tinguishes itself from every other, and contrasts itself
with the All. Now it is claimed that every thinker who reaches the
maturest stage of thought attains to this insight. It is the
imperial mark of a certain stage of knowledge. Here the supreme
thinkers, sceptered with final perception of the truth of their
own eternity, sit at ease, enthroned in the serene and lucid realm
of law, beyond the reach of the dark tempest of cavils and doubts.
And there is a larger company who on easier terms have attained
the same result. For, without this wearisome metaphysical hewing
of conclusions from the quarries of ontology, the good and pure,
who, in their loving obedience and aspiration, keep the harmonic
quickness and innocence of their intuitions uninjured, also have
an unshaken assurance that they live in God and shall share his
life forevermore. The mystics of every period seem in feeling to
have an immediate grasp of all that the greatest philosophers have
painfully conquered by speculation. These two classes may claim to
possess direct certitude of eternal life. All others must either
attain to the stage of development and mount of vision of these,
or receive the faith on their authority, or else be subject to
doubt and unbelief.

To accept the doctrine of the immortality of the soul on the
authority of the wisest philosophers and the purest saints, is a
legitimate procedure perfectly in keeping with what the human race
does in all other provinces of thought where it is incapable of
proving what its teachers have demonstrated, but can easily
appreciate and make practical application of the truths they have
affirmed. The great laws of science in all its domains are
scientifically mastered by very few, but their empirical rules are
implicitly followed by the common multitude. One form or
receptacle of authority after another may be superseded; but
authority itself always remains. And the true course for those to
pursue who have come to repudiate the authority of scripture, or
church creed, or the resurrection of Christ, as a proof of the
future life of man, is not at once to abandon all belief in a
future state, but to accept the guidance of the most competent
independent thinkers in place of that of the most arbitrary
dogmatists. For unto all who do not arrogate to themselves a
transcendent competency to judge, the general consensus of the
thought and feeling of the world, clarified and interpreted by the
fittest few, wi