About seven years ago trouble for the first time entered this almost sacred household. A formidable consumption of one lung set in, threatening Mr. Call’s life. I have always believed that this was the long latent bequest of pious cruelties suffered in earlier life. Six years ago the case became hopeless, in its normal course, and the physicians said that the only possibility of recovery lay in a rare and difficult operation, imperilling the few months of life that might remain. The patient and his devoted wife resolved to incur this risk. A tube was inserted through the back; through it the pus was drained from the ulcerated lung; and little by little the tube was withdrawn, by infinitesimal degrees, as the healing process went on behind it. It was a painful anxious process of many weeks. At this time, when he was kept motionless, I marvelled at his cheerful spirit; though the slightest miscarriage in the wearisome operation might prove fatal, the patient was always serene. One of his physicians, by no means sure of the result, approached him on the subject of religion, and the condition of his soul. Soon after Mr. Call gave me an account of the conversation. In religious matters the doctor had dabbled where Call had dived; it ended in the physician’s being compelled to consider the condition of his own soul, and why he should be holding the religion of primitive man along with a science almost able to raise the dead. The wonderful operation was perfectly successful. Love had healed the young man’s broken heart; science had healed the mature man’s dying frame. The real miracles that supplant fictitious ones, and fulfil their fables, had been brought home to him. Five happy years were added to his life, during which he wrote the important work to be hereafter considered. On a summer evening last year he passed a pleasant evening at home, ended with a game of cribbage with his wife. During the night he died painlessly of heart disease; a _post mortem_ examination proved the lungs quite sound. My friend’s body and mind and affections were so combined in organic unity that his very ailments had for me symbolical significance. The unsuspected failure of the heart, for instance, seems a last sequel of the spiritual lesion given him by Dogma as a parting blow: its counterpart is to me visible in the fact that after writing this work he hardly had heart to publish it. The substance of it was completed in 1887; it was entirely finished in 1889; it lay in his library one year. His wife wished him to publish it—so she told me—but he thought the world would not be interested in his views. So deep had bigotry been able to send this man into the vale of Humiliation; and what an intellect was thus discouraged may be partly estimated by those who shall read this book on “Final Causes” published by his widow.