The southern Aryans were absorbed in the struggles of thought: their past is the problem of creation, their future the problem of existence, and the present, which ought to be the solution of both, seems never to have attracted their attention, or called forth their energies. There never was a nation believing so firmly in another world, and so little concerned about this. Their condition on earth was to them a problem; their real and eternal life a simple fact. Though this is true chiefly before they were brought in contact with foreign conquerors, traces of this character are still visible in the Hindus as described by the companions of Alexander, nay, even in the Hindus of the present day. The only sphere in which the Indian mind finds itself at liberty to act, to create, and to worship is the sphere of religion and philosophy, and nowhere have religious and metaphysical ideas struck root so deeply in the mind of a nation as in India. History supplies no second instance where the inward life of the soul has so completely absorbed all the other faculties of a people. _India._ Our happiness here is but a foretaste of our blessed life hereafter. We must never forget that. We shall be called away, but we shall meet again. _Life._ We must have patience--and we all cling to life as long as there are those who love us here. Those who love us there are always ours. Nothing is lost in the world. How it will be, we know not, but if we have recognised the working of a divine wisdom and love here on earth, we can take comfort, and wait patiently for that which is to come. _Life._ Truly those who die young are blest. And shall we find them again such as they left us? Why not? It is really here on earth that those whom we love change, it is here that they die every day.... Where are all those bright joyous faces which we look at when we open our photograph books from year to year? On earth they are lost, but are they not treasured up for another life, where we shall be not only what we are from day to day, never the same to-morrow as we were yesterday, but where we are at once all that we can be--where memory is not different from perception, nor our wills different from our acts? We shall soon know--till then surely we have a right to be what we are, and to cling to our human hopes. The more human they are, the nearer the truth they are likely to be. _Life._ I believe in all our hopes we cannot be human enough. Let us be what we are--men, feel as men, sorrow as men, hope as men. It is true our hopes are human, but what are the doubts and difficulties? Are they not human too? Shall we meet again as we left? Why not? We do not know _how_ it will be so, but who has a right to say it _cannot_ be so? Let us imagine and hope for the best that, as men, we can conceive, and then rest convinced that it will be a thousand times better. _Life._