26 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



1 1 null, too, because, in dealing with a thesis which 

 it is specially the temptation and the practice to 

 handle as a theme for declamation, he has so 

 written as to force his antagonists to treat it 

 argumentatively and searchingly as well. Sonic 

 gratitude, moreover, is due to the man who had 

 the moral courage boldly to avow his adhesion to 

 the negative view, when that view is not only in 

 the highest degree unpopular, but is regarded for 

 the most part as condemnable into the bargain, 

 and when, besides, it can scarcely fail to be pain- 

 ful to every man of vivid imagination and of 

 strong affections. It is to his credit also, I vent- 

 ure to think, that, holding this view, he has put 

 it forward, not as an opinion or speculation, but 

 as a settled and deliberate conviction, maintain- 

 able by distinct and reputable reasonings, and to 

 be controverted only by pleas analogous in char- 

 acter. For if there be a topic within the wide 

 range of human questioning in reference to which 

 tampering with mental integrity might seem at 

 first sight pardonable, it is that of a future and 

 continued existence. If belief be ever permis- 

 sible — perhaps I ought to say, if belief be ever 

 possible — on the ground that " there is peace and 

 joy in believing," it is here, where the issues are 

 so vast, where the conception in its highest form 

 is so ennobling, where the practical influences of 

 the Creed are, in appearance at least, so benefi- 

 cent. But faith thus arrived at has ever clinging 

 to it the curse belonging to all illegitimate pos. 

 sessions. It is precarious, because the flaw in its 

 title-deeds, barely suspected perhaps and never 

 acknowledged, may any moment be discovered ; 

 misgivings crop up most surely in those hard and 

 gloomy crises of our "lives when unflinching confi- 

 dence is most essential to our peace; and the 

 fairy fabric, built up not on grounded conviction 

 but on craving need, crumbles into dust, and 

 leaves the spirit with no solid sustenance to rest 

 upon. 



Unconsciously, and by implication, Mr. Harri- 

 son bears a testimony he little intended, not, in- 

 deed, to the future existence he denies, but to the 

 irresistible longing and necessity for the very be- 

 lief he labors to destroy. Perhaps no writer has 

 more undesignedly betrayed his conviction that 

 men will not and cannot be expected to surrender 

 their faith and hope without at least something 

 like a compensation ; certainly no one has ever 

 toiled with more noble rhetoric to gild and illumi- 

 nate the substitute with which he would fain per- 

 suade us to rest satisfied. The nearly universal 

 craving for posthumous existence and enduring 

 consciousness, which he depreciates with so harsh 



a scorn, and which he will not accept as offering 

 even the shadow or simulacrum of an argument 

 for the Creed, he yet respects enough to recognize 

 that it has its foundation deep in the framework 

 of our being, that it cannot be silenced, and may 

 not be ignored. Having no precious metal to pay 

 it with, he issues paper-money instead, skillfully 

 engraved and gorgeously gilded to look as like 

 the real coin as may be. It is in vain to deny 

 that there is something touching and elevating in 

 the glowing eloquence with which he paints the 

 picture of lives devoted to efforts in the service 

 of the race, spent in laboring, each of us in his 

 own sphere, to bring about the grand ideal he 

 fancies for humanity, and drawing strength and 

 reward for long years of toil in the anticipation 

 of what man will be when those noble dreams 

 shall have been realized at last — even though we 

 shall never see what we have wrought so hard to 

 win. It is vain to deny, moreover, that these 

 dreams appear more solid and less wild or vague 

 when we remember how close an analogy we may 

 detect in the labors of thousands around us who 

 spend their whole career on earth in building up, 

 by sacrifice and painful struggles, wealth, station, 

 fame, and character, for their children, whose en- 

 joyment of these possessions they will never live 

 to witness, without their passionate zeal in the 

 pursuit being in any way cooled by the discour- 

 aging reflection. Does not this oblige us to con- 

 fess that the posthumous existence Mr. Harrison 

 describes is not altogether an airy fiction? Still, 

 somehow, after a few moments spent in the thin 

 atmosphere into which his brilliant language and 

 unselfish imagination have combined to raise us, 

 we — ninety-nine out of every hundred of us at the 

 least — sink back breathless and wearied after the 

 unaccustomed soaring amid light so dim, and 

 craving, as of yore, after something more per* 

 sonal, more solid, and more certain. 



To that more solid certainty I am obliged to 

 confess, sorrowfully and with bitter disappoint* 

 ment, that I can contribute nothing — nothing, I 

 mean, that resembles evidence, that can properly 

 be called argument, or that I can hope will be re- 

 ceived as even the barest confirmation. Alas ! 

 can the wisest and most sanguine of us all bring 

 anything beyond our own personal sentiments to 

 swell the common hope ? We have aspirations 

 to multiply, but who has any knowledge to enrich 

 our store ? I have of course read most of the 

 pleadings in favor of the ordinary doctrine of the 

 future state ; naturally also, in common with all 

 graver natures, I have meditated yet more ; but 

 these pleadings, for the most part, sound to anx- 



