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for it is occupied with the relation of our minds to the Mind from which they came. Unless the Materialist can justify himself at the bar of Reason-and we have seen that he never can-another form and principle of Knowledge than his demand our study. Religion is therefore not only a legitimate but a necessary branch of science, possessing its own axioms, involving undeniable postulates, furnished with methods appropriate to its subject-matter, and issuing in conclusions, practical no less than theoretical, on which reflection sets the seal of certitude.

"Man," it has been profoundly observed, "is by nature a metaphysical being; the fact of Death would by itself make him so." Perhaps we shall bring out the exact truth by subjoining as a gloss, "The fact of Death apprehended, questioned, and dared for the sake of an end to which life is sacrificed." Death is not known to any creature save man; in the animal world, so far as we can judge, it is an event, not an apprehension; for the hunted stag flees without more than a vague dread of evil impending. But man has looked Death in the face and asked him "What art thou?" None would say that submitting to Fate is self-sacrifice. But the voluntary death of a man on behalf of his fellows, however little the hero reasons about it or is capable of analyzing his own motives, I would define as a supreme appeal from Matter to Spirit. More than a tribal instinct enters into the great act of self-immolation; deep within it we perceive the Primal Source from which it springs; here at last we have plucked out the heart of the mystery which we call Life, and behold it is Love. Not blind Chance nor eyeless Necessity created SO marvelous a thing; what laws of mechanism could be invoked to explain by physical

attractions and repulsions the Divine Friendship latent, yet most thrillingly effective, in a simple lad's rushing upon death for a cause greater than himself? That may be all he knows; but it is enough. Advantage or profit to the man who falls thus in battle, where is it? He has flung away all whatsoever, on the supposition of Materialism, he had at any time, and now he is no more. He has perished and with him a universe of thought and feeling in the same moment. Can we believe this, once we have allowed that Humanity is not an exile in an alien solitude, an accident or a by-product of mere energy, but at home in the all-enfolding Mind whose light streams over our path? To defy death as our friends do in the thousand scenes of carnage is to refute Materialism; and we may reply to everyone of its proposed enigmas by a phrase grander than the proverbial saying which it imitates, Solvitur moriendo. Death is the teacher of true philosophy.

And hence it was to be anticipated that, when the reign of sceptic, agnostic, phenomenist, had risen to the height of power, it would meet with a check outside the lecture-room and the laboratory, as tremendous in onset as the evil to be stayed. Men are always dying; but not in enormous crowds, or deliberately and in the prime of life, or summoned from every rank and profession in the name of the brotherhood. The Great War is a War of doctrines and ideals. It is fought in the unseen world and is the clashing with one another of invisible hosts. It will bear Humanity onward to religious altitudes yet undreamed of, or throw it back into the steaming valley of moral despair and aimless luxury. Once more, surely, it is time to remind ourselves of Plato's noble saying, repeated by his far-off disciple, Ruskin:

Wherefore, our battle is immortal; and the Gods and the Angels fight on our side; and we are their possessions. And the things that destroy us are injustice, insolence, and foolish thoughts; and the things that save us are justice, self-command, and true thought, which things dwell in the living power of the Gods.

Now, if Materialism, which in this country is the practical and daily outcome of agnostic tendencies, be the sum of all possible fallacies, then the price which our dear friends are paying with their lives to ransom us from it is at once sacred and inestimable. They die that England may live. Admirable; but tell me, what kind of life, and on what level? Darwin, whose merits in his proper department are greater than can be expressed, has had his day. Not that so modest a man of genius thought himself ever the prophet of Humanity. He abandoned that office to Mr. Spencer whom he called "our great philosopher," and to the lords of synthesis, contented in his own person, or at least compelled, to be ignorant how life had arisen and to what goal it was moving. But Darwinism had reigned for a good half-century, taking much of the power not only which the Christian Faith had hitherto wielded but also that which systems of ideal forms might still claim. The social order, construed until then in theory as an embodiment of ethical rights and duties, now ran no slight risk of appearing to depend on forcethe sheer strength of material resources guided by secular interests. To believers in the better part of man this change could not seem anything but decadence. A sharp cynic in Mr. Mallock's New Republic maintained, not without effect, that in reducing virtue to expediency the coming atheism would make vice much less attractive, and indeed altogether mean

LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 371.

ingless. The "new man," created by mechanism, himself a machine which had only some physical motive power inside it, could not hope to be treated, like his human predecessor, to love in which tenderness might win depth by a touch of delightful mockery, or to anger which was noble and kind, or to pity because of the contrast between his lofty aims and inadequate performance. How is it possible to give your heart or to break it where a piece of clockwork is the sole object in front of you? But all these considerations, well-founded, nay inevitable, on the hypothesis of vulgar science, became an excuse to cultivate power and pleasure to the utmost. The Darwinian Era may have been worse or better than ages going before; calculations in this region are of little value; but the instinct which the agnostic and the materialist encouraged was one of lawless Hedonism. And earlier ages differed from it precisely in this, that they recognized the Higher Law even in the act of breaking its commandments. Their very sin held, so to speak, of the infinite and eternal.

Arguments which have never been answered were brought from many sides against the Lucretian idea of evolution, when the great wave came swelling on our shores. But they served chiefly by the manner in which current opinion rejected them to mark how the flood was bursting the ancient dykes and barriers of tradition. It is true that Professor Huxley, before quitting our mortal stage, changed his tone of defiant security, and in the Romanes Lecture at Oxford raised the flag of the revolt of man against the cosmic order. He was charged with want of logic and a sentimental Humanism. Reserving, however, for the present our study of this unexpected transformation-scene, which has had, and will have imitators, we may

endeavor to strike a balance between the "old Faith" of the Christian and the "new Faith" of which science, exalted into a complete philosophy of life and conduct, was taken to be the herald. Witty persons have talked of "Worldliness and Other-Worldliness." These are pretty clear terms, better than the "isms" which ruin a good style and which require to be constantly watched lest they turn with Hegelian dexterity into their opposites. I think, also, that Secularism, in spite of its abstract termination, is a working equivalent of the real tendency now under review. Death is the line which divides the Christian faith from the Secularist assumption. The question cannot be stated simply as if it concerned our mortal span, whether we shall seek to light it up with an ideal, or to shape its course on the principle of Aristippus and get as much variety or pleasure into it as we find possible. It is a different problem from either of these. We must try to ascertain if our individual life, as we know it, under the conditions of time and space is or is not the prelude to another stage of existence when those conditions have fallen away from us. If it is, then our aspirations and duties ought to conform to "other-worldliness"; but if not, whether we please ourselves in the ideal or batten on the real will signify nothing to us next week or next year. Of the noble and the ignoble it must then be said when their time comes that all alike they "are made one with Nature." But since Nature has neither soul nor mind, it will be to the letter true, even of the saint, hero, poet, thinker, friend of man,

That all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been, And grief itself be mortal.

No wonder that Shelley, after uttering this lament, puts the question to himself, "of what scene" are we

"the actors or spectators?" Emphatically, it is the Human Question. To leave it hanging doubtful in the air of scepticism, which was thought wisdom during the Darwinian Era is to condemn all except a few despairing idealists to live without rule or compass. For what would any "aurea aetas ventura" much signify, when doomed inexorably to end in death and mere oblivion? Already deep down in our secret heart we have knowledge more than enough of the Living Eternal to whom we are akin— to take from a limited existence on this floating clod of earth its desirableness. If the dream of life is just a dream, never to wake into a fresh morning as the sun sinks to rise again, can we mind greatly how the dream goes? And so it came to pass that many modern voices have been asking the world, is Life worth living? Its root and stay, its value and meaning were in the Unseen or nowhere. To be a sceptic towards God, it appeared by free trial and experiment, was to empty our own personality, our very self, of the something which gave it a real being. "The wonder and the beauty and the terror," apart from which man is weariness all day long, must then be aspects caught and reflected in our consciousness of an Eternal Love. For they are qualities at once most human yet in their infinite power and majesty most divine. To deny their transcendent worth, reducing them to secondary passing effects of our small experience, is at a single stroke to degrade them into a nursery tale, or as Montaigne speaks, to make of them "phantoms that amaze people," but are all the while hollow and impotent.

Have we come back, then, to the tired Preacher who was King in Jerusalem, with his "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity"? Yes and no, according to the judgment we form

E.

to ourselves of life and death. Since the finite and contingent do, in fact, suppose and depend upon the First Cause who is not Chance, or Fate, or the Unknowable, but the Living and Seeing God—“Deus vivens et videns," said St. Augustine-if He be denied or ignored, the rest is, as it will prove itself to be, vanity indeed. If history, life, character, the social order, be cut off in our philosophy from that creative and sustaining influence, then Ecclesiastes, who for the moment was dramatically taking that point of view, is justified. And on its wide acceptance there must follow-will any man conversant during the last fifty years with society and literature deny that there has followed?—a notable paralysis of the more spiritual instincts, emotions, aims, efforts. von Hartmann, no contemptible witness, described his own time as a "most irreligious age." In England, the unbelief of the artisan class, the apathy of the agricultural class, in all that concerns Religion would be portentous, were it not SO familiar. Apologists have written with pathetic fervor that the "empty tomb" proves the Resurrection; what does the "empty Church" prove except that the majority, without distinct knowledge of the reason why, have cast aside hope in the Risen Christ and look on Religion as the means by which the clergy earn their living? And on this has ensued the "transvaluation of all values," which we may perceive in poetry, novel writing, music, painting, conversation, journalism, and in the verdict of society on social institutions like marriage and the family. Further consequences of a sinister kind are taedium vitae, frivolous amusements, race suicide, the growth of deliberate self-murder, increase of mental maladies, and an almost universal unrest. The literature of many days past, English and foreign, re

flects in the same looking-glass the phenomena so closely related which, in Our newer jargon, are labeled Realism and Pessimism. The author of Ecclesiastes did not know that language; but he saw "all the works that were done under the sun, and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit."

Our laughing and dying heroes answer with a shout of glad defiance. They have no conscious philosophy; but they will do their duty and scorn the consequences. Of religion itself most of them know little; for they were born in the Darwinian Era. But man, despite agnostic and materialist, is and will ever be irretrievably a metaphysician. He looks through appearances to the light beyond. He has in himself the answer of life. He has come at a sudden call from the foolish decadence which held him a prisoner-come, as Richter says, to the "great sighing and singing tree of true Knowledge which points the way to the open battlefield and the city where we shall be crowned." What is the "seeming" of word-spinners to a man who has given up all he had and is marching straight to Death? He would have died hereafter; but this moment he dares and chooses to die. I am thinking of one I knew well, whose thoughts and desires were all beautiful, his whole nature moulded on the lines of a pure humanity. But, before the summons of war, the Darwinian

cloud had overtaken him and he was perplexed. In that last advance no doubt held him back; from the depths of his being there rose upon my friend a light clear as the dawn, and he gave himself with a ringing cheer to the supreme sacrifice. He had never denied the Truth, never doubted that the soul is captain and the flesh must obey. Shall I commit the act of high treason to mind and heart of supposing that when Death took him

there was nothing save a piece of machinery shattered and broken, while he who sprang forward over the top with a spirit never to be daunted was now even less than its least fragment? If that tenement of clay was henceforth to be made one with Nature, The Nineteenth Century and After.

what of the spirit which had given it life and motion? It had never simply been absorbed into a world of matter, and from matter it was now set free. Would it not find its way Home? On the field where such men die Religion lives again.

William Barry.

CONCERNING COMPANIONSHIP.

We have been apt to deride the epithet "dearest friend," even as we are prone to laugh at the mention of a mother-in-law or of twins or trousers upon the stage. In a more insincere yesterday one dearest friend or so may have proved a dearest enemy, and brought the expression into disrepute. But these moments of common sorrow and scant pleasure inspire the demand as they create the supply of the real and substantial article. Superficiality is out of date, and the self-seeker a blatant anachronism. We have little time to investigate and test a new acquaintance, or to consider the old with ceremony, while we have much need of an unfailing, sentimental supporter who shall serve our anxieties and our compensations, contributing the listening ear and the brightening eye to the account alike of our troubles and joys. "The only way to have a friend is to be one," wrote America's best philosopher, and, in truth, the giving and taking of friendship are amongst the supreme privileges of existence.

Sin

cerity and selflessness are the keystones of the treasure-land; and the best of all investments is a freehold on the affections of some deserving, industrious and intelligent one, to whom we pay faithfully the tax of helpful sympathy in all circumstances.

Shakespeare knew a great deal about friendship, and his works are punetuated with the counsel of perfection

in its achievement and of warning against its endangerment.

The forlorn of a later and less distinguished lyrical history who bewailed: Oh, bring my brother back to me, I cannot play alone,

voiced a poignant fact. We cannot play alone, although we may work happily outside the chance of companionship; for work can be all-engrossing, whether of the most laborious, the most intellectual, or the merely mechanical virtue. We recognize gratefully that sorrow if not halved is at least mitigated by the assurance that we are not bearing our burden alone.

To quote the omniscient William, "You do freely bar the door of your own liberty if you deny your grief to your friend."

Although in great affliction we crave solitude, yet the thought of some other, even if away from us, occupied with a consideration of our sadness is a consolation clearly realized. If we ignore all companionship in the first days of a calamity, it is a solace in the background to know that some dear comrade will come quickly when wanted, and meanwhile the written word can be relied upon to break in upon the endless, awful hours of despair.

I would cite as the model letter of condolence one which ran: "All that I have and am is waiting to be called

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