TEE SOUL AXE FUTURE LIFE. 



perhaps, said enough. Maida died in October, 



1824, and is commemorated in a sculptured figure 



at the doorway of Abbotsford. His attached 



master wrote au epitaph on him in Latin, which 



he thus Englished : 



" Beneath the sculptured form which late you 

 wore, 

 Sleep soundly, Maida, at your master's door." 



It was a sad pang for Scott, when quitting 



home to seek for health abroad, and which k 

 did not find, to leave the pet dogs which survived 

 Maida. His last orders were, that they should 

 be taken care of. We may be permitted to join 

 in the noble eulogium pronounced on Scott by 

 Willie Laidlaw, who lived to mourn his loss, that 

 kindness of heart was positively the reigning 

 quality of Sir Walter's character l-^Ct&iiJUrj 

 Journal. 



THE SOUL AND EUTUBE LIFE. 



By FEEDEKIC HAERISO^. 



HOW many men and women continue to give 

 a mechanical acquiescence to the creeds, 

 long after they have parted with all definite the- 

 ology, out of mere clinging to some hope of a 

 future life, in however dim and inarticulate a 

 way ! And how many, whose own faith is too 

 evanescent to be put into words, profess a sov- 

 ereign pity for the practical philosophy wherein 

 there is no place for their particular yearning for 

 a heaven to come ! They imagine themselves to 

 be, by virtue of this very yearning, beings of a 

 superior order, and, as if they inhabited some 

 higher zone amid the clouds, they flout sober 

 thought as it toils in the plain below ; they coun- 

 sel it to drown itself in sheer despair or lake to 

 evil living; they rebuke it with some sonorous 

 household word from the Bible or the poets — 

 " Eat, drink, for to-morrow ye die " — " Were it 

 not better not to be?" And they assume the 

 question closed when they have murmured tri- 

 umphantly, l> Behind the veil — behind the veil." 



They are right, and they are wrong : right to 

 cling to a hope of something that shall endure 

 beyond the grave ; wrong in their rebukes to 

 men who in a different spirit cling to this hope 

 as earnestly as they. We too turn our thoughts 

 to that which is behind the veil. We strive to 

 pierce its secret with eyes, we trust, as eager and 

 as fearless ; and even it may be more patient in 

 searching for the realities beyond the gloom. 

 That which shall come after is no less solemn to 

 us than to you. We ask you, therefore: What 

 do you know of it? Tell us; we will tell you 

 what we hope. Let us reason together in sober 

 and precise prose. Why should this great end, 

 staring at all of us along the vista of each human 

 life, be forever a matter for dithyrambic hypoth- 



eses and evasive tropes ? What in the language 

 of clear sense does any one of us hope for after 

 death : what precise kind of life, and on what 

 grounds ? It is too great a thing to be trusted 

 to poetic ejaculations, to be made a field for 

 Pharisaic scorn. At least be it acknowledged 

 that a man may think of the soul and of death 

 and of future life in w r ays strictly positive (that 

 is, without ever quitting the region of evidence), 

 and yet may make the world beyond the grave 

 the centre to himself of moral life. He will give 

 the spiritual life a place as high, and will dwell 

 upon the promises of that which is after death as 

 confidently as the believers in a celestial resur-" 

 rection. And he can do this without trusting his 

 all to a, perhaps so vague that a spasm of doubt 

 can wreck it, but trusting, rather, to a mass of 

 solid knowledge, which no man of any school 

 denies to be true so far as it goes. 



I. 



Tiiere ought to be no misunderstanding at the 

 outset as to what we who trust in positive meth- 

 ods mean by the word " soul," or by the words 

 " spiritual," " materialist," and " future life." 

 We certainly would use that ancient and beauti- 

 ful word soul, provided there be no misconcep- 

 tion involved in its use. We assert as fully as 

 any theologian the supreme importance of spirit 

 ual life. We agree with the theologians that 

 there is current a great deal of real materialism 

 deadening to our higher feeling. And we deplore 

 the too common indifference to the world beyond 

 the grave. And yet we find the centre of our 

 religion and our philosophy in man and man's 

 earth. 



To follow out this use of old words, and to 



