ive and real a thing as a sensation
of pleasure; or that, although death is _only_ the negation of life, one
is really entitled to ask why one's dear child is thus "negated" at the
age of six or twelve. Then there came this new school with its discovery
that pain does not exist. Death, of course, is an entry into a more
glorious life beyond; pain is an illusion to be banished by resolute
thought. These childish symposia were interrupted every few years by
some disastrous earthquake, the sinking of a great liner, an epidemic of
disease, a famine, and so on; but the pious philosophers bravely
struggled on. One may trust that the war has reduced them to silence,
and that we need not linger over them.

Then there was the school which sought desperately to find good in evil.
A man or woman is stricken with disease. Very often it brings with it a
softening, an improvement, of character; either in the patient or in the
nurses, or in both. Our religious philosophers fancied they caught in
this a glimpse of the divine plan: cancer was an instrument of
righteousness in the hands of the Almighty, the bacillus of
tuberculosis was a moral agency. They detected cases in which adverse
fortune had sobered and softened a man: the finger of Providence. In
France there was a very considerable return to the Catholic Church, and
recovery of its power, after the disastrous war of 1870. In the south of
Italy there is always much less sexual freedom for a time after an
earthquake has buried a few tens of thousands under the ruins of their
houses. I would undertake to fill a quarto volume with instances of good
things which arose out of or followed upon evil experiences. We saw that
the present war is being examined in the same respect. There are "great
spiritual opportunities": hundreds of thousands of young men are being
compelled (by the authorities) to go to church who had not been for
years; the different denominations are fraternising as they never did
before; the churches are rather fuller than they had been of late:
charity is awakened on a prodigious scale; zeal for an ideal (the
violated peace of Belgium) is dragging men even from our slums to the
colours. Here again one could at least fill a moderate treatise with the
things achieved; and beyond them all is the unuttered vision of the
crowded churches at the triumphant close of the war, perhaps that
long-coveted religious revival.

There is no doubt whatever that this theory of the