pse, and "the nameless quiet" of the
Buddhist Nirvana, feels compelled to pass them all by and to hold that
of the invisible universe we are painfully ignorant, and that the only
deathless reality is the will of man conformed to the great obedience
of the moral law. It believes that the test of a system is not what it
promises but what it performs, and we may take it as an absolutely
certain thing that if any of the "systems" of our day secured palpably
higher ethical results amongst its adherents, the world would flock to
that Church forthwith. As Augustine says, "no one loves the devil,"
which, being ethically interpreted, means no one wants to be bad, and
if any ecclesiastical corporation, by an appeal to history or to
present and urgent visible facts, could justify its claims to
successfully strengthen man's oftentimes rebel will in the pursuit of
the great ideal, men would follow it to the world's end, such is the
power of truth and goodness over the human heart. But the truth is, no
such agency has ever been discovered. In the sixteenth century the
Council of Trent was summoned "to reform the Church in its head and
members," a plain confession of ethical failure. Do men suppose that
Luther, or a whole synod of monks, could have torn Europe in pieces in
about a score of years, when Anglicans have been debating auricular
confession and the eastward position for the last fifty, unless the
Continent had undergone a moral _debacle_? Luther's paltry diatribes
about indulgences would have left men as cold as stone; it was the
fervour of the ethical enthusiast thundering against immoralities in
high places which rent the Christian Church in twain by the most
violent and widespread schism it had ever known.

No, the test of a thing is not what it promises but what it does.
_Exitus acta probat_. And if the enlightened men and women of our time
are disposed less and less to rely upon creeds as a basis of religious
communion, it is because they see that whatever the future life may
have in store for mankind, they cannot better prepare for it than by
living worthily in this.

But as evidence that they who follow the ethical obedience are in no
wise insensible to the sterner aspects of life, we shall now pass on to
say what in our judgment should be the religious attitude of man face
to face with the inevitable certainty of death.

If we pause one moment to reflect on the physical aspect of death, it
would only be to