ave. But if man be
immortal, as the wise in all ages have believed, then we do not have to
lay down our Possessions with this mortal body. For, if the soul when
freed from the flesh is to remain the soul, the self--and only so can
immortality have any meaning--then it must keep all those inner
acquisitions of knowledge, culture, and character which it has gathered
on earth; nay, it then for the first time truly comes into the enjoyment
of them. What were our earthly Possessions become Treasures laid up for
ourselves in Heaven.

THE BOOK OF TO-DAY AND THE BOOK OF TO-MORROW

The book of to-day is not necessarily the parent of the book of
to-morrow, just as it is itself not necessarily the child of the book of
yesterday. The relation is apt to be one of succession and influence
rather than anything suggesting biological evolution. Nature, according
to Linnaeus's famous maxim, never goes by leaps, but the book is a human
product, and human nature takes its chief pride in its leaps, calling
them inventions and discoveries. Such a leap in book production was the
substitution of parchment for papyrus, of paper for parchment, of
mechanical for manual processes when writing was displaced by
typography, of higher for lower mechanism in the creation of the power
perfecting press. These inventions had behind them, to be sure, the
impetus of economic demand, but no such partial explanation can be given
for the advent of William Morris among the printers of the late
nineteenth century, unless an unrecognized artistic need may be said to
constitute an economic demand.

The book of to-day in its best examples resembles not so much the book
of yesterday as that of some earlier days, and we may count this fact a
fortunate one, since it relegates to oblivion the books made in certain
inartistic periods, notably of the one preceding the present revival. It
is rather the best of the whole past of the book, and not the book of
to-day alone, that influences the character to be taken by the book of
to-morrow. This element is a historical one and a knowledge of it may be
acquired by study; it is the possible inventions that baffle our
prophecies. We know that any time some new process may be discovered
that will transform the book into something as unlike its present
character as that is unlike the papyrus roll. But because the element of
invention is so uncertain we can only recognize it, we cannot take it
into account. Our advantag