ind develops with it, the crude must give way to
the mature, and the false be replaced, not with vacancy, but with
the true. The problem of the nature and destiny of the soul will
not be solved by tearing away the fictitious drapery thrown around
it, but by piercing to the roots of the reality within the
drapery.

And now we come to the third reason for the increasing doubt and
decreasing faith in regard to a future life: that reason is that
the form of the belief in it prevalent in Christendom has become
incredible, and the rejection of the form has loosened the hold on
the substance. The philosophic mind, which has attained to the
idea of the infinite God, without body, or parts, or passions,
omnipresent in his total perfection, can reason to the belief in a
kindred immortality for its own finite being. But since our
experience is here limited to the life now known, we are utterly
without data or ability to image forth such a conception of
immortality in any form of picture or mental scenery. There seem
to be only three ways in which we can give imaginative
representation of a future life. The first is the method of the
universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a
shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an
unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of
ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former
adventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of analogy which
is the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the rest
as fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those who
are unwilling to leave their thoughts of the future life in empty
rational abstraction, portray it in vivid concrete. This they do
by means of the doctrine of a general bodily resurrection of the
dead.

It is a striking fact that four of the great historic and literary
religions have taught the doctrine of immortality under the form
of a physical resurrection, namely: Zoroastrianism, Judaism,
Christianity, and Mohammedanism. It has been attributed, also, to
the ancient religion of Egypt, but erroneously. Its belief there
is a mere inference from facts which do not really imply it. The
Egyptians plainly believed in a series of individual reincarnations,
not in any general resurrection. But it is a sufficiently
interesting and impressive fact that over one third of the human
race have embodied their expectation of a future eternal life
in this concrete and astonish