seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of
the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest
pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has
been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with
saints and sages. The conception that anything in this life could of
itself be of any great moment to us, was considered as much a puerility
unworthy of a man of the world, as a disloyalty to God. Experience of
life, and meditation on life, seemed to teach nothing but the same
lesson, seemed to preach a sermon _de contemptu mundi_. The view the
eager monk began with, the sated monarch ended with. But matters did not
end here. There was something more to come, by which this view was
altogether transmuted, and which made the wilderness and the waste place
at once blossom as the rose. Judged of by itself, this life would indeed
be vanity; but it was not to be judged of by itself. All its ways seemed
to break short aimlessly into precipices, or to be lost hopelessly in
deserts. They led to no visible end. True; but they led to ends that
were invisible--to spiritual and eternal destinies, to triumphs beyond
all hope, and portentous failures beyond all fear. This all men might
see, if they would only choose to see. The most trivial of our daily
actions became thus invested with an immeasurable meaning. Life was thus
evidently not vanity, not an idiot's tale, not unprofitable; those who
affected to think it was, were naturally disregarded as either insane or
insincere: and we may thus admit that hitherto, for the progressive
nations of the world, the worth of life has been capable of
demonstration, and safe beyond the reach of any rational questioning.

But now, under the influence of positive thought, all this is changing.
Life, as we have all of us inherited it, is coloured with the intense
colours of Christianity; let us ourselves be personally Christians or
not, we are instinct with feelings with regard to it that were
applicable to it in its Christian state: and these feelings it is that
we are still resolved to retain. As the most popular English exponent of
the new school says: '_All positive methods of treating man, of a
comprehensive kind, adopt to the full all that has ever been said about
the dignity of man's moral and spiritual life._' But here comes the
difficulty. This adoption we speak of must be justified upon quite new
reasons. Indeed it is practic