Is belief in a future life generally holding its ground? My friend, the late Mr. Chamberlain, was by no means alone in resigning it. But if this life is all, how can we continue to hold our faith in divine justice? Mr. Chamberlain, as I said before, was evidently happy as well as good. His life, though short and regarded by him as ending in the grave, was to him so much gain, and proved beneficence on the part of the Author of his being. But if Mr. Chamberlain's theory is true, what is to be said in the case of the myriads to whom life has been wretchedness, ending perhaps in agony, often without the slightest responsibility on their part? For these unhappy ones would it be well, as Mr. Chamberlain holds it was for him, that there should be no hereafter? Is their being brought into existence only to suffer compatible with our faith in supreme benevolence? Is confidence in supreme justice compatible with the conviction that the tyrant and the tortured victims of his tyranny, alike, repose forever in the grave? Such, it is true, was the belief of the Hebrew; indication of any other belief, at all events, he has left us none, unless it be a faint glimpse of Sheol. The philosophy of Job halts accordingly. The Hebrew believed that he would be rewarded or punished in his posterity. Bishop Butler's grand argument for belief in the possibility of a future life goes upon the supposition that our conscious personality is distinct and separable from our perishable frame, and is in itself "indiscerptible," so that there is no reason why it should not survive the death of the body. To prove that it ever has survived the death of the body, or to show the mode of its survival, the Bishop does not attempt. But Butler lived long before Evolution and the general advance of physiology in these later days. Johnson, who was no sceptic, owned that he yearned for more light on the "spiritual world," by which he apparently meant immortality. Positivism tenders us endless existence as particles in a collective humanity, the "colossal man." But would there be much satisfaction in existence when individuality and personal consciousness had been lost? Would the prospect lead the ordinary man to work and suffer for generations to come, at all events, for any beyond the circle of the immediate objects of his love? What the end of the colossal man is to be seems undetermined. The Positivist Church has produced very good and beautiful lives, but its power as a religion to go alone would be more clearly seen were not Christianity at its side.