ristian hope." Its moral
character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the
latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent
agnostic parsimony.

Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious,
attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden
from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation
of eternal glory, such as that of the _Divina Commedia_. True faith,
true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the
confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or
another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His
almighty hands, we should surrender ourselves to Him, in the full
assurance that He will do with us what is best for the ultimate end of
life, of spirit and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has
traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in the period
between Luther and Kant.

And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to imagine to
themselves what this eternal life may be, nor will they cease their
endeavours so long as they are men and not merely thinking machines.
There are books of theology--or of what passes for theology--full of
disquisitions upon the conditions under which the blessed dead live in
paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon the properties of the
glorious body, for without some form of body the soul cannot be
conceived.

And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a
concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great
part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those
of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star
to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced
to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed
in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to
ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent and living
essence. Man will never willingly abandon his attempt to form a concrete
representation of the other life.

But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable? How
can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive
such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a
corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and
extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian do