into nonentity? Is it not fitter that he
be welcomed by triumphant initiation into the family of the
deathless Father?

Think of the advancement man has made since the time when he was a
cannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, and
contending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till now
that he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions of
Hamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers,
holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements compose
it, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a mass of
incandescent hydrogen. From such a background of accomplished fact
he seems really to have a right to peer forth into the unbounded
future and promise himself an unbounded destiny. The repetition of
such a progress, nay much less, it may not unreasonably be
imagined would raise the curtains from unsuspected secrets, bring
the family of intelligences scattered over all worlds into
conscious communication, and accomplish the deliverance of the
whole creation travailing and groaning together unto this day for
the redemption of the creature. What a splendid, almost incredible
task man has already achieved in disentangling the apparent
astronomic motions and converting them into the real ones. How
immensely sublimer and more complex is the position of man on this
planet than it seemed to the primitive savage, who knew only what
his crude senses taught him, although, all the while, the moon was
circling about him twenty five hundred miles an hour, and he was
whirling with the revolving earth a thousand miles an hour, and
spinning around the sun over thirty thousand miles an hour, and
swooping with the whole solar system through the blue void with a
still swifter gyre in a yet vaster cycle! This is demonstrated
physical fact. Its harmonic correlate in the spiritual sphere
would be nothing less than a lease of eternal existence for the
soul which sees endless invitations ahead, and exults at the
prospect of an eternal pursuit of them, its reason and affection
affiliated with those of the whole divine household of immortals.
Two or three generations ago it would have been more inconceivable
that men a hundred miles apart could audibly converse together, as
they now do by means of the telephone, than it is at this day to
believe that communication may at some future time be opened
between the inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of Sirius
through the vibrations