d worship in the old ways, that the newer forms in which the
religious sentiment expresses itself are insensible to the more solemn
aspects of life, its sins and sorrows, its disappointments and
disillusionment, and most of all to the final catastrophe which men
call death. Ours, they would impress upon us, is a fair weather creed,
good enough when all goes well, but painfully inadequate in the storm
and stress which the inevitable trials of existence inflict upon us.
Sorrow, they impressively warn us, is ever the rock upon which all such
systems must split.

Now, to say nothing of the obvious reflection that what we now call the
old, that is, the orthodox ways, are in reality exceedingly new, and
that even the "chosen people," or their immediate predecessors, were
left wholly destitute by the Deity of any such comforts as are held so
indispensably necessary to a well-ordered existence--to say nothing of
this, the argument, if worth anything, would go to show that the
religion which offered most consolation was the true one; and since no
traveller ever returns from that bourne, so near and yet so far, to
advise us of the truth or falsity of these ultra-mundane comforts, we
seem compelled to hesitate more than ever before we forsake that sturdy
and plain-spoken guide called reason, whom we as confidently follow in
the region of religion as in the business of everyday life. The
Society for Psychical Research has some remarkable evidence to offer,
apparently establishing to physical demonstration that _the_ man
[Transcriber's note: the _man_?] in us does not die but lives, and
communicates with his fellows after the final fact of this earth called
death. But, however this may be, and we are not called upon now to
offer any opinion on these matters, the so-called revelations are
wonderfully silent on those topics which sentimentarians apparently
erect into the supreme test of a religion's truth or falsity. As far
as one may judge, the departed appear to be occupied with nothing more
sublime than filled their thoughts during this present sphere; in fact,
as is well known, they often appear to exhibit a painful declension in
moral life and to have lost immeasurably in character by their passage
from this stage of being to the unknown land beyond the grave.

Reason, therefore, being in no position to settle the rival claims of
the physical delights of the Mohammedan paradise, the comparatively
insipid ideal of the Apocaly