"I don't know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on this matter," he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him. "You didn't go to the Book for the point you made _against_ me. But if you go to it now for the point I want you to make _for_ me, what are you going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different from the life we have here? I accept it all,--all that the Old Testament says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on this point?" "Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is everything to me." "It isn't to me!" cried the old man. "We are in the keeping of the divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly happy? It's because we're not conditioned for happiness here; and how are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience, there just as we do here." "There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience," Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void. "Like what?" Hilbrook demanded. "I've been trying to figure it, and I can't. I should like you to try it. You can't imagine a new passion in the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear! You can't add to them or take away from them." The old man dropped from his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. "I wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven't been over the whole ground. Maybe there's some principle that I've missed." He hitched his chair closer to Ewbert's, and laid some tremulous fingers on the minister's sleeve. "If I've got to live forever, what have I got to live for?" "Well," said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, "let us try to make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there's light beyond it, if we can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience of it here?" "Have you seen a mother with her child?" Hilbrook retorted. "Yes, I know. But even that has some alloy of selfishness. Can't we imagine love in which there is no greed,--for greed, and not hate, is the true antithesis of love which is all giving, while greed is all getting,--a love that is absolutely pure?" "_I_ can't," said the old man. "All the love I ever felt had greed in it; I wanted to keep the thing I loved for myself."