‘gone before.' An unselfish and magnanimous person cannot be solaced, in parting with mortal companions and human sufferers, by personal rewards, bliss, or anything of the sort. I used to think and feel all this before I became emancipated from the superstition; and I could only submit, and suppose it all right because it was ordained. But now the release is an inexpressible comfort; and the simplifying of the whole matter has a most tranquillising effect. Conscious as I am of what my anxiety would be if I were exiled to the antipodes—or to the garden of Eden if you will-for twenty or thirty years, I feel no sort of solicitude about a parting which will bring no pain. Sympathy with those who will miss me I do feel of course; yet not very painfully, because their sorrow cannot, in the nature of things, long interfere with their daily peace; but to me there is no sacrifice, no sense of loss, nothing to fear, nothing to regret. Under the eternal laws of the universe I came into being, and under them, I have lived a life so full that its fulness is equivalent to length. The age in which I have lived is an infant one in the history of our globe and of man; and the consequence is a great waste in the years and the powers of the wisest of us; and, in the case of one so limited in powers and so circumscribed by early unfavourable influences as myself, the waste is something deplorable. But we have only to accept the conditions in which we find ourselves, and to make the best of them; and my last days are cheered by the sense of how much better my later years have been than the earlier, or than in the earlier I ever could have anticipated. Some of the terrible faults of my character which religion failed to ameliorate, and others which superstition bred in me, have given way more or less since I attained a truer point of view; and the relief from all burdens, the uprising of new satisfactions, and the opening of new clearness-the fresh air of nature, in short, after imprisonment in the ghost-peopled cavern of superstition—has been as favourable to my moral nature as to intellectual progress and general enjoyment. Thus, there has been much in life that I am glad to have enjoyed; and much that generates a mood of contentment at the close. Besides that I never dream of wishing that anything were otherwise than as it is, I am frankly satisfied to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I neither wish to live longer here, nor to find life again elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it, and a mere

act of restricted human imagination and morality to conceive of it. It seems to me that there is not only a total absence of evidence of a renewed life for human beings, but so clear a way of accounting for the conception, in the immaturity of the human mind, that I myself utterly disbelieve in a future life. If I should find myself mistaken, it will certainly not be in discovering any existing faith in that doctrine to be true. If I am mistaken in supposing that I am now vacating my place in the universe, which is to be filled by another-if I find myself conscious after the lapse of life-it will be all right of course; but, as I said, the supposition seems to me absurd. Nor can I understand why anybody should expect me to desire anything else than this yielding up my place. If we may venture to speak, limited as we are, of anything whatever being important, we may say that the important thing is that the universe should be full of life, as we suppose it to be, under the eternal laws of the universe; and, if the universe be full of life, I cannot see how it can signify whether the one human faculty of consciousness of identity be preserved and carried forward, when all the rest of the organisation is gone to dust, or so changed as to be in no respect properly the same. In brief, I cannot see how it matters whether my successor be called H. M., or A. B., or Y. Z. I am satisfied that there will always be as much conscious life in the universe as its laws provide for; and that certainty is enough, even for my narrow conception, which, however, can discern that caring about it at all is a mere human view and emotion. The real and justifiable and honourable subject of interest to human beings, living and dying, is the welfare of their fellows surrounding them or surviving them. About this I do care, and supremely : in what way I will tell presently.1

It is difficult for minds brought up in the conviction of continuous or renewed existence in some altogether different sphere, some world of solved problems and of realised ideals, where every perplexity will be cleared up, every limitation melt away, every corner of space be visited, and every avenue to knowledge opened to

1 Vol. ii. pp. 435–9.

our purified vision during eternal years—it is difficult for such minds either to acquiesce in the cessation of conscious being and identity here described, or to thoroughly believe in the cheerfulness of this acquiescence. That so curiously active an intellect should be so content in the prospect of inaction; that one who so thirsted after science should be satisfied, having learned so little, never to learn more; that one so wakeful should thus welcome everlasting sleep; that one who to her last breath felt so intense an interest in the future of the race to which she was to belong no more, should yet be so happy in view of a nonexistence in which that future must be absolutely dark, seems all but incredible, would be quite incredible did we not know it to be the case with hundreds who yet calmly submit to the inevitable. But there is something behind yet harder to receive-that those whose blessedness in this world has lain, not in philosophy but in affection, not in the accumulation of knowledge but in the interchange of love, whose joy too has consisted rather in the lastingness than the mere fact of their unitedness, should, out of pure submission not to God's will' but to the laws of Nature,' be able, when the hour comes to die, willingly and even gratefully to utter the Vale vale, in æternum vale, to the sharers of their life on earth. This is unquestionably the harder may it not also be the higher-form of pious resignation ?—the last achievement of the ripened mind? The following is Harriet Martineau's last view of the world:

I am confident that a brighter day is coming for future generations. Our race has been as Adam created at nightfall. The solid earth has been but dark, or dimly visible, while the eye was inevitably drawn to the mysterious heavens above. There, the successive mythologies have arisen in the east, each a constellation of truths, each gloriously and fervently worshipped in its course; but the last and noblest, the Christian, is now not only sinking to the horizon, but paling in the dawn of a brighter time. The dawn is unmistakable; and the sun will not be long in coming up. The last of the mythologies is about to vanish before the flood of a brighter light.

With the last of the mythologies will pass away, after some lingering, the immoralities which have attended all mythologies. Now, while the state of our race is such as to need all our mutual devotedness, all our aspiration, all our resources of courage, hope, faith, and good cheer, the disciples of the Christian creed and morality are called upon, day by day, to 'work out their own salvation with fear and trembling,' and so forth. Such exhortations are too low for even the wavering mood and quacked morality of a time of theological suspense and uncertainty. In the extinction of that suspense, and the discrediting of that selfish quackery, I see the prospect, for future generations, of a purer and loftier virtue, and a truer and sweeter heroism than divines who preach such self-seeking can conceive of. When our race is trained in the morality' which belongs to ascertained truth, all ‘fear and trembling' will be left to children; and men will have risen to a capacity for higher work than saving themselves-to that of 'working out' the welfare of their race, not in 'fear and trembling,' but with serene hope and joyful assurance.

The world as it is is growing somewhat dim before my eyes; but the world as it is to be looks brighter every day.1

1 Vol. ii. pp. 460-2.

X.

VERIFY YOUR COMPASS.

Of the many ethical errors to which humanity is prone, is one which is curiously common, and yet against which, as curiously, we are little on our guard. It is difficult to correct because it is not easy to recognise. It is not that we are habitually given to follow our impulses, that error is too universal to be astonished at, or written about. It is that we are so apt to be proud of our failings, to worship our weaknesses, to canonise our defects, to mistake the beacon which should warn us off the rocks for the lighthouse which was intended to direct us into port-to enthrone in our blindness the very qualities and fancies and predilections which we ought sedulously to watch, and severely to imprison, to dress them up as idols and then worship them as gods-to glorify them with a hallowed name, and then to obey them with a devoted loyalty which is almost touching, and which would be admirable were it not so easy, so mischievous, and so tenacious. We take some Will of the Wisp as our guide in life, which is the mere miasma of our fancies and our passions, and follow it as if it were the Pillar of Fire which was sent to point our course amid the