"not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance." It is not the thought that our life or our virtue—it is the thought that virtue itself should die-which is soul-saddening. The desire for Immortality is like the desire in Man for happiness. Man desires happiness, he is capable of happiness, without happiness his life is incomplete and inharmonious. This is an argument that the Creator intended him to be happy. Similarly the thought or desire of Immortality is an argument that Man is an immortal being. For Immortality is essential to the purpose of human life; and if it is permissible to believe that life must fulfil its purpose, then it is necessary to believe in its Immortality. Thus Addison in his Cato has these lines:

"It must be so; Plato, thou reasonest well!

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after Immortality?

Or whence this secret dread and inward horror

Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul

Back on herself and startles at destruction ?

'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;

'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to Man." I

No doubt it may be said that this argument from the desire to the fact of Immortality depends upon

Act v. scene I.

the belief in the beneficence of the Almighty. It does so depend, but not entirely; for human nature is a witness to its own capacity, and there is that in Man which claims an immortal destiny. And this claim is not local or partial, but is found everywhere among all races and at all periods of History.

The desire of Immortality, like the religious sense (of which indeed it is a part), possesses the character of a universal creed. Everywhere Man is found to believe in God or in Divine or supernatural beings. Everywhere too he believes in the existence of souls or spirits after death.

It is true, indeed, that the universality of religion, as an element in human thought, has been denied. There is nothing perhaps that may not be denied. And even if primitive Man were not a religious being, it would be no disproof of religion. For upon speculative matters, as has been already said, it is not in the crude imaginations of savages but in the tendencies and judgments of civilised mankind that the truth may be more probably thought to reside. But modern anthropological research, by its patience and industry, has gone far to reassert the universality of the religious sentiment. Professor Max Müller puts it in these words, "We may

safely say that, in spite of all researches, no human beings have been found anywhere who do not possess something which to them is religion, or to put it in the most general form, a belief in something beyond what they can see with their eyes." And he quotes from Professor Tiele this striking passage: "The statement that there are nations or tribes which possess no religion rests either on inaccurate observations or on a confusion of ideas. No tribe or nation has yet been met with destitute of belief in any higher beings, and travellers who asserted their existence have been afterwards refuted by facts. It is legitimate, therefore, to call religion in its most general sense an universal phenomenon of humanity."

As it is with religion, so is it with the belief in the world beyond the grave. "The belief of mankind,” says Mr. Alger, "that a soul or spirit survives the body has been so nearly universal as to appear like the spontaneous result of an instinct." 2

It is true that the belief in the survival of the soul after death, like religion itself, was at first rudimentary; it was but the germ or promise of something

• Hibbert Lectures, ii. p. 79.

2 A Critical History of the Doctrine of the Future Life, p. 583.

higher; it was sometimes so vague or faint that even keen observers could not detect it, but it was there; and whatever sanction a creed may claim, as having been widely and universally accepted at all stages of history, belongs to the faith that the soul of Man survives the grave. There is no people which does not exhibit that faith.

To the witness, then, of the soul's desire for Immortality (however that witness may be estimated) must be added the corroborating assurance of its universality.

Even this force it would be wrong to overestimate. I am contending for the reasonableness -the probability of faith in Immortality, not for its certainty. But one who recognises that the same, or the same sort of evidence, is adducible from history for the belief in Immortality as for religion itself, and that the one as well as the other is apparently a spontaneous universal outcome of the nature of Man, will probably feel himself strengthened in his conviction of a life surpassing and transcending the life of earth.

We may now summarise the evidences for

Immortality deducible from the nature of Man himself.

We have seen that Man is the climax of the visible creation; to him, as it were, the visible creation tends.

We have seen that in Man the spiritual part of his being is the highest, the most sacred, the nearest to God.

We have seen that according to analogy the separation of the soul from the body and the dissolution of the body does not necessitate or imply the death of the spirit.

We have seen that Man himself expects and demands Immortality; it is his hope, his guide, the postulate of his nature.

We have seen that this hope is strongest and most imperious in the highest and most God-like human

natures.

We have seen intimations of an essential affinity between the highest part of human nature and the spiritual world.

We have seen that without human Immortality the great cosmical process is bereft of its full significance.

And we have seen that the conviction of personal