ure from us, although its dazzling prizes, scattered on the
dark back ground of eternity, were burning there in everlasting
invitation and hospitality. Thus, while the eager worldliness of
our age practically vacates the faith in a future life, it does
not logically disprove it; but leaves it for the ultimate test of
the genuine evidence.

The second reason for the apparent rapid crumbling away of the
belief in immortality in Christendom is the recent wide diffusion
of a critical knowledge of the comparative history of the opinions
of all nations on the subject of a future life, revealing the
mythological character common to them, and tracking them back to
their origin in primitive superstitions no longer is their literal
purport credible to any educated intelligence. In many works by
theological writers, and by scientific writers, of free habits of
thought, like Strauss and Spencer, collections have been made of
the fancies and theories of mankind respecting the survival of the
spirit and the conditions of its experience after the death of the
body. These beliefs, it has been agreed, even among the most
enlightened peoples, rest at last on the same basis with the
crudest notions of the barbarians of the prehistoric period,
namely, the spontaneous workings of raw instinct and imagination.
Tracing the views of Christians as to the nature of the soul, and
the life to come in heaven or hell, back to the rude conceptions
of the naked savages who fashioned their idea of the ghost from
the shadow or the reflection of the man, which was a picture or
representative of him, yet without matter, and from the phenomena
of dreams, in which they supposed the spirit of the man left him
and went through the adventures of the dream and returned ere he
awoke it has been asserted that every form of later faith, however
refined and improved in details, yet really resting on such
puerile fancies, such incompetent and absurd beginnings, is
thereby discredited and must be rejected.

Now, it is true that when we find among Christian believers,
connected with the doctrine of a future life, an incongruous
medley of physical imagery and gross imaginative pictures,
conceptions of just the same character as the grotesque dreamings
of the earliest savages and the elaborate mythology of subsequent
priesthoods, we are required to treat the whole suppositious mass
as mere poetry or superstition, and to dismiss it from our faith.
But we are by no me