it for yourself, formulating thus: Supposing both to
be equally happy, is one hour more desirable than one year? From
that then advance to the final inquiry, what are threescore and
ten years on earth to all eternity with God? By-and-by, son of Hur,
thinking in such manner, you will be filled with the meaning of the
fact I present you next, to me the most amazing of all events, and in
its effects the most sorrowful; it is that the very idea of life as a
Soul is a light almost gone out in the world. Here and there, to be
sure, a philosopher may be found who will talk to you of a Soul,
likening it to a principle; but because philosophers take nothing
upon faith, they will not go the length of admitting a Soul to be
a being, and on that account its purpose is compressed darkness
to them.

"Everything animate has a mind measurable by its wants. Is there
to you no meaning in the singularity that power in full degree to
speculate upon the future was given to man alone? By the sign as
I see it, God meant to make us know ourselves created for another
and a better life, such being in fact the greatest need of our
nature. But, alas! into what a habit the nations have fallen! They
live for the day, as if the present were the all in all, and go
about saying, 'There is no to-morrow after death; or if there be,
since we know nothing about it, be it a care unto itself.' So when
Death calls them, 'Come,' they may not enter into enjoyment of the
glorious after-life because of their unfitness. That is to say,
the ultimate happiness of man was everlasting life in the society
of God. Alas, O son of Hur, that I should say it! but as well yon
sleeping camel constant in such society as the holiest priests
this day serving the highest altars in the most renowned temples.
So much are men given to this lower earthly life! So nearly have
they forgotten that other which is to come!

"See now, I pray you, that which is to be saved to us.

"For my part, speaking with the holiness of truth, I would not
give one hour of life as a Soul for a thousand years of life as
a man."

Here the Egyptian seemed to become unconscious of companionship
and fall away into abstraction.

"This life has its problems," he said, "and there are men who
spend their days trying to solve them; but what are they to the
problems of the hereafter? What is there like knowing God? Not a
scroll of the mysteries, but the mysteries themselves would for
that hour at least lie