s, it is a good thing to recover our balance and stand upon our
feet. There is no irreparable loss. Everything is transformed, nothing
perishes and that which seems to be hurled into destruction is not
destroyed at all. Our moral world, even as our physical world, is a
vast but hermetically sealed sphere, whence naught can issue, whence
naught can fall, to be dissolved in space. All that exists, all that
comes into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and
the most appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches flung
away for an instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There
is no escape or leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the
mark, not even waste or neglect. All this heroism poured out on every
side does not leave our planet; and the reason why the courage of our
fighters seems so general and yet so extraordinary is that all the
might of the dead has passed into the survivors. All those forces of
wisdom, patience, honour and self-sacrifice which increase day by day
and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of danger, feel
rising within us without knowing whence they come are nothing but the
souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls.

3

It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw
them with our eyes. This was the aim of all the great religions, when
they represented under forms appropriate to the civilization of their
day, the latent, deep, instinctive, general and essential truths which
are the guiding principles of mankind. All have felt and recognized
that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead,
and have given it various names designating the same mysterious
verity: the Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as
reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as
Shintoism, or ancestor-worship. The last are more fully convinced than
any other nation that the dead do not cease to live and that they
direct all our actions, are exalted by our virtues and become gods.

Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood
that wonderful ancestor-worship, says:

"One of the surprises of our future will certainly be a
return to beliefs and ideas long ago abandoned upon the mere
assumption that they contained no truth--beliefs still
called barbarous, pagan, mediaeval, by those who condemn them
out of traditional habit. Year afte