Theoretically it should produce noble characters; practically it has produced the noblest, if the _Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius were really written by him and not by some monk in the Middle Ages. If we follow the teaching of Stoicism we shall, when we come to die, at least have the consolation that we have done our duty; and if we realize the full meaning of “duty” in the modern world to include duty done kindly and generously as well as faithfully, we shall be living as nearly to the ideals laid down by Christ as is possible to human nature, and we shall assuredly have nothing to fear. Anæsthesia gives some faint hint as to the possibility of a future life. It is believed that chloroform and ether abolish consciousness by causing a slight change in the molecular constitution of nervous matter, as for instance dissolving the fatty substances or lipoids. If so minute a change in the chemistry of nervous matter has the power of totally abolishing consciousness, how can the mind possibly survive the much greater change which occurs in nervous matter after corruption has set in? Nor has there ever been any proof that there can be consciousness without living nervous matter. One turns to the spiritualistic evidence offered by Myers, Conan Doyle, Oliver Lodge, and other observers, but after carefully studying their reports one feels inclined to agree with Huxley that spiritualism has merely added a new terror to death, for, according to the spiritualists, death appears to transform men into idiots who on earth were known to be able and clever, and the marvel is not the miracles which they report, but that clever men should be found to believe them. An even more remarkable marvel than the marvel of Lodge and Conan Doyle was the marvel of John Henry Newman, who, a supremely able man, living at the time of Darwin, Huxley, and the vast biological advancement of the Victorian era, was yet able in middle life to embrace the far from rationalistic doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. That he was tempted to do so by the opportunity which his action gave him of becoming a prince of the Church is too ridiculous an assumption to stand for a moment. The man _believed_ these things, and believed them with greatness, nobility, and earnestness; when he ’verted he was forty-four years of age, and it was not for about thirty years that he was created a cardinal. The only explanation that can be given is that we have not yet fathomed the depths of the human mind; there is a certain type of mind which appears to see things by what it calls intuition and is not open to reason on the basis of evidence or probability.