that ceaseless cry for more light; our delight in reverencing something better than ourselves, in ideal excellence; our intense sensibility to beauty and sublimity in nature-have these no final cause if God exists? Did He give us these powers of intellect and heart and spirit-powers which draw their fire from the fire of His eternal Thought and Will-only to resume them into Himself, to lure us on to work and then to quench our light; to make our hopes our hell, our noblest longings our deepest misery; to extinguish our exhaustless effort and curiosity in the degradation of an eternal sleep? Did He give us that love of the ideal, that delight in beauty, that tearful interest in His universe, only to make the grave and the wretched dust of our corruption the vain and miserable end? Has He written His scorn on all our aspirations after truth and light and holiness? Does He smile with contemptuous pity when men's hearts go up to Him in praise for the freshness and radiance of the spring? It is incredible. Either the atheist is right, or that immortality is untrue is absurd.

Look, too, at our triumph over death. When decay usurps the powers, and memory and life slip from us like a dream, it is then that our inner being most often rises into beauty and victory. And when the last act of the man is the assertion of his immortality, does the Lord of Righteousness contradict him in contempt? Is the spirit on the verge of its greatest loss at its very noblest moment of gain? does it reach with faithful effort, and thrilled with divine hope, the mountain peak, only to topple over the precipice of

annihilation?

Then those who believe in God are the

real fools of the world.

Our soul swells with reverence and love for those who held life as nothing in comparison with truthfulness to right; our soul is full of a sad condemnation of those who prefer to live when life is infamous; and yet if annihilation be true, God despises the nobility which we revere, and tacitly approves the infamy which we condemn. But this is incredible if we conceive of God as moral: it is hideous. Either, then, there is no God or annihilation is false.

Finally, it is true of a noble human life that it finds its highest enjoyment in the consciousness of progress. Our times of greatest pleasure are when we have won some higher peak of difficulty, trodden under foot some evil, refused some pleasant temptation for truth's sake, been swept out of our narrow self by love, and felt day by day, in such high labours, so sure a growth of moral strength within us, that we cannot conceive of an end of growth.

And when all that is most vigorous within us, does God-pure moral Being-does God say No? Is that insatiable delight in progress given to the insect of an hour? Does there seem to be a Spirit who leads us through life, conquering the years in us, redeeming us from all evil, bringing in us calm out of sorrow, faith out of doubt, strength out of trial; and when He has made us great of spirit like Himself, does He bury all that wealth of heart in nothingness?

What incredible thing is this ?—only credible if there be no God.

'MELENCOLIA?

'For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.'-Eccles. i. 18.

THE first impulse of many, on hearing this text, would be to give it a blunt contradiction. In their opinion, to increase knowledge is to increase pleasure, and their opinion is true. The pleasure of a thousand associations which wake pity, and kindle enthusiasm, and adorn the meanest place in which a great action has been done, is the reward of the historian's knowledge. The pleasure of discovery, of confirming theory by fact, of recreating the past earth and peopling its plains with life-if these accompany the common walk of one who knows even a little of natural philosophy, what deeper pleasures are his lot whose extensive knowledge can correlate the facts of many different spheres of science, and so harmonise the universe?

The pleasure of recognising the truth in the creations of great poets, of seeing into the secret springs of human action; of a fine and subtile tolerance, of playing on the hearts of men, of making society musical by bringing out of different temperaments accordant tones; of giving sympathy and directing help aright -these are the delights which come of a fine knowledge

of the human heart. In every region of man's activity, he that increaseth knowledge increaseth pleasure.

But is this the whole account of the matter? We may contradict the text as we please, but we do not in reality contradict it by asserting its opposite; we only complete it by asserting its other half. Both statements are half-truths. The whole truth of the thing is only found in the assertion of both. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth pleasure, and increaseth sorrow.

For in this world, pleasure and sorrow are two sisters who never live very far apart. Every pleasure which comes to the surface of the lake of life has had its own sorrow born with it in the depths below. Sooner or later, it too will come to the surface, and the bloodred lily of pain will replace the sunny lily of pleasure.

Knowledge and toil are the sources of joy, but they are also the sources of sorrow.

This is what Albert Dürer saw and engraved in his subtile print of Melencolia.' All of you are probably acquainted with it, and I take it with the passage in Ecclesiastes as my text, for the key-note of the whole is, he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

This would be especially true, in the artist's time, of those who were attempting to penetrate into the secrets of the physical world. For the true methods of scientific investigation had not been found; and though the alchemist and the natural philosopher, whose instruments are seen in the engraving, lit upon discoveries which seemed to open vistas of knowledge, they could not apply them, much less generalise them. At the end of a long life of work, they were no further than before;

the knowledge they had won served only to tantalise them.

The opening soliloquy of the great German poem may well express the intolerable melancholy which seized on all physical students of that time-the bitter consciousness of their fruitless work, their hopeless incapacity to know.

We are freed from that grief, for we are consciously advancing, having found true methods. But Dürer must have met many who had worn out their life, and sometimes their brain, in the service of the crucible. But the same profound pain besets us in the science of metaphysics and of theology, and for the same reason— the want of true methods. Many a thinker who has spent life in passionate labour to solve the problems of the soul, is seized, when the energy of the brain begins to fail, with the biting sorrow which is born of fruitless labour.

But the sorrow which we describe is never, when the man is true, a base, but a noble one. And so, Dürer's lonely figure, the genius of the labour and knowledge of the earth, is crowned with the laurel and winged with the mighty pens of thought and imagination.

Nor is this sorrow felt at all times, but at intervals when labour and thought are, for a time, forgotten, and in a moment of pause unconscious meditation sets in. It is the attitude of arrested thought in which the seated figure reposes, her cheek upon her hand, her compass idle, her book unread, her instruments scattered idly at her feet, her keys unused, her very wolf-hound, sym