ce; yet our unconscious life is
as truly life as our conscious life, and though it is unconscious to
itself it emerges into an indirect and vicarious consciousness in our
other and conscious self, which exists but in virtue of our unconscious
self. So we have also a vicarious consciousness in others. The
unconscious life of those that have gone before us has in great part
moulded us into such men and women as we are, and our own unconscious
lives will in like manner have a vicarious consciousness in others,
though we be dead enough to it in ourselves.

If it is again urged that it matters not to us how much we may be alive
in others, if we are to know nothing about it, I reply that the common
instinct of all who are worth considering gives the lie to such cynicism.
I see here present some who have achieved, and others who no doubt will
achieve, success in literature. Will one of them hesitate to admit that
it is a lively pleasure to her to feel that on the other side of the
world some one may be smiling happily over her work, and that she is thus
living in that person though she knows nothing about it? Here it seems
to me that true faith comes in. Faith does not consist, as the Sunday
School pupil said, "in the power of believing that which we know to be
untrue." It consists in holding fast that which the healthiest and most
kindly instincts of the best and most sensible men and women are
intuitively possessed of, without caring to require much evidence further
than the fact that such people are so convinced; and for my own part I
find the best men and women I know unanimous in feeling that life in
others, even though we know nothing about it, is nevertheless a thing to
be desired and gratefully accepted if we can get it either before death
or after. I observe also that a large number of men and women do
actually attain to such life, and in some cases continue so to live, if
not for ever, yet to what is practically much the same thing. Our life
then in this world is, to natural religion as much as to revealed, a
period of probation. The use we make of it is to settle how far we are
to enter into another, and whether that other is to be a heaven of just
affection or a hell of righteous condemnation.

Who, then, are the most likely so to run that they may obtain this
veritable prize of our high calling? Setting aside such lucky numbers
drawn as it were in the lottery of immortality, which I have referred to
cas