To this question as to the truth of the assumption I shall return in the sequel. We have very briefly sketched the manner of its origination, and here we may leave this part of our subject with the remark that the belief in a future life, in a world unseen to mortal eyes, is not only coeval with the beginnings of the human race but is also coextensive with it in all its subsequent stages of development. It is in short one of the differential attributes of humanity. Man is not only the primate who possesses articulate speech and the power of abstract reasoning, who is characterized by a long period of plastic infancy and a corresponding capacity for progress, who is grouped in societies of which the primordial units were clans; he is not only all this, but he is the creature who expects to survive the event of physical death. This expectation was one of his acquisitions gained while attaining to the human plane of existence, and the interesting question in the natural history of man is whether it is to be regarded as a permanent acquisition, or is rather analogous to the organ that subserves, perhaps through long ages, an important but temporary purpose, after the fulfilment of which it dwindles into a rudiment neglected and forgotten. I do not overlook the existence of divers theological systems in which the attitude toward a future life is very different from that with which our Christian education has made us familiar. We sometimes hear such systems cited as exceptions to the alleged universality of the human belief in immortality. The Buddhist looks forward through myriads of successive sentient existences to a culminating state of Nirwana, which if not actual extinction is at least complete quiescence, the absolute zero of being. It hardly needs saying, however, that Buddhistic theology, though it may have arrived at such a zero through long flights of metaphysical reasoning, is nevertheless based in all its foundations upon the primitive belief in man's survival of death. Sometimes it is said that the Jews of the Old Testament times had no proper conception of immortality. It can hardly be maintained, however, that such stories as that of the conversation at Endor between the living Saul and the dead Samuel could emanate from a people destitute of belief in a life after death. In point of fact ancient Jewish thought abounds in traces of the primitive ghost-world. It is only by contrast with the glorious and inspiring Christian development of the belief in immortality that the earlier dispensation seems so jejune and meagre in its faith. There was little to arouse religious emotion in the dismal world of flitting shadows, the Sheol or Hades from which the Greek hero would so gladly have escaped, even to take the most menial position in all the sunlit world. Greek and Hebrew thought, in what we call the classic ages, stood alike in need of religious revival. The mythic lore of the Greek mind