The old, old needs of life are always with us, the necessity of consolation in grief and loss, of hope enough to keep us trudging along our path. Perhaps not even in its swift response to these great needs of the human being comes the profoundest proof of its supremacy. From the point of view of potential evolution, from the greatness and depth of its challenge, we know its greatness. Christianity, with the sting of its challenge for eternity, suggests enough of progress to satisfy the human soul once started on its way. What deeper appeal has ever come than the thought of endless destiny, bringing the awful necessity of living in the light of it? Not long since, I read in some journal an article in which a writer speaks wistfully of our lost hope in immortality, but adds that we do not so greatly mind, and that our children will mind still less. If this faith is indeed gone, what has happened to rob us of so great a hope, once entertained? How the demonstration of organic processes in the physical world, which has been the great achievement of our time, can be assumed to reach to that which is beyond sense is hard to say; it would need eternity to disprove the belief, as it needs eternity to prove it. When you try with finite means to define the infinite you make trouble for yourself, and perhaps rob the young of inherited hopes. If our children do not mind, it will show a phase of degeneracy in them, of willful shutting off of light and life already attained. We shall count them craven if they let go any high ideal once conceived, for that means inevitable retrogression; this should be held as the unforgotten and unforgettable hope of the race. What mortal, when the splendor of such a thought had dawned on him, could let it go? The endless possibility, the infinite opportunity for growth, the challenge for eternity,--who dare take it, and order his life in accordance with it? Again, this is the greatest of all idealisms in that it sets for the human being the hardest and the highest of all human tasks, self-sacrifice. The wonder of it, that across the old physical law of survival of the fittest by brute means, supreme, unchecked, unhindered two thousand years ago, could have crept the gleam of a higher law, strangely contradicting it,--the survival of that which is fittest in the individual, perhaps at the expense of the body. The greatest marvel in all the world’s history is that Christ could have been; that the very idea of soul, of human development transcending the physical in utter self-sacrifice, could have come into existence is proof enough of the divine. That teaching, so clear, so unmistakable, has been blurred and forgotten, as nation and individual have succumbed to the lesser law, but it still is there. Christianity left behind? It is millions of years ahead, so far ahead that it is still dim before our vision.