“Nor need you. The witness is in yourself.”
“I do not understand you.”
“Have not all men, at all times and everywhere desired to know what is to be their condition after death? Does not every barbarous people harbor [pg 97]the conviction that there is a future life? Do not you civilized Romans, though you have no evidence, act as though there were such a life, and testify thereto on your monumental cenotaphs?”
“I allow all that. But what of it?”
“How comes it that there should be such a conviction based on no grounds whatever, but a vague longing, unless there were such a reality provided for those who have this desire in them? Would the Creator of man mock him? Would He put this hunger into him unless it were to be satisfied? You have eyes that crave for the light, and the light exists that satisfies this longing! You have ears that desire sounds, and the world is full of voices that meet this desire. Where there is a craving there is ever a reality that corresponds with and gives repose to that desire. Look,” said the bishop, and pointed to the water in which were reflected the stars that now began to glitter in the sky. “Do you see all those twinkling points in the still water? They correspond to the living luminaries set above in the vault. You in your soul have these reflections—sometimes seen, sometimes obscured, but ever returning. They answer to realities in the celestial world overhead. The reflections could not be [pg 98]in your nature unless they existed in substance above.”
“There is a score of other things we long after in vain here.”
“What things? I believe I know. Purity, perfection, justice. Well, you do not find them here entire—only in broken glints. But these glints assure you that in their integrity they do exist.”
A boat was propelled through the water. It broke the reflections, that disappeared or were resolved into a very dust of sparkles. As the wavelets subsided, however, the reflections reformed.
Castor walked up and down beside Æmilius in silence for a few turns, then said:—
“The world is full of inequalities and injustices. One man suffers privation, another is gorged. One riots in luxury at the expense of the weak. Is there to be no righting of wrongs? no justice to be ever done? If there be a God over all, He must, if just—and who can conceive of God, save as perfectly just?—He must, I say, deal righteous judgment and smooth out all these creases; and how can he do so, unless there be a condition of existence after death in which the wrongs may be redressed, the evil-doers be punished, and tears be wiped away?”