the last he torments himself with inventions to outwit or subdue Nature, and in the end dies, utterly defeated. His civilizations, his dynasties, his laws, his manners, his customs, are all doomed to destruction and oblivion as completely as an ant-hill which exists one night and is trodden down the next. Forever and forever he works and plans in vain; forever and forever Nature, the visible and active Spirit of God, rises up and crushes her puny rebel. There must be good reason for this ceaseless waste of human life,--this constant and steady obliteration of man’s attempts, since there can be no Effect without Cause. It is, as if like children at a school, we were set a certain sum to do, and because we blunder foolishly over it and add it up to a wrong total, it is again and again wiped off the blackboard, and again and again rewritten for our more careful consideration. Possibly the secret of our failure to conquer Nature lies in ourselves, and our own obstinate tendency to work in only one groove of what we term ‘advancement,’--namely our material self-interest. Possibly we might be victors if we would, even to the very vanquishment of Death! So many of us think,--and so thought one man of sovereign influence in this world’s affairs as, seated on the terrace of a Royal palace fronting seaward, he pondered his own life’s problem for perhaps the thousandth time. “What is the use of thinking?” asked a wit at the court of Louis XVI. “It only intensifies the bad opinion you have of others,--or of yourself!” He found this saying true. Thinking is a pernicious habit in which very great personages are not supposed to indulge; and in his younger days he had avoided it. He had allowed the time to take him as it found him, and had gone with it unresistingly wherever it had led. It was the best way; the wisest way; the way Solomon found most congenial, despite its end in ‘vanity and vexation of spirit.’ But with the passing of the years a veil had been dropped over that path of roses, hiding it altogether from his sight; and another veil rose inch by inch before him, disclosing a new and less joyous prospect on which he was not too-well-pleased to look.