ll certainly not believe there is any
_post mortem_ state of rewards and punishments because of his faith in
the sanity of God, and I do not see how he will trace any reaction
between this world and whatever world there may be of disembodied lives.
Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession to-day tend
in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether. So, to
a greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time. We may find
that issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at present
we have not turned over the leaf. On this side, in this life, the
relevancy of things points not in the slightest towards the immortality
of our egotisms, but convergently and overpoweringly to the future of
our race, to that spacious future, of which these weak, ambitious
Anticipations are, as it were, the dim reflection seen in a shallow and
troubled pool.

For that future these men will live and die.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] As, for example, that God is an omniscient mind. This is the last
vestige of that barbaric theology which regarded God as a vigorous but
uncertain old gentleman with a beard and an inordinate lust for praise
and propitiation. The modern idea is, indeed, scarcely more reasonable
than the one it has replaced. A mind thinks, and feels, and wills; it
passes from phase to phase; thinking and willing are a succession of
mental states which follow and replace one another. But omniscience is a
complete knowledge, not only of the present state, but of all past and
future states, and, since it is all there at any moment, it cannot
conceivably pass from phase to phase, it is stagnant, infinite, and
eternal. An omniscient mind is as impossible, therefore, as an
omnipresent moving body. God is outside our mental scope; only by faith
can we attain Him; our most lucid moments serve only to render clearer
His inaccessibility to our intelligence. We stand a little way up in a
scale of existences that may, indeed, point towards Him, but can never
bring Him to our scope. As the fulness of the conscious mental existence
of a man stands to the subconscious activities of an amoeba or of a
visceral ganglion cell, so our reason forces us to admit other possible
mental existences may stand to us. But such an existence, inconceivably
great as it would be to us, would be scarcely nearer that transcendental
God in whom the serious men of the future will, as a class, believe.

[51] It is an interestin