in a thousand of these human souls that cares to think, for ten
minutes of the day, where this estate is or how beautiful it is, or what
kind of life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life they must lead
to obtain it.

You fancy that you care to know this; so little do you care that,
probably, at this moment many of you are displeased with me for talking of
the matter! You came to hear about the Art of this world, not about the
Life of the next, and you are provoked with me for talking of what you can
hear any Sunday in church. But do not be afraid. I will tell you something
before you go about pictures, and carvings, and pottery, and what else you
would like better to hear of than the other world. Nay, perhaps you say,
"We want you to talk of pictures and pottery, because we are sure that you
know something of them, and you know nothing of the other world." Well--I
don't. That is quite true. But the very strangeness and mystery of which I
urge you to take notice, is in this--that I do not--nor you either. Can
you answer a single bold question unflinchingly about that other
world?--Are you sure there is a heaven? Sure there is a hell? Sure that
men are dropping before your faces through the pavements of these streets
into eternal fire, or sure that they are not? Sure that, at your own
death, you are going to be delivered from all sorrow, to be endowed with
all virtue, to be gifted with all felicity, and raised into perpetual
companionship with a King, compared to whom the kings of the earth are as
grasshoppers, and the nations as the dust of his feet? Are you sure of
this? or, if not sure, do any of us so much as care to make it sure? and,
if not, how can anything that we do be right--how can anything we think be
wise? what honor can there be in the arts that amuse us, or what profit in
the possessions that please?

Is not this a mystery of life?

But further, you may, perhaps, think it a beneficent ordinance for the
generality of men that they do not, with earnestness or anxiety, dwell on
such questions of the future, because the business of the day could not be
done if this kind of thought were taken by all of us for the morrow. Be it
so; but at least we might anticipate that the greatest and wisest of us,
who were evidently the appointed teachers of the rest, would set
themselves apart to seek out whatever could be surely known of the future
destinies of their race; and to teach this in no rhetorical or ambigu