There appeared the other day in the Washington Herald a notable letter by Mr. Paul Chamberlain on Immortality. It took the same line as an essay on the same question by Mr. Chamberlain's late father, which I had read in manuscript. Both the letter and the essay are on the negative side of the question, which, in the essay at least, is pronounced the happier and better view, as conducive to unselfishness. Unselfishness, it must surely be, of a supreme kind. Annihilation is not a cheerful word. Bacon has a highly rhetorical passage flouting the fear of death. His was probably not a very loving nature, nor does he seem to have thought of the parting from those we love.

The life of the late Mr. Chamberlain was evidently happy as well as good. That of his son, I have no doubt, is the same. But of the lot of the myriads whose lives, through no fault of their own, are, or in the course of history have been, unhappy, often most miserable, what is to be said? If for them there is no compensation, can we believe that benevolence and justice rule the world? If the world is not ruled by benevolence and justice, what is our ground of hope?

The negative conclusion rids us, it is true, of the Dantean Hell, which paints the Deity as incomparably worse than the worst Italian tyrant, and, as it is to be everlasting, concedes the final victory to evil.

We discard all ghost stories and spiritualist apparitions as at most signs of a general craving. We resign all reasoning like that of Butler, who describes the soul as indiscerptible, assuming that it exists separately from the body. Nor can we be said to have anything that bears the character of Revelation. That the Founder of Christianity looked for a future life, with its rewards and punishments, is evident. But he brought no special message, lifted not the curtain of mystery, did nothing to clear our minds upon the subject. His apologue of Dives and Lazarus shows that to Him as to us the other world was a realm of the imagination.

Is there anything in man not physical, or apparently explained and limited by the transient conditions and necessities of his present state, anything which gives an inkling of immortality? Our utilitarian morality is the offspring and adjunct of our condition here. But is there not an aspiration to character which points to something more spiritual and higher than conformity to the utilitarian code? Heroism and self-sacrifice are not utilitarian.

We can hardly allow the investigation to be closed by the mere mention of the talismanic formulary Evolution. There may be something still to be said on that subject. Evolution cannot have evolved itself, nor does it seem capable of infallible demonstration. It no doubt postulates vast spaces of time for its action. But within the space of time of which we in any way have knowledge, apparently no case of spontaneous evolution has taken place. Rudimentary likeness between the frame of the ape and that of man seems hardly in itself a proof of the generation of man from the ape.

On no subject, however, does one who is not a man of science or a philosopher feel more intensely his deficiency, and his need of having his paths lighted by the perfectly free while reverent inquiry, to pray for which has been the object of these letters.

August 11th, 1907.