, what is there to withhold them from doing it? What is the value
of a clean breast?

III. The fatherhood of God seems to be implied in the Christian belief
in the brotherhood of man. By that phrase I meant to characterise
Christianity, not to embark upon the question of Theism. It does not
seem possible that we should ever have direct proof through human
observation and reasoning of the existence of Deity or of the divine
aim and will. To some power, and apparently to some moral power, we
must owe our being. We can hardly believe that creation planned itself
or that the germ endowed itself with life and provision for
development. But what can have been the aim of creation? What can
have led to the production of humanity, with all the evil and suffering
which Omniscience must have foreseen? What was there which without
such a process mere fiat, so far as we can see, could not produce? The
only thing that presents itself is character, which apparently must be
self-formed and developed by resistance to evil. We have had plenty of
"evidences" in the manner of Paley or the Bridgewater Treatises, met by
sceptical argument on the other side; but has inquiry yet tried to
fathom the mystery of human existence?

IV. One thing for which I have earnestly pleaded is the abolition of
clerical tests, which are in fact renunciations of absolute loyalty to
truth. Would this involve the dissolution of the Churches? Nothing
surely can put an end to the need of spiritual association or to the
usefulness of the pastorate so long as we believe in spiritual life. I
think I have seen the most gifted minds, such as might have done us the
highest service in the quest of truth, condemned to silence by the
tests.

May 5th, 1907.

VI.

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

There appeared the other day in the Washington _Herald_ a notable
letter by Mr. Paul Chamberlain on Immortality. It took the same line
as an essay on the same question by Mr. Chamberlain's late father,
which I had read in manuscript. Both the letter and the essay are on
the negative side of the question, which, in the essay at least, is
pronounced the happier and better view, as conducive to unselfishness.
Unselfishness, it must surely be, of a supreme kind. Annihilation is
not a cheerful word. Bacon has a highly rhetorical passage flouting
the fear of death. His was probably not a very loving nature, nor does
he seem to have thought of the parting