the generations on this and millions unnumbered of
worlds all survived. With vivid gestures he passed them all before the
eye--low-browed savages, cannibals, fetish-worshippers, Calvinists, and
at last the aesthetics of our day. "There would be no room for them--no
use for them at all--it would be a glut which baffles all imagination."
There was no way out but that the individual perished to prevent the
universe from being crowded out.

And the cobbler at the top of the brae described to me how his dog was
run over in the street. "He gaed a bark--and he never gaed anither.
It'll be like that at the end with us a'. We'll gae out like my dawg."
It was a queer result of the glimpse which came to us of an illimitable
universe--this cheapening of ourselves. There was nothing at last but
the charnel-house of the crowded kirkyard, where the generations lay
layer upon layer, and where the opening of a grave reminded the old
clerk, as he quaintly declared, of nothing but a dentist's shop. The
teeth survived for unrecorded centuries--but that was all.

It is strange the tricks the memory plays. For, sitting here, glancing
over the crowded sheet filled with the names of the dead, I remembered
these things. And there came the sense of the madness of the universe
and the intolerableness of life, if the end of all heroism was but
that--nothingness and corruption. A handful of bones thrown up by the
beadle to make room for the dead of to-day--is that all that is left of
those who handed down the lamp of life to us? Is that all that will be
left of us too at the last?

In the ordinary day my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road and the
cobbler on the breast of the brae would have said that that was the
end. But the extraordinary day has come upon us unawares, and in the
extraordinary day this little, burdened, pain-racked life becomes
suddenly unendurable unless it lie in the bosom of eternity. If there
be no rainbow circling the heavens above the carnage heaps of the
stricken battlefields, if the farewell of death be a farewell for ever,
how can the heart endure?

***

It certainly looks to the seeing of the eye as if destruction were the
end. With the perishing of the body everything seemeth to perish: all
love, all thought, all tenderness vanish for ever. But the eyes and
the ears are for ever playing us false; and here, too, they deceive us.
For the world is so ordered that nothing ever perishes. In nature
th