death is the echo of the voice of love reverberated from
the limit of life.

The cumulative fund of human experience, the sensitive affiliating
line of history, like a cerebral cord of personal identity
traversing the centuries, renders a continual succession of
generations equivalent to the endless existence of one generation;
but with this mighty difference, that it preserves all the edge
and spice of novelty. For consider what would be the result if
death were abolished and men endowed with an earthly immortality.
At first they might rejoice, and think their last, dreadest enemy
destroyed. But what a mistake! In the first place, since none are
to be removed from the earth, of course none must come into it.
The space and material are all wanted by those now in possession.
All are soon mature men and women, not another infant ever to hang
upon a mother's breast or be lifted in a father's arms.

15 Augustine, Op. Imp. iii. 198.

All the prattling music, fond cares, yearning love, and
gushing joys and hopes associated with the rearing of children,
gone! What a stupendous fragment is stricken from the fabric of
those enriching satisfactions which give life its truest value and
its purest charm! Ages roll on. They see the same everlasting
faces, confront the same returning phenomena, engage in the same
worn out exercises, or lounge idly in the unchangeable conditions
which bear no stimulant which they have not exhausted. Thousands
of years pass. They have drunk every attainable spring of
knowledge dry. Not a prize stirs a pulse. All pleasures,
permutated till ingenuity is baffled, dis