upon this interesting problem, but today, all we know about eternal life is that we do not know anything about it.

I gazed (as oft I've gazed the same)
To try if I could wrench aught out of death,
Which could confirm, or shake, or make a faith,
But it was all a mystery. Here we are.

Yes, "Here we are," that is the great reality. There is cheer and hope and love even in the thought that the present hour is big with possibilities and sweet with memories. We need not think of the grave while our hearts pulse, and our blood is warm. It is queer how all believers in eternal life fear the grave and deepen its gloom. The thought of another life often impoverishes the life we now possess. Pining for the far away tomorrow, we lose the joy at our doors. Schiller describes a recluse at the bar of heaven, arguing that he must have great rewards because he has practiced great privations in life. He received a chilling answer. He is told that if he was foolish enough to let the real life slip through his fingers for a distant reward, there is no power that can make good his losses.

Real optimism springs from the thought that the present life may be made dearer and nobler, richer, and happier, and that we may so live as to leave behind us a long and fragrant memory:

The ripe products of a fertile brain
Will live and reproduce fair fruit again.

Even at its worst, death is an obligation we owe posterity, and the discharge of it should make no one a pessimist. At any rate, with Grant Allen, we can sing when we feel life's evening gathering about us:

Perchance a little light will come with morning; Perchance I shall but sleep.

Dr. Roberts admits, I believe, that he has no evidence to offer, except what he calls "the innate desire for another life." But if the desire for immortality proves another and an endless life, the desire for God, or Christ, or an infallible Revelation, ought to be sufficient to prove their existence. The Spiritualists, like the Orthodox, reason logically enough against beliefs not their own, but when it comes to their own dogmas they do not consult reason at all. I had left Calvinism because it failed to furnish the evidence for its claims, how then could I join the Spiritualists with no more evidence to substantiate their claims than that it was pleasant to desire another life? But there is the testimony of the mediums; yes, and there is the testimony of the apostles. If the latter is not enough to make Christianity true, the former is not enough to prove Spiritualism.

The comparatively few lines in which I have tried to tell my early experience as a Rationalist give but an imperfect idea of the effort required under circumstances of stress and anxiety, to keep my ship steady on the troublous waters to which the winds outside the harbor of Calvinism had driven me. In the words of Shelley, I had unfurled my sails to the tempest, and fear and alarm were to be my portion, until I became more accustomed to the swing of the sea, and could command the stars to point the way. sea is not like the sheltered harbor. to go out to sea, but not so easy to way there.

The open

It is easy find one's

During this period of mental struggle to work out a philosophy of life which should fill the vacuum created by the collapse of theology, I was frequently approached by well-meaning, but over-confident, teachers who, in their own opinion, at any rate, had completely and satisfactorily reconciled religion with Reason. Nearly every mail brought me letters recommending some publication which would answer all my difficulites as it had theirs. Not a few of my would-be helpers went to the trouble of calling on me with the same object in view. I shall only speak here of one of the books which was supposed to have untied all the knots, divine and human, which have ever perplexed the brain of man. The book came to me highly recommended. Even Presi

dent Eliot of Harvard had publicly endorsed it. While it was many years after the period I am now writing of, that my attention was called to this book, nevertheless, it is because the book is typical of the efforts to make Reason approve of the fundamentals of the popular faith, that I reproduce here what I said of it at the time:

Balance is the name of a little book with a great aim. Its author, Mr. Orlando Smith, sets out as a new Columbus to discover not another earth, but another truth, which shall give to all known truths new meaning and worth. This truth, he believes, he has discovered, and christens it, "The Fundamental Verity." Lucid illustrations are massed together with telling effect, to show that Nature is equipped with a self-curative genius which makes discord an impossibility. "That which is overdone in one direction is underdone equally in an opposite direction. This rhythm, this equivalence which pulls the pendulum in one direction as far as it pushes it in another is the Fundamental Verity, which, if grasped as universal and infallible, will remove from our shoulders what Shakespeare calls "the weary weight of all this unintelligible world," and bring Religion and Science, the two gladiatorial contestants in the modern arena, to replace their quarrelous weapons, with which they have given and received gashes deep and bloody, with the olive branch of peace and concord.

Having undertaken to demonstrate that the physical world is in the embrace of laws which forever evolve order out of confusion, and that Balance is supreme in every detail of life, from the most momentous to the most minute, that throughout the length and breadth of the universe the account balances perfectly; and that Nature has no failures, and bad debts; that Balance forbids wrong, such for instance as the victory of one force over another, the author believes he has found in this law the unanswerable demonstration for the existence of a Supreme Being who is the author of Balance in the universe and of the immortality of the soul. Thus, having given to these two ambitious propositions a new front, he concludes he has reconciled Religion with Science.

It is quite easy to reconcile enemies if they let you interpret their differences to suit yourself. Mr. Smith defines both Religion and Science with a view to reconciliation, and it is no wonder that they stop quarreling immediately.

Even in Mr. Orlando Smith's religion, there is an element of the supernatural, a deus ex machina-who from the eternities rules the world and is pledged to see that in the end right shall prevail. This is theology and not science.

Mr. Smith starts by trying to prove that Nature is just, orderly, and its accounts are always perfect, and then, unfortunately enough, he drags