and sobbing of the babes who weep
upon the threshold of Hades,

_Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens,
Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,_

unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the
sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' breasts, a dark day
had cut off and drowned in bitter death--

_Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et at ubere raptos
Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo._

But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for
it? And yet is it true that they never longed for it?

It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their
parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be
gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up for the
imagination--namely, the consideration of the solidarity and
representivity of eternal salvation.

There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a
collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or
may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation
as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as
something collective sin, and redemption. According to this mode of
feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption
is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ.

And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief
with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote
suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the
transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in
popular Catholic piety.

Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious
thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality
restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of
the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan
derivation--for such were the heroes and demi-gods--which sometimes
shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are
called and few that are chosen.

Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands
the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by
Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to
those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive
expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon s