rests and provocations of the present world, concentrated and
intensified as never before the strife of aspirants, the giddy
enterprises of speculation and commerce and engineering, the chaos
of caucuses and newspapers and telegraphs monopolize our
faculties and exhaust our energies, leaving us but faint
inclination to attend to the solemn themes of the soul and the
mystic lures of infinity. To those crazed with greed, battling
with rivals or sunk in debauchery, God naturally becomes a verbal
phantom and immortality a foolish dream. There is nothing in
mechanism and mammon worship, nothing in selfish sloth and
laughter, nothing in cruel oppression and drudgery, to inspire
belief in the deathless spirituality of man. Among a people
prevailingly given over to these earthlinesses, faith in the
transcendent verities of religion perforce dies out. In the long
run the supreme devotion of the soul irresistibly moulds its
faith. Christendom does not live in conscious sacrifices and
aspirations for God and eternal life, but it lives chiefly for
selfish power and knowledge, money, praise and luxury. Therefore
in Christendom faith in immortality is decaying. But we believe
this decay to be temporary, the necessary transition to a richer
and more harmonic insight. The passing eclipse of faith in a
future life is destined by concentrating attention on the present
to develop its resources, realize the divine possibilities of this
world, unveil all the elements of hell and heaven really existing
here, and fully attune mankind to the conditions of virtue and
blessedness now. When this shall have been done the tangential and
fractional character of our experience will be so obvious, the
inadequacy of the earthly state for the wants of our transcendent
and prophetic faculties will be so urgent, and the supplementing
adaptations of the entire unseen but clearly divined future to the
craving parts in the present will be so manifest, that a complete
revelation of immortality will break upon the prepared mind of the
race. Then history will take a new departure in breathing
communion with the whole creation.

But infidelity to duty and privilege does not destroy the truth of
duty and privilege. It only blinds the faithless eyes so that they
cannot see the truth. If the immortality of the soul be a truth,
the materialistic absorption of our life would blind us to it and
make us deny it. Exclusive attention to the present would hide the
fut