Is our life a mere fortuitous and evanescent thing? Is consciousness a mere symptom of matter under certain conditions? Do we begin and end? Are the intense emotions and attachments, the joys and sorrows of life, the agonies of loss, the hungering love with which we surround the faces, the voices, the forms of those we love, the chords which vibrate in us at the thought of vanished days, and places we have loved—the old house, the family groups assembled, the light upon the quiet fields at evening, the red sunset behind the elms—all those purest, sweetest, most poignant memories—are these all unsubstantial phenomena like the rainbow or the dawn, subjective, transitory, moving as the wayfarer moves? Who can tell us? Some would cast themselves upon the Gospel—but to me it seems that Jesus spoke of these things rarely, dimly, in parables—and that though He takes for granted the continuity of existence, He deliberately withheld the knowledge of the conditions under which it continues. He spoke, it is true, in the story of Dives and Lazarus, of a future state, of the bosom of Abraham where the spirit rested like a tired child upon his father’s knee—of the great gulf that could not be crossed except by the voices and gestures of the spirits—but will any one maintain that He was not using the forms of current allegory, and that He intended this parable as an eschatological solution? Again He spoke of the final judgment in a pastoral image. [Sidenote: IDENTITY] Enough, some faithful souls may say, upon which to rest the hope of the preservation of human identity. Alas! I must confess with a sigh, it is not enough for me. I see the mass of His teaching directed to life, and the issues of the moment; I seem to see Him turn His back again and again on the future, and wave His followers away. Is it conceivable that if He could have said, in words unmistakable and precise, “You have before you, when the weary body closes its eyes on the world, an existence in which perception is as strong or stronger, identity as clearly defined, memory as real, though as swift as when you lived—and this too unaccompanied by any of the languors or failures or traitorous inheritance of the poor corporal frame,”—is it conceivable, I say, that if He could have said this, He would have held His peace, and spoken only through dark hints, dim allegories, shadowy imaginings. Could a message of peace more strong, more vital, more tremendous have been given to the world? To have satisfied the riddles of the sages, the dream of philosophers, the hopes of the ardent—to have allayed the fears of the timid the heaviness of the despairing; to have dried the mourner’s tears—all in a moment. And He did not! What then _can_ we believe? I can answer but for myself. I believe with my whole heart and soul in the indestructibility of life and spirit. Even _matter_ to my mind seems indestructible—and matter is, I hold, less real than the motions and activities of the spirit.