For consider to what violent storms man is exposed in the voyage of life, what variety there is in his natural endowments, what incongruity between education and position in life. It is easy for the favorite of fortune to keep in the right path; temptation, at any rate to crime, hardly reaches him; how hard, on the other hand, is it for the hungry, the uneducated, the passionate man to refrain from evil. To all this due weight will be given in the last judgment, when guilt and innocence are put in the balance, and thus mercy will become justice, two conceptions which generally exclude one another. It is harder to think of nothing than of something; when the something is once given, harder to imagine cessation than continuance. This earthly life cannot possibly be an end in itself. We did not ask for it; it was given to us, imposed upon us. We must be destined to something higher than a perpetual repetition of the sad experiences of this life. Shall those enigmas which surround us on all sides, and for a solution of which the best of mankind have sought their whole life long, never be made plain? What purpose is served by the thousand ties of love and friendship which bind past and present together, if there is no future, if death ends all? But what can we take with us into the future? The functions of our earthly garment, the body, have ceased; the matter composing it, which even during life was ever being changed, has entered into new chemical combinations, and the earth enters into possession of all that is her due. Not an atom is lost. Scripture promises us the resurrection of a glorified body, and indeed a separate existence without limitation in space is unthinkable; yet it may be that this promise implies nothing more than the continued existence of the individual, as opposed to pantheism. We may be allowed to hope that our reason, and with it all the knowledge that we have painfully acquired, will pass with us into eternity; perhaps, too, the remembrance of our earthly life. Whether that is really to be wished is another question. How if our whole life all our thoughts and actions should some day be spread out before us and we became our own judges, incorruptible and pitiless? But, above all, the emotions must be retained by the soul, if it is to be immortal. Friendship does indeed rest on reciprocity, and is partly an affair of the reason; but love can exist though unreturned. Love is the purest, the most divine spark of our being. Scripture bids us before all things love God, an invisible, incomprehensible Being, who sends us joy and happiness, but also privation and pain. How else can we love Him than by obeying His commandments, and loving our fellow-men, whom we see and understand? When, as the Apostle Paul writes, faith is lost in knowledge, and hope in sight, and only love remains, then we hope, not without reason, to be assured of the love of our merciful Judge. COUNT MOLTKE. Creisau, October, 1890.