they tell us nothing, and can tell us
nothing, of what we most want to know. They cannot tell us what our own
nature is. They cannot tell us what God is, or what duty is. We had a
belief once, in which, as in a boat, we floated safely on the unknown
ocean; but the philosophers and critics have been boring holes in the
timbers to examine the texture of the wood, and now it leaks at every
one of them. We have to help ourselves in the best way that we can. Some
strike out new ideas for themselves, others go back to the seven sages,
and lay again for themselves the old eggs, which, after laborious
incubation, will be addled as they were addled before. To my
metaphysical friends in Jamaica the 'Light of Asia' had been shining
amidst German dreams, and the moonlight of the Vedas had been
illuminating the pessimism of Schopenhauer. So it is all round. Mr. ----
goes to Mount Carmel to listen for communications from Elijah;
fashionable countesses to the shrine of Our Lady at Lourdes. 'Are you a
Buddhist?' lisps the young lady in Mayfair to the partner with whom she
is sitting out at a ball. 'It is so nice,' said a gentleman to me who
has been since promoted to high office in an unfortunate colony, 'it is
so nice to talk of such things to pretty girls, and it always ends in
one way, you know.' Conversations on theology, at least between persons
of opposite sex, ought to be interdicted by law for everyone under
forty. But there are questions on which old people may be permitted to
ask one another what they think, if it only be for mutual comfort in the
general vacancy. We are born alone, we pass alone into the great
darkness. When the curtain falls is the play over? or is a new act to
commence? Are we to start again in a new sphere, carrying with us what
we have gained in the discipline of our earthly trials? Are we to become
again as we were before we came into this world, when eternity had not
yet splintered into time, or the universal being dissolved into
individual existences? For myself, I have long ceased to speculate on
these subjects, being convinced that they have no bottom which can be
reasoned out by the intellect. We are in a world where much can be
learnt which affects our own and others' earthly welfare, and we had
better leave the rest alone. Yet one listens and cannot choose but
sympathise when anxious souls open out to you what is going on within
them. A Spanish legend, showing with whom these inquiries began and w