s there be"--

That no life lives for ever
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea--

convinces no one. Most men have known moods of severe depression and
lassitude when not to be at all seemed the one consummation to be
desired; but that is not the normal attitude of normal people. Such
would still fain believe that the grave is not the end, but many of
them are in a state of bewilderment and insecurity. On the one hand
men have never grown reconciled to the heart-breaking triviality of
death, never accepted this dispensation without a question, a hope, or,
failing hope, a sense of rebellion; on the other, we have to recognise
that we live in an age when multitudes have ceased to accept religious
beliefs simply upon the authority of the Bible--when educated people
generally have come quite definitely to disbelieve in the resurrection
of the body, a final day of judgment, a localised {222} heaven and
material hell--an age which must be one of manifold doubts and
misgivings.

But this break-up of Biblical authority and its unquestioning
acceptance is itself largely due to that resistless advance of physical
science which has reconstructed the world for us with such masterful
hands. The results of the modern conception of the universe are only
just beginning to get into our system; as yet they are still largely
unassimilated, and give us trouble accordingly. Let us take such a
statement as the following, and imagine its effect upon the average
individual:--

Think of Mercury in its wild rush through the solar heat, or Venus
gleaming in the western sky, or ruddy Mars with its tantalising
problems, or of mighty Jupiter 1,230 times the size of our own planet,
or of Saturn with its wondrous rings, or of Uranus and Neptune
revolving in their tremendous orbits--the latter nearly three thousand
millions of miles away from the centre of our system. . . But the true
awfulness is yet untouched. What of the millions of millions of suns
that blaze in immeasurable space beyond our comparatively little solar
sphere? Sirius alone, at the foot of the constellation of Orion, is
125 times larger than our sun. Fifteen hundred millions of millions of
miles away, where ordinary eyes dimly descry half a dozen points of
light, the telescope reveals more than a thousand orbs, some seventy of
them vaster than our sun. What indeed is the whole of this our tiny
planet compared