178 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



are a part of Nature, will force her ! She must grant us 

 this boon. She must grant the reunion, having made 

 the union so sweet. We adjure her by all that we have 

 enjoyed, by all that we have suffered : by our agonies at 

 the open grave, and at the dying bed ; by the might and 

 beauty of earthly love enjoyed ; yea, by the grief and 

 pain of earthly love disappointed and driven back upon 

 itself; and by the martyrs who have died for love of 

 man ; we demand a hereafter of reunion, of compensa- 

 tion ; we demand another life and stage for love. 



Alas ! alas ! What answer can we make to this 

 the eternal and terrible cry of the human heart ? For 

 we touch here at the primal and true source of the desire 

 for another life, and of all the arguments in favour of it. 

 We touch, too, at the real sting of death in the dread of 

 the eternal farewell, the fear that on the further side of 

 that forgetful shore our earthly love cannot revive or 

 live. "Love listens and paler than ashes," as Science 

 coldly replies to this logic of the affections : 



There is no hope, she tells us, of this future of reunion 

 any more than of that other future communion with the 

 good and wise. Nature is deaf and blind to such appeals 

 and arguments. Our most vehement wishes are impotent 

 to make Nature do this great and impossible thing. In 

 fact, she could not support such a prodigious and ever- 

 accumulating burden of life. For the animals, too, have 

 their affections ; and the dog wishes not to be severed from 

 his master ; so that the animals also must have a here- 

 after. But why go over again the old arguments ? In 

 a word, there would not be room in space for all the old 

 individual lives, and these are ever on the increase. 

 And again, Nature is cruel and regardless of our tears. 

 We can clearly see that things are not arranged so as to 

 meet our dearest wishes. Far otherwise. They are 



