e same
proud note, the young man observed, ran through the service from
beginning to end. Hymn and prayer and reading all confidently assumed
that Fifi was dead only to this mortal eye, but in another world, open
to all those gathered about the grave for their seeking, she lived in
some marvelously changed form--her body being made _like unto his own
glorious body_....

In the homeward-bound car, Queed fully recaptured his poise, and
redirected his thoughts into rational channels.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul had not a rational leg to
stand on. The anima, or spirit, being merely the product of certain
elements combined in life, was wiped out when those elements dissolved
their union in death. It was the flame of a candle blown out. Yet with
what unbelievable persistence this doctrine had survived through
history. Science had annihilated it again and again, but these people
resolutely stopped their ears to science. They could not answer science
with argument, so they had answered her with the axe and the stake; and
they were still capable of doing that whenever they thought it
desirable. Strange spectacle! What was the "conflict between Religion
and Science" but man's desperate struggle against his own reason?
Benjamin Kidd had that right at any rate.

Yet did these people really believe their doctrine of the saved body and
the saved soul? They said they did, but did they? If they believed it
surely, as they believed that this night would be followed by a new day,
if they believed it passionately as they believed that money is the
great earthly good, then certainly the biggest of their worldly affairs
would be less than a grain of sand by the sea against the everlasting
glories that awaited them. Yet ... look at them all about him in the
car, these people who told themselves that they had started Fifi on the
way to be a saint, in which state they expected to remeet her. Did they
so regard their worldly affairs? By to-morrow they would be at each
other's throats, squabbling, cheating, slandering, lying, fighting
desperately to gain some ephemeral advantage--all under the eye of the
magnificent guerdon they pretended to believe in and knew they were
jeopardizing by such acts. No, it was pure self-hypnosis. Weak man
demanded offsets for his earthly woes, and he had concocted them in a
world of his own imagining. That was the history of man's religions; the
concoction of other-worldly offsets for worldly w