“A word you dropped the other day,” said the curate, “set me thinking of the note-worthy fact that belief in God and belief in immortality cease together. But I do not see the logic of it. If we are here without God, why may we not go on there without God? I marvel that I have heard of no one taking up and advocating the view. What a grand discovery it would be for some people--that not only was there no God to interfere with them, and insist on their becoming something worth being, but that they were immortal notwithstanding! that death was only the passage of another birth into a condition of enlarged capacity for such bliss as they enjoyed here, but more exalted in degree, perhaps in kind, and altogether preferable.” “I know one to whom the thought would not have been a new one,” said Polwarth. “Have you not come upon a passage in my brother’s manuscript involving the very idea?” “Not yet. I read very slowly and pick up all the crumbs. I wish we had had the book here. I should have so much liked to hear you read from it again.” The gate-keeper rose and went to his cabinet. “The wish is easily gratified,” he said. “I made a copy of it,--partly for security, partly that I might thoroughly enter into my brother’s thoughts.” “I wonder almost you lend the original then,” said Wingfold. “I certainly could not lend the copy to any man I could not trust with the original,” answered Polwarth. “But I never lent either before.”--He was turning over the leaves as he spoke.--“The passage,” he went on, “besides for its own worth, is precious to me as showing how, through all his madness, his thoughts haunted the gates of wisdom.--Ah! here it is! “‘About this time I had another strange vision, whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell. I thought, as oftener than once before, that at length I was dying. And it seemed to me that I did die, and awake to the consciousness of a blessed freedom from the coarser and more ponderous outer dress I had hitherto worn, being now clad only in what had been up to this time an inner garment, and was a far more closely fitting one. The first delight of which I was aware was coolness--a coolness that hurt me not--the coolness as of a dewy summer eve, in which a soft friendly wind is blowing; and the coolness was that of perfect well-being, of the health that cometh after fever, when a sound sleep hath divided it away and built a rampart between; the coolness of undoubted truth, and of love that has surmounted passion and is tenfold love.’ “He goes on to give further and fuller account of his sensations,--ventures even on the anticipated futility of an attempt to convey a notion of one of his new senses. I leave all that for your own reading, Mr. Wingfold.