"I think we live two lives. One of them is the life of this world, a thoroughly material and physical life. It is made up of toils and cares, burdens and pains. It grows out of the lives of others, is closely interwoven with them, and almost depends upon them for its existence. It attaches itself, sometimes, to one other life, as a vine attaches itself to the tree; sometimes it draws sustenance from many. It is, more or less, a superficial life, although it may accomplish great deeds and suffer heroic sufferings. It is of the earth, however, and never soars beyond it. No mystery attaches to it, for it is never called upon to perform mysterious deeds. It is comprised within the limits of threescore-and-ten, and has no past or future. Its mission belongs to the body, and when the body perishes, its mission ends. It has no recollections coming from any time before itself. It makes no prophecies of events in the future. "The other life we live in ourselves, and it is as mysterious as was the enigma of the Sphinx in the solemn silence of the desert. It takes no thought for the body, for it is the life of the soul. We cannot explain this life to others, for we do not understand it ourselves. It is a starry stranger, imprisoned within the corporeal bars and of mysterious origin and destiny. The fates who weave the fabric of our lives, and Atropos, who stands by with the unerring shears to sever the thread, have no power over it. Have we not lived this life before, and shall we not live it again when the light of this physical life is snuffed out like a farthing rush? If not, how is it that sometimes a sweet strain of music we have never heard before, a solemn voice in the wash of the waves, a perfume of some flower by the wayside, a tone in some human voice, will recall the dim image of something we are confident has never happened in this physical life? If not in this physical life, when and where did it happen? Have we ever lived before this life, and shall we live in it again after this body has decayed? Do we fulfil the mission of this world in the brief span of one life-time? If our life has no end, has it ever had a beginning? Has immortality or eternity a commencement? These are questions which occur to me, especially after those moments when, as I confidently believe, the soul leaves the body, and expands into space and embraces the infinite. I acknowledge that I cannot answer these questions. They are a part of the great mystery of life, which not only envelopes us, but all nature, in its cloud, and reaches, in its influences and its developments, from the grain of sand on the sea-shore up to the Throne of God.