and live in this superfluity of sunshine."

Then I said to my joyous comrade: "Many live their lives of toil and
gloom and ugliness in the belief that in another life after this they
will be rewarded. They think that God wills them to live this life of
work."

"Then perhaps in the next life they will again live in toil and gloom,
postponing their happiness once more," said my companion. "Or on the
Day of Judgment they will line up before God and say with a melancholy
countenance, 'Oh Lord we want our wages for having lived!' ...
An insult to God and to our glorious life, but how terrible, how
unutterably sad! And the reply of the angel sadder still, 'Did you not
know that life itself was a reward, a glory?'"

V

THE UNCONQUERABLE HOPE

Once, long ago, when an earthquake rent the hills, and mountains
became valleys, and the earth itself opened and divided, letting in
the sea, a new island was formed far away upon an unvisited ocean. Out
of an inland province of a vast continent this island was made, all
the land upon it having been submerged, and all the peoples that dwelt
to north and to south, to east and to west, having been drowned.

There survived upon the island a few men and women who remained
undisputed masters of the land, and they lived there and bred there.
No one visited them, for the island was remote, unknown; and they
visited no one, for they had never seen the sea before, they had not
even known of its existence, and they did not know how to fashion a
boat.

The island became fertile, and men and women married, and bore sons
and daughters. The people in the island multiplied and grew rich. But
all the while they lived without the invention of the boat, and they
thought their island was the whole world, not knowing of the other
lands that lay beyond the sea.

The original people died in their time, and their sons and daughters
and grandsons and granddaughters, and the newer, later, survived and
gave birth to newer and later still. And the story of the origin of
the island was handed down from generation to generation.

The story was a matter of fact. It became history, it became legend
and tradition, it became a myth, it became almost the foundation of
religion. For a thousand years a lost family of mankind dwelt on that
island on the unvisited sea, and none of their kindred ever came out
of its barren sea-horizons to claim them.

And then, lest these children of men should utterly fo