The happiness of this venerable author, conscious that his life is closing, his work ended,—a happiness not derived from any hope of future reward, or even existence,—is a salient testimony of our time. In one of these recent addresses Renan says: “Let us die calmly, in the communion of humanity, the religion of the future.” The dying Voltaire was fed with a wafer, even while he ridiculed it. Renan partakes the communion of humanity, the religion of the future. It may appear cold comfort to the superstitious, for they comprehend not that to such a man the communion of humanity implies an eternal life. In one sense Renan lived not quite threescore years and ten; in another he lived ages on ages. By his mastery of Eastern and Oriental languages and literatures, by his studies of ancient and modern systems, he had familiarly dwelt among primitive tribes, with them set up their sacred dolmens, knelt at their altars, travelled with their migrations in India, Persia, Egypt, Syria, shared their pilgrimages from lower to higher beliefs, listened to their prophets, visited the home of Mary and Joseph, walked with the disciples, conversed with Jesus, witnessed the crucifixion, journeyed through the middle ages, reached the Renaissance, passed through Protestantism, gathered every spiritual flower of the nineteenth century. Such long experience of the past, such knowledge of the attractions of humanity,—predicting its fulfilments,—carry the thinker equally far into the future. Knowing the angles of convergence in time’s rising pyramid, he can calculate the apex, and look down from it. He is able to rejoice in realisations of ideals now mere tendencies. His immortality is present. Such to Renan meant that communion of humanity, into which he entered by patient studies, and by the devotion of his life to the spiritual essence of the world. And this vision sustained him in his last hour. And let me here say, that Renan’s optimism was not based in any belief in a superhuman providence, or any dynamic or compulsory destiny in nature. It was his faith in the heart and brain of man. In his last work he reminds youth that their efforts at new abstractions and theologies are idle: the new notions will follow the old into extinction. “Dear children,” he says—