d
all the while upon her; now stiff and icy he was sleeping his last
sleep in the same spot, and his soul? Safely resting, after the
feverish toil and strife of Time, amid the palms of Eternal Peace.
Not the peace of Nirwana; neither the absolute absorption of one
school of philosophy, nor the total extinction inculcated by a yet
grosser system. Not the vague insensate peace of Pantheism, but the
spiritual rest of a heaven of reunion and of recognition promised by
Jesus Christ our Lord, who, conquering death in that lonely rock-hewn
Judaean tomb, won immortal identity for human souls. Not the
succession of progressive changes that constitute the hereafter of--

"This age that blots out life with question-marks,
This nineteenth century with its knife and glass
That make thought physical, and thrust far off
The heaven, so neighbourly with man of old,
To voids sparse-sown with alienated stars."

Among the multitudinous philosophic, psychologic, biologic systems
that have waxed and waned, dazzled and deluded, from the first
utterances of Gotama, to the very latest of the advanced
Evolutionists, is there any other than the Christian solution of the
triple-headed riddle--Whence? Wherefore? Whither?--that will deliver
us from the devouring Sphinx Despair, or yield us even shadowy
consolation when the pinions of gentle yet inexorable death poise
over our household darling, and we stand beside the cold silent clay,
which natural affection and life-long companionship render so
inexpressibly precious?

When we lower the coffin of our beloved is there soothing comfort in
the satisfactory reflection that perhaps at some distant epoch, by
the harmonious operation of "Natural Selection" and by virtue of the
"Conservation of Force," the "Survival of the fittest" will certainly
ensure the "Differentiation" the "Evolution" of our buried treasure
into some new, strange, superior type of creature, to us for ever
unknown and utterly unrecognizable? Tormented by aspirations which
neither time nor space, force nor matter, will realize or satisfy,
consumed by spiritual hunger fiercer than Ugolino's, we are invited
to seize upon the Barmecide's banquet of "The Law which formulates
organic development as a transformation of the homogeneous into the
heterogeneous;" and that "this universal transformation is a change
from indefinite homogeneity to definite heterogeneity; and that only
when the increasing mul