he Musical Bank, he took from his valise the pamphlet on "The Physics of
Vicarious Existence," by Dr. Gurgoyle, which he had bought on the
preceding evening, doubtless being led to choose this particular work by
the tenor of the old lady's epitaph.

The second title he found to run, "Being Strictures on Certain Heresies
concerning a Future State that have been Engrafted on the Sunchild's
Teaching."

My father shuddered as he read this title. "How long," he said to
himself, "will it be before they are at one another's throats?"

On reading the pamphlet, he found it added little to what the epitaph had
already conveyed; but it interested him, as showing that, however
cataclysmic a change of national opinions may appear to be, people will
find means of bringing the new into more or less conformity with the old.

Here it is a mere truism to say that many continue to live a vicarious
life long after they have ceased to be aware of living. This view is as
old as the _non omnis moriar_ of Horace, and we may be sure some
thousands of years older. It is only, therefore, with much diffidence
that I have decided to give a _resume_ of opinions many of which those
whom I alone wish to please will have laid to heart from their youth
upwards. In brief, Dr. Gurgoyle's contention comes to little more than
saying that the quick are more dead, and the dead more quick, than we
commonly think. To be alive, according to him, is only to be unable to
understand how dead one is, and to be dead is only to be invincibly
ignorant concerning our own livingness--for the dead would be as living
as the living if we could only get them to believe it.

CHAPTER XI: PRESIDENT GURGOYLE'S PAMPHLET "ON THE PHYSICS OF VICARIOUS
EXISTENCE"

Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance,
and this path had led Dr. Gurgoyle to the conviction, real or feigned,
that my father was son to the sun, probably by the moon, and that his
ascent into the sky with an earthly bride was due to the sun's
interference with the laws of nature. Nevertheless he was looked upon as
more or less of a survival, and was deemed lukewarm, if not heretical, by
those who seemed to be the pillars of the new system.

My father soon found that not even Panky could manipulate his teaching
more freely than the Doctor had done. My father had taught that when a
man was dead there was an end of him, until he should rise again in the
flesh at the last