are rich and impressive
in proportion to the greatness of the faculties and the wealth of
knowledge and love brought to its consideration. And thus we come
face to face with the fifth and last cause of the failing faith in
immortality confessed to characterize the present day.

That cause is the common inability to realize in the thoughts of
the mind, and to hold in the faith of the feelings, a conception
so vast, so mysterious, so remote from the usual routine of the
selfish trifles and petty notions which monopolize the powers and
fritter down the faculties of the average people of the nineteenth
century. The battle of sensualism, the scramble over material
interests, the wearing absorption in the small and evanescent
struggles of social rivalry, the irritated attention given to the
ever thickening claims of external things, the pulverizing
discussions of all sorts of opinions by hostile schools, are fatal
to that concentrated calmness of mood, that unity of passion, that
serene amplitude of intellectual and imaginative scope, that
docile religious receptiveness of soul, requisite for the fit
contemplation of a doctrine so solemn and sublime as that of
immortality. The grade of thought and scale of emotion ordinarily
characteristic of ordinary men are utterly out of keeping with the
inexpressible grandeur of themes like that of the divine kinship
and eternity of the soul. The reason and fancy, before they can be
competent to appreciate such truths, must be trained in the study
and worshipful meditation of subjects of commensurate mystery and
sublimity. It is no wonder that when minds and hearts familiar
only with houses and clothes and food, the trivial gossip and
vanity of the hour, are summoned to grasp the idea of spiritual
survival and an everlasting destiny of conscious adventures, they
are overwhelmed and helplessly fail to represent to themselves the
possibility of any such truth. This cause of doubt is very
prevalent and effective; for ever more and more in our age
conscious attention is turned away from states within and fixed
upon things without. The natural consequence is that the objective
world is arrogating the first place in consciousness, and the
subjective world is sinking into the secondary rank. Whatever
exalts the object at the expense of the subject tends to
materialism, unbelief in the separate being of the spirit. On the
other hand whatever gives the panoramic passage of subjective
states in