it with
eagerness and found that he had exprest himself about as follows: "I do
not say that there is no God, I simply say I do not know. I do not say
that there is no life beyond the grave, I simply say I do not know." And
from that day to this I have asked myself the question and have been
unable to answer it to my own satisfaction, how could anyone find
pleasure in taking from a human heart a living faith and substituting
therefor the cold and cheerless doctrine, "I do not know."

Christ gave us proof of immortality and it was a welcome assurance,
altho it would hardly seem necessary that one should rise from the dead
to convince us that the grave is not the end. To every created thing God
has given a tongue that proclaims a future life.

If the Father deigns to touch with divine power the cold and pulseless
heart of the buried acorn and to make it burst forth from its prison
walls, will he leave neglected in the earth the soul of man, made in the
image of his Creator? If he stoops to give to the rose bush, whose
withered blossoms float upon the autumn breeze, the sweet assurance of
another springtime, will He refuse the words of hope to the sons of men
when the frosts of winter come? If matter, mute and inanimate, tho
changed by the forces of nature into a multitude of forms, can never
die, will the imperial spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has
paid a brief visit like a royal guest to this tenement of clay? No, I am
sure that He who, notwithstanding his apparent prodigality, created
nothing without a purpose, and wasted not a single atom in all his
creation, has made provision for a future life in which man's universal
longing for immortality will find its realization. I am as sure that we
live again as I am sure that we live to-day.

In Cairo I secured a few grains of wheat that had slumbered for more
than thirty centuries in an Egyptian tomb. As I looked at them this
thought came into my mind: If one of those grains had been planted on
the banks of the Nile the year after it grew, and all its lineal
descendants had been planted and replanted from that time until now, its
progeny would to-day be sufficiently numerous to feed the teeming
millions of the world. An unbroken chain of life connects the earliest
grains of wheat with the grains that we sow and reap. There is in the
grain of wheat an invisible something which has power to discard the
body that we see, and from earth and air fashion a new body s