But as evidence that they who follow the ethical obedience are in no wise insensible to the sterner aspects of life, we shall now pass on to say what in our judgment should be the religious attitude of man face to face with the inevitable certainty of death.

If we pause one moment to reflect on the physical aspect of death, it would only be to remark that it is as natural an occurrence as birth. In fact, as is obvious to the most superficial mind, birth and death are inextricably interwoven. The great life of the worlds is so one, so powerful, so omnipresent, that nothing can so utterly pass away as to give birth to nothing—no, not even the cremated remains which are blown to the four winds. The theory that death is a non-natural occurrence arbitrarily inflicted by the Deity in his anger at Adam's disobedience is no longer taught even in the nursery, because aeons upon aeons before man's advent hither death reigned supreme over sentient existence, and the bones of the doomed are in our museums to attest the fact. Nay, we have recovered the ice-embedded body of the mammoth, its stomach filled with undigested food, food it ate as far back as the glacial period, by which it was overtaken and frozen in its ice grave 200,000 years ago. The Roman sentinel, overwhelmed where he stood by the lava of Vesuvius, defiant of disaster in his inflexible devotion to duty, is not a surer proof of the natural fact of death than the mammoth that died in Alaska before man's appearance on the earth. The law of growth is the law of death. Life begins, it increases, it reaches its meridian, it begins to waver and then steadily to decline, till at length the bodily frame dissolves, and then—

That which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

It is so with all things, from a fungus to a giant of the forest, from a stone to a cluster of stars whose light takes 4000 years to reach us. It is only a question of time when our own sun shall set in impotence and rise again no more. All things are passing away, everything is unstable, change is at the heart of all. How solemn, how true the words, whose melancholy haunts the more the memory dwells on them: "this world passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will endureth for ever"! As we said, the one changeless thing, beyond the doom of sun-stars and swarms of worlds, is the will of man nobly submissive to the Great Obedience of the Supreme Law—the Law of Justice and of Truth. That alone can never die.

Let us turn now to the ethical and religious aspect of that which we have seen to be in itself so natural, so inevitable.

In the first place, we conceive that it in no wise interrupts the progress of the individual life. Certainly the conditions under which existence maintains itself in that other state must be far other than those which obtain here, for there man is destitute of his bodily environment. The conditions of such a life are wholly unpicturable, wholly unimaginable, but not inconceivable. These are high matters, like the truths of sublimest philosophy, wherein it is impious to intrude with so inferior a faculty as imagination, and demand that an image or representation of a bodiless existence be presented to it. What picture does man make for himself of the force of gravitation, nay of the force which drives the crocuses out of the soil in spring? It is enough to know that the force is there; it is enough to know that a man's body is not his self. Surely every one who reflects must be conscious that his body is his, just like his clothes; and therefore not he, any more than the raiment wherewith he is covered. Foolish, then, is it to ask for pictures like children; let us be satisfied to know with the reason, which we alone of all earth-born creatures possess, that the body is not we but ours, and that we are not mere ephemerals, but are "going on and still to be".

Now these words of Tennyson exactly express our ethical teaching, that man is "ever going on and still to be," and that death, so far from putting a stop to the eternal progress, is but a stage, an incident in the journey, possibly—for we know so little of these matters—a very insignificant one. The theory commonly inculcated, certainly commonly held, is that the fact of death ushers in a perfect transformation scene, more wonderful than anything thought of or devised by man, nor should we be accounted irreverent did we describe the language of the book of Revelation as pantomimic in the exuberance of its splendour. All sorrow is supposed to cease as if by magic, the sun shines perpetually, it is eternal noon; the home of the blessed is a wondrous city, built four-square, whose streets are of pure gold, whose rivers are of crystal, and whose foundations are laid in precious stones. Sweetest songs of earth resound in the heavenly courts; yea, even musical instruments are there, and life would appear to be one prolonged religious service. Into this celestial blessedness departed souls enter new-born, and take their allotted places once and for ever; they never apparently move from them; they grow no better; there is no room for further development, nor possibility of deterioration, but a fixed and immovable moral status is, to all appearances, arbitrarily imposed upon them for evermore. The impression one gathers is, therefore, of a large and glorified amphitheatre, tiers rising above tiers into infinity, seats along them, each of which is tenanted by an individual elect spirit whose merits are precisely proportioned to its place.

Now that existence prolonged, I will not say into eternity, but into a week is the very reverse of inspiring. Of course, we are aware that Dean Farrar has as effectually explained away the Orientalisms of the Christian heaven as the Paganisms of the orthodox hell; we are ready to believe that the Apocalypse—which is held now not to be a Christian book at all, but a Jewish composition, edited and amended by a Christian hand—sets forth only figures and types of the great supernal blessedness. This we know, but our difficulty is not with the form but with the content, that is, with that which these hyperboles symbolise. It is fairly inconceivable to us that a matter which, according to the Churches, merely concerns the body, soon to be resolved into its component gases, should exercise so miraculous a transformation on the soul, or the real man. He did not die; his body did, and yet they would have us believe that that mere physical occurrence, that catastrophe of flesh and blood, means the subsequent and eternal stagnation of all psychical life; that men either go forthwith into scenes with which ninety out of a hundred would be wholly unfamiliar, or are thrust headlong into a subterraneous locality called Sheol, or the grave in Hebrew, the English equivalent of which is hell, the only difference being that, whereas the good can grow no better, the wicked can and do grow worse.

Doubtless, I shall be reminded that these teachings do not occur explicitly in the Thirty-nine Articles, any Church Confession, or a Papal Decree. That may very well be so, as regards them all, but there can be no doubt that the main assertion is accepted as dogmatically true by all Christian Churches—namely, that a wonderful and searching change does occur at the moment of death, whereby "the time of probation," as it is called, comes to an end, and all possibility of further "merit before God," or, as we should say, of ethical advancement, relentlessly cut off. To quote a letter of Cardinal Newman's, written in 1872 to the Rev. W. Probyn-Nevins, and published subsequently by him—in the Nineteenth Century of May, 1893—"The great truth is that death ends our probation, and settles our state for ever, that there is no passing over the great gulf". Amidst much that is uncertain, for instance, as to whether real devils are in hell, a real fire, and whether it be bright or dark, whether the appalling torments are ever mitigated, say on certain feasts of the Christian Church, such as Christmas Day and Easter, or whether eventually the pains ultimately die completely away and thus usher in that "happiness in hell" in which Mr. Mivart is, or was, so deeply interested five years ago—amidst all these highly debatable points, Newman pronounces one thing certain, that "death ends our probation," that "there is no passing over the great gulf".

Now, whence did he learn this strange teaching? How is he dogmatically certain of that one thing, while all the rest is in a haze? From stray texts, such as, "Whether the tree falleth to the north or the south, in whatsoever place it shall fall, there shall it lie"; or, from the parable of wise and foolish virgins, some of whom happened to be asleep, and awoke at the critical hour to find that during the long night-watch for the bridegroom their store of oil had become exhausted? Surely tropes and parables are a highly insecure foundation whereon to build such a momentous teaching. Certainly, it is gravely questionable whether any direct statement in the Hebrew or Christian writings can be adduced to support the common notion that bodily dissolution is a spiritual reagent, and ipso facto seals the destiny of a spiritual essence. Vast numbers of even Anglicans repudiate the notion in the name of theology and religion. We repudiate it in the name of reason, which was put into us for no other purpose, we know well, than to judge not only the statements Churches put forth, but the sacred documents on which they build them. We repudiate the notion in the name of that reason which shows us that the Infinite Mind, whose light and life we share, was millions of years preparing this earth for man's habitation, aeons of time so fashioning the course of things that a body might be prepared in which that mind which we call soul might energise; aeons of time so ordering the course of events that man should emerge one day from the savagedom and animalism of the past to enter upon the path of a progress which we believe to be endless. I say the reason which demonstrates this to us with a certitude which not the most intolerant bigotry dares to question to-day, tells us also that it is wholly preposterous that all that is left to man wherein to work out his own individual moral progress is the brief span of threescore years and ten, that after these days "few and evil," the chapter is closed, the book sealed for ever, and the status of man inexorably and unalterably determined.