Is it not almost ludicrous to suggest that that communal instinct will cease to play, if the hope of individual reward after death is withdrawn from the human race? Will man--because he is nobler than the beast, because at his best he does things more altruistic, more self-sacrificing, more self-forgetting, more self-transcending than any of these--do less nobly because he envisages destiny, which (if he see it as destiny) he will see as the logical outcome of evolutionary law? It is possible, it is even probable, that all phases of theological thought have had their use in giving direction and stimulus to the human brain; if they have done nothing but stimulate rebellion against obscurantist authority they have had value of a positive kind. But we may go even further than this, for “everything possible to be believed,” says Blake, “is an image of truth.” And under many a concept, distorted by ignorance or guile, has lain a germ of the true life which draws man on to communal ends. In time that germ puts off the husk that seemed once (perhaps in some cases actually was) the protective armoury through which alone it could survive for the use of a later day. But though old reasons have been shed, the essential value has not changed; and often it is less by logic and reason than by the strong and subtle links of association that we preserve what is good of past credulities. The doctrine of conscious immortality, however much belittled by its appeal to selfish individualism, has done a work for the human race. It has held the germ of an ideal for unity which is receiving a more universal interpretation to-day than the earlier theologians would ever have allowed, or than man, in his then stage of development, could have thought it worth while to hand on to his intellectual heirs. Perhaps only because he conceived it in just such a form have its values been preserved. I am reminded in this connection of the method by which the wild swine of the New Forest were taught to obey the voice of the horn by means of which the swine-herd, called them back each night from their free roaming in the forest. The way he did it was this. Having first formed his herd, some four or five hundred strong, he penned them in a narrow space where water and warm shelter were to be found; and there, in the allotted enclosure, according them no liberty, he fed them daily to the sound of the horn. Food and music became a sort of celestial harmony to pig’s brain--when they heard the one, good reason was given them for expecting the other. Presently, in a well-fed condition, they were set free to roam; and being full and satisfied they did not roam far; and at night the horn sounded them back to an ample meal, and continued to sound while again they ate and were satisfied.