th a certitude which not the most intolerant
bigotry dares to question to-day, tells us also that it is wholly
preposterous that all that is left to man wherein to work out his own
individual moral progress is the brief span of threescore years and
ten, that after these days "few and evil," the chapter is closed, the
book sealed for ever, and the status of man inexorably and unalterably
determined.

I frankly avow I would as soon believe the Buddhist _Jataka_ as such a
wholly irrational account of the ways of God with man. Just think of
the palaeolithic man, who had no glimmering of moral discernment; think
of the cave-men whose skulls we possess in scores, that bear eloquent
testimony to their deplorable degradation--think of such creatures
dying, and their mental and moral status stereotyped for ever. "Death
ends our probation!" A precious revelation this! Where and what are
these men now? When Newman visited Greece in the thirties what
impressed him, or rather oppressed him, as he stood above the glorious
bay of Salamis, over which once rode the hundreds and thousands of
galleys and triremes which transported the unnumbered hosts of Xerxes
to Greece, was the awful thought that all those million men, including
the proud monarch who reviewed them from the spot on which he then
stood, were "_still alive_". Alive! And where were they, and what
were they doing? I cannot conceive anything more appallingly
depressing, nay, maddening, than to believe that all that heavenly
orchestration is going on while Xerxes is possibly in an Apocalyptic
hell, and his hosts either bearing him company or wandering aimlessly
about in the same stupid, stolid, unmoral, unspiritual condition in
which they were the moment they were engulfed in those blue waters.
Why, Nero fiddling while Rome was burning is a pleasant memory compared
with it!

But we have not reached the end yet. "Deep calleth unto deep," and the
extreme deductions from the perverse notion that the act of dying is
the signal for the infliction of an everlasting mental and moral
sterility, finally convince us of the groundlessness of this feckless
theology. According to these deductions of which I speak, one grievous
offence against Divine or ecclesiastical law--such, for instance, as
grave scandal or the omission to attend at mass--is sufficient to
condemn a man to eternal reprobation. If it be supposed that death
cuts the offender off before he has the opportunity