that death is near, reaches out for help or at least some knowledge of his future. He sends for his physician, who cannot promise him anything--cannot number the days or hours of his remaining life; for his lawyer, who cannot assure him beyond all doubt that his will can be made to endure for a single day beyond his death. At last, he sends for a minister of God--and what says the spiritual expert? Perhaps he represents that old, old organization, whose history stretches back for centuries through the dark ages to the borders of the brilliancy beyond; that old hierarchy that claims to hold all spiritual power to which man may appeal with reasonable hope. What says to the dying man this representative and heir of the accumulated spiritual research and culture of the past? He may with honesty say, 'Hope;' but if he says more than Hope, he does it as the blind might sit and guide by signs through unknown labyrinths the blind. All this is true; but the fact that the learned professions have come into existence, and continue to live and draw from the masses their material support--a tax greater in amount than the income of the nations--shows that they meet, and genuinely meet, a demand. I say genuinely, for 'You cannot fool all the people all the time.' And so, my young friend, this poor man Peters wants me. Later, if there is time, he will want the representative of the religion which he professes, or which he remembers that his mother or his father professed. I shall stand by his side and place my hand upon his throbbing brow--and he will hope, and not despair. Who knows whether or not our hope and our faith have power in some strange way to link the present to the future, carrying forward the spirit-seed to soil in which it blooms in splendor through eternity? As Byron says, 'How little do we know that which we are, How less what we may be.' But here we are; and I know by the face of that old neighbor-woman looking from the doorway there that our man still lives."