as if it may as naturally retain all other faculties, and so need no fresh body); or that it does not carry its Memory, and so, when re-embodied, lives beyond Lethe, utterly unaware of what has passed in this state of existence. I am not disposed to insist that there could be absolutely no fulfilment of Justice, no satisfaction of the unquenched thirst of Love, in a world between which and our own had fallen a veil of Oblivion. The consequences of our acts (as I shall by-and-by attempt to shew) may bring about sure retribution by working themselves into the very tissue of our souls; and Love may draw once more together and perfect the friendship of spirits. whose affinity first proclaimed itself here below. But, undoubtedly, so far as we can yet grasp such thoughts, the retention or restoration of Memory is almost, if not absolutely, a sine qua non among the conditions of such a Life after Death as shall altogether fulfil those aspirations which (God-given as we believe them to be) are our chief pledge that such a Life awaits us.

II. Very interesting, though less important, are the speculations regarding another world which refer to that side of our intellectual nature which we call the Esthetic. How will the beauty of our new habitations touch us? Or will it be the yet unexplored loveliness of our own planet which we shall behold at last, and no longer with care-worn hearts or tear-dimmed eyes? To how many of the sick and suffering, the narrow-fortuned, the toil-enslaved, have the scenes of Alps and Andes, Grecian

isles and Yosemite valleys, been dreams of longing never appeased ere death closed their unsatisfied eyes? What bliss might be given to many of the purest of souls, who have passed whole years imprisoned in sordid streets, or amid all the ugliness of a sick chamber, by merely permitting them "to see those things which we see," of woods and hills and waters, the sunrise and the moon walking in glory amid the clouds? We dare not say it is a debt owing to such souls that they should one day behold God's beautiful world; but assuredly it would be no improbable display of His love to shew it to them.

All these questions, however, and all which concern the mental faculties in another life, are (as I said a few pages back) even more rebuffing to our poor thoughts and speculations than those which concern the future of the Affections and the Conscience; and to these I hasten, as also infinitely the most interesting.

III. If there be a Life after Death, it can scarcely be but that Love will assume therein a much higher place than it holds here. What gifts of tongues and prophecy may cease, what wit and learning and science may "vanish away," we cannot define. But that Love "never faileth" is no less sure than that we ourselves shall continue to be. God cannot—it is reverence itself that makes us say it-God cannot have made our human hearts as if expressly to contain and feed that light of a world else so dark, and yet permit the gleam to be extinguished like the toy-lamps launched on the Ganges,

leaving them to go down the stream of eternity in the blackness of night. If He can and does so ordain it, He is not the God who has given us the law of justice and fidelity, nor the adored, all-merciful One whom we have found in life's supremest, hours in the Holy of Holies of Prayer. He is not our God; and even if He (or It?) be a "Stream of Tendency," an "Universum," or the "Deity of the Religion of Inhumanity," which our various new teachers would have us recognize, Religion is evermore closed to us, for we cannot love Him, and the hope of Immortality vanishes as a dream. As Florence Nightingale recently wrote, “Our ground for believing in a future life is simply Because God is." His character is the pledge of our Immortality, and it is quite as much the pledge that the Love which is the most godlike thing in us shall be immortal too. Our divines are so jealous of what they have deemed to be God's "glory" as the Judge of all the earth, that they have supposed Judging to be altogether His chief concern, and that He calls us from the grave expressly to punish us or to reward. But beside these royal functions of Deity (if we may so express it), there must remain the cares of the tender Father, the divine Friend; and it would be strange indeed if these should not be vindicated by that Good One quite as surely and perfectly as the others.

One of the many questions which crowd on us when we attempt to construct any theory of what the future of the Affections may be, has doubtless made the hearts

of the bereaved ache whenever it has occurred to them. What warrant have we that, dying long years after our lost ones, perchance in wholly different spiritual and moral conditions, we shall ever meet or overtake them, and not rather remain "evermore a life behind," "through all the secular to be"? Even granting that they live and we live, who has told us that our paths, which happened to approach, like those of a comet and a planet, for the mere moment of earthly existence, will ever touch again throughout the cycles of eternity? In view of these agonizing questions, we can scarcely wonder at those who have killed themselves with their beloved ones, rather than allow them to go out alone into the darkness, striving thus to secure a natural proximity, even while they madly placed the moral distance of a great crime between them. The supreme kindness of Providence would seem to be shewn when it suffers two loving spirits to pass linked in inseparable embrace through the awful portals of the unknown world. Could we anticipate such a lot with certainty, Death would lose half its terrors and all its sadness.

And again, another painful doubt is, How shall we recognize our friends in a disembodied or re-embodied state? Suppose that we both live again and meet again, how shall we be sure that, in some strange glorified form which passes us by all unwittingly and unrecognized, we shall not miss the being whom we would

traverse half eternity to find?

These are the anxious,

but after all somewhat childish, questions which the

restlessness of severed affection naturally suggests. But in truth we are quite as sure of re-union with our beloved ones, and of mutual recognition, as of the immortal life itself. As we have just observed, the ground of our belief in that Life is the same which guarantees the restoration of Love, and therefore, implicitly, some sure method of re-union. How it is to be brought about is the concern of Him who will lead us into that unseen Land partly for that very purpose. Perhaps we may most readily conceive of it by supposing (what is for all other reasons most probable) that in another life we shall be indefinitely more free than we are now, more able to move and to communicate through space, and having perhaps no physical wants, being at length disenthralled from the endless Liliputian cords which bind us here and often keep apart the tenderest friends. And again, as to the mutual recognition of departed spirits, the question really is not, How should we know—but, How should we not know-the one who has been soul of our soul, in any form, or in formless spiritual existence? Even through the thick veil of the flesh we are always dimly conscious of the presence of Love. One sympathizing heart amid a crowd of enemies makes itself felt and gives strength unspeakable. To suppose that we could ever at any time be brought into contact with the spirit which has been nearest to our own, and not recognize it under any disguise, is wholly gratuitously to doubt our instincts. But why should we even postulate that a disguise of any kind is to be antici