is then materially altered. I may with reason entertain the hope that the event I long for has been decreed, and I may without presumption submit my desire to Him by whom alone it can be fulfilled, and from whose Spirit it may have received, in an illuminating, strengthening, and sustaining inspiration, some earnest of its accomplishment. To extend this reasoning to other expectations in which desire has taken the form of prayer would be very easy. If, for instance, the ground has been parched by drought, or, on the contrary, its most needful fruits have been injured by excessive rain, a favourable change in the weather would not be accounted a miracle. To hope for such a change cannot be deemed unreasonable; to long for it may become inevitable; to express our desire in words which acknowledge that the event is dependent upon His allruling Will is to act as becomes children of a Father in heaven, whose provident watchfulness over them demands their ever-grateful and trustful homage, and suggests the first of the considerations which claim attention from their anxious minds when they are asking, "What shall we eat?" or, "What shall we drink ? His Providence, having determined all events conformably with law and order, grants no one a dispensation from the plain and obvious duty of endeavouring to ascertain and to observe the rules He has ordained; it sanctions neither the idleness which casts upon Him in faith without labour the responsibility of supplying daily bread, nor the folly which resorts to Him in sickness, yet takes no heed to fulfil the conditions of health; but it authorizes and prescribes that irrepressible,

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patients to be prayed for having been inscribed on its cylinder, should be kept in motion a given number of hours daily for a specified period, such a proposal would not have been more irrational than that which was made, and, as a matter of course, unhesitatingly declined.

Matt. vi. 31.

that never-resting persuasion respecting His goodness and wisdom which, by every available method and in every possible way, asks from Him until it receives, seeks until it finds, and knocks until the door is opened.1

Matt. vii. 7, 8.

CHAPTER XI.

ESCHATOLOGICAL CONCLUSIONS.

“Έσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος. Πάντα γὰρ ὑπέταξεν ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ.”—I COR. xv. 26, 27.

I. THE nature and scope of the science treated of in this work have been sufficiently indicated in the foregoing chapters; but, for the due appreciation of its importance, its bearing upon the interest we have in the illimitable future needs a closer and more direct investigation than the course of my argument has hitherto permitted.

2. Although it may be truly affirmed that we are never absolutely certain what a day will bring forth, there can be no question as to the possibility of reasonable expectations, so long as we confine our view to the incidents of mortal life. Conjectures based upon observed coincidences and sequences are so frequently verified by events, and the confirmation thus afforded to those which have reference to certain classes of phenomena is of such a kind, as to leave no room for doubt that we have been provided with data available for prospective calculations, and that even confident prediction is admissible on the supposition that every factor is known of which account should be taken. If, for instance, oxygen and hydrogen gases are mixed, no hesitation, is felt in prophesying that, on the introduction of a

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flame or spark, an explosion will take place, and that, moreover, a combination thence arising, in which these gases are united in known proportions, will constitute a known proportion of water. The event could not happen otherwise than according to expectation, without necessitating the assumption that some factor involved in the product, whether a supposed natural force or one whose intervention would be called miraculous, had escaped notice. Of the countless issues of those manifold forces which keep the universe in motion, an indefinite number thus admit of being predicted with more or less of confidence, some without even the slightest hesitation. The position of the earth, for instance, or of any other body in the solar system, relatively to the rest, at any given day or hour in the future may be calculated with a precision that leaves no room for the shadow of a doubt. Yet, on the other hand, there is no lack of such phenomena as suggest problems conceivably soluble, yet demanding for their solution data which elude all attempts at adequate observation, and necessitating computations that transcend the faculties of mortal man: no one, to take another instance, can foresee the shape which a cloud will assume at any given moment. Similar remarks may be made with respect to the incidents of man's future, whether regard be had to the career of this or that individual, or to the fate of a nation, or to the destiny of the race: so far as they fall within the scope of reasonable conjecture, the limits of speculation respecting them afford room for analogous degrees of confidence and of doubt. The course of events is on the whole unquestionably such as to justify the exercise of forethought and the formation of plans: nevertheless, if anything appears to be visible to the species of foresight which depends exclusively upon the expectations warranted by observation and experience, it is but a dim and hazy vista, in which shadows

are ever liable to be mistaken for realities and realities for shadows. In the prospect which the individual has before him there is only one event which it is thus given him to foresee beyond the possibility of mistake or doubt, however uncertain its distance may be : he will vanish from this world, the only theatre of existence of which he has had any experience whatever, and the only kind of environment and scenery which it is possible for him to imagine; and then to all sensuous perception he will have ceased to be. The vista ends in a grave; the background is perfect darkness. It now remains to be considered whether we have discovered a light that will render visible anything beyond that will open up to view the illimitable distance which lies behind the coffin and the pall.

3. First of all, let man be regarded simply as the kind of being which every person's consciousness immediately and of necessity assures him that he is; namely, as something which feels, and perceives, and thinks, and wills. His experience, whether of sensation, or of perception, or of thought, or of volition, is inseparable from the consciousness of individuality"—a certain indivisible oneness of

This word, it will be perceived, I here use in reference to real being: I assume that there is in man the consciousness of an ens individuum, that this is what he sees in the immediate intuition which he has of self. Individuality may, of course, be merely conceptual, and therefore nominal. Any collection or aggregate of things may at will be conceived of as a single object, and named as such; in which case, seeing that the objective material is by hypothesis divisible, and may in fact appear to admit of division even ad infinitum, the individuality is restricted to the concept and depends upon the application of the name. Nothing forbids the supposition that the Great Eastern, for instance, might be broken up, and the materials of which it consists utilized in new combinations; but the steamship so named is, in the sense just explained, an individual entity, a thing which cannot be divided. An object admits of being thus conceived even although it should happen that the material is visibly in a state of