38 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
that alone does not prove that we shall be personally judged 
by them. Bnt he must be a very bold man who ventures to 
pronounce that, instead of that ledger being ever opened for 
business and a final settlement of accounts, it will be 
destroyed at the end of the world, which must come by cold 
if it is not anticipated by heat, science predicting one and 
revelation the other; so that the atheistic vision of the per- 
petual improvement of “Humanity” is a baseless fabric ; 
and it is men and not humanity whose future has to be 
considered, Continuity” is one of the accepted doctrines 
of the philosophy of experience or induction, and is com- 
bined in a famous book with “ Correlation,” or the per- 
manence of the sum of all forces in the universe. Why 
are we to take for granted that the responsibility which is 
evidently a universal law of nature and society is to be 
broken and stopped before its work is half done? The onus 
probandi lies with those who say it will. If they answer that 
we see it broken every day by death, I reply that we see 
nothing of the kind. _ All we see is that people die and pass 
out of our sight. J do not pretend to prove without revela- 
tion what happens to them then. But those who deny that 
anything will, and teach men so, and act on that belief, 
contrary to the laws of every moral philosophy that has ever 
been generally received, have no kind of evidence that they 
are right nor any a priori reason for believing it. 
This, like all such questions, up to the fundamental one of 
creation, admits of only two alternative answers, and of no 
middle one. Neither of them can be given with the certainty 
of either mathematics or induction from all the known 
instances, seeing that none are known. ‘Therefore they can 
only be decided, or rather acted on, according to the balance 
of probabilities. In the case of creation the two alternatives 
are (1) that the world made itself, mcluding all the laws of 
nature, which means (as I have shown elsewhere) the 
spontaneous resolution of every atom in the universe always 
to behave towards every other in a certain way whenever 
they have the opportunity; and (2) that all the laws of 
nature were made and are maintained by one supreme 
power. The latter theory needs no explanation. The 
former needs one so much yet that no half dozen philoso- 
phers, whose names are known to the world, have agreed on 
any. I showed in my first paper here* that the most popular 
* “How did the World Evolve Itself ?” 1884, to which my paper “On 
the Beauty of Nature,” in 1887, was supplemental, 
