Belief in God, and the immortality of the soul, and the compensations of a future life tend to maintain social order and moral rectitude, by enabling men to endure the trials and injustice of this world in the hope of ample compensation in the hereafter. Man steps forth on this revolving globe not of his own volition, but is sent here by some mysterious power on some inscrutable mission to fulfill some divine purpose. He comes as a spiritual wayfarer under sentence of death. Not death to the spirit, but to the transient habiliments of earth-dust he gathers round his invisible spiritual form. When he arrives and gathers his reasoning powers to scan the narrow horizon of his life, he is beset by perplexing problems of poverty, disease, sorrow, sin and death. The "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" often overwhelm him, and he discovers at last that the law of life is the law of growth and development; and all these struggles and trials are intended to evolve character and purify and ennoble the soul. That this is the seed time and nursery of existence preparatory to the harvest of eternal life when he shall drop this overcoat of atoms and be transplanted to the self-luminous bosom and unfading joys of the perfected and celestial sun-worlds. Here he sees incompleteness, fragmentary careers, tragedies, injustice, griefs and farewells, and he hungers for knowledge. His quenchless spirit seeks to penetrate the mysteries of the universe, and comprehend time and eternity, and in agony of soul he asks the age-old question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" Then, if he turn not to the pages of sacred writ for an answer, he will find written on the living pages and animated forms of all nature the promise of another life. He will find it in the returning verdure of spring, in the unfading light of the eternal stars, in the ever-changing beauty of the bending skies, in the mysterious impulse of the untaught birds of the air who start on their vast migrations from the frozen seas of the north to the summer-lands of the sunny south; in the tropic fish, who seek their spawning nests in the clear, cool rivers of the north. The bear and lion, the tiger and elephant, the bees and the insects of a summer day, all have the longings of their natures satisfied. Why should man be an exception? If the Creator of all keeps faith with all other creatures, why not with man? "As something must have been eternal," says Prof. Wright, "it is easier to suppose it was an intelligent, designing mind which was uncreated from the beginning, and which has brought the universe into being with all its uniformity of laws and complexity of adaptation than to suppose that the eternal substance was matter out of which has come the orderly universe as we know it, with its high grades of intelligence in animals and man.