they are true. It can strengthen the principle of faith in those who do not require positive demonstration for their beliefs; it cannot even cross swords with those, soon to be the majority of thinking men, to whom positive demonstration has become as necessary to their minds as food to their bodies. Nay, they will resent rather than welcome the attempt to put a multitude of hopes and myriads of wishes in the place of one solid fact, and will soon confirm themselves in their opinions, by the obvious argument that these hopes and wishes are peculiar to the childhood of the race, and form only one out of many proofs, that man is liable to perpetual self deception until he confronts fact and law. Not indeed that they will indulge in the equally unscientific statement that there is no such thing as immortality. The attitude of mind which they will assume will be that of knowing nothing, and of having no reasonable hope of ever discovering any thing, about man's future destiny. And while they will think it good that man, or at any rate that some men, should allow themselves to hope for life after death, yet they will steadily oppose any assertion that these hopes ought to guide men's conduct, influence their motives, or form their character. Now, if this be true, it is difficult to overrate the importance of thoroughly and distinctly realizing it. That the evidence for the truths of natural religion is overwhelming, is one of the statements that are accepted as truisms, at the very moment that science is slowly leavening the human intellect with the conviction that all such evidence is scientifically worthless. Nevertheless the opposite idea has taken firm hold of the religious mind, and forms the basis of many an eloquent refutation of the "presumptuous assurance" and "illogical obstinacy" of modern thought. Men must have smiled to hear themselves alternately refuted and rebuked by controversialists who did not understand the tone of mind against which they were arguing, or who assumed as true the very things which their opponents resolved to know nothing about, either in the way of belief or rejection. It is very certain, however, that this error will not yield to the mere statement that it is an error, and therefore I will go on to examine a little more minutely the various arguments by which men seek to prove the doctrine of immortality. These are mainly fourfold:
1. That it is an original intuition, and arising from this,
2. That it is a universal belief.
3. That it follows necessarily from the existence of God.
4. That it is essential as a motive for human morality.
1. I take the statement of this argument from the words of one than whom no man has a better right to be heard on such a subject. Prof. Max Müller, in his preface to the first volume of his "Chips from a German Workshop," writes as follows: "An intuition of God, a sense of human weakness and dependence, a belief in a Divine government of the world, a distinction between good and evil, and a hope of
