let it not be forgotten that the faith which begins where knowledge ends is one of the permanent assets of the spiritual life. Think how our nature gains in depth and in height, when, in the absence of knowledge, we dare to live as though we actually knew; when, in the absence of demonstration, we dare to live as though justice and love were at the heart of things! Think how our nature gains in spiritual grandeur, when, in the absence of proof, we dare to live as though there were a veritable eternity of opportunity for development ahead of us! The truly great man is not he who has a ready answer for every vexing question and who lives with the complacency that is born of dogmatism. Nay, the truly great man is he who, in the absence of knowledge, rests back upon a rational faith and makes that faith the basis of further progress. The truly great man, I take it, is he who has a fund of moral heroism upon which he can draw whenever face to face with one or another of the conditions that are bound up with our agnosticism about the hereafter. To be minus that moral heroism and the spiritual heights of character to which it can lift us would be to lose what is of priceless worth.

This is the dominant note in the ethical mes

sage of Tennyson and the reason for the powerful appeal that the best of his poetry has made to the spiritual sufferers it was designed to help.

By the word "soul" we do not mean a diaphanous, transparent, attenuated form within our physical frame. That notion is indeed a superstition. Yet, as in the case of all other superstitions that live, it has an element of truth in it which keeps it alive. There is within us something nonmaterial, indissoluble, absolute; something by reason of which a sacredness attaches to each human being and the reality of which we ascertain by appeal to experience and, chiefly, the experience of pain, physical and moral pain. We may well shrink from the presumptuousness that would offer an explanation for the terrible sufferings to which hosts of human beings are subjected, but we should lose one of the finest spiritual values of our earthly experience did we fail to derive from pain evidence for the fact that we are spiritual beings in essence, that man is a soul and has a body. Such is the mighty conviction we are empowered to extract from pain. Given the world as it is and the existence of evil an unsolved problem, we are yet blessed in being able to turn pain to such sublime account, making it the re

vealer of a soul, a spiritual self within us that can say to pain: "You can have no power over me save as I supply the weapons.

It is, then, foundations for faith in the survival after death of the soul, the spiritual self, that we are to consider. And the reality of soul is made known through experience of physical and moral evil, of disease and remorse, more, perhaps, than through any other source.

Let us begin by examining a group of three minor foundations, still popular in certain quarters, but perhaps less entitled than any others to keep their hold on modern thought. These three minor bases are: (1) the universality of the belief in a hereafter; (2) the instinctive desire for a future life; (3) intuition, or immediate awareness of immortality.

Our attention will be directed, next, to the Christian basis with its four hundred million and more adherents. Then will follow consideration of a group of three foundations identified with modern occultism: spiritualism, psychical research, and theosophy, and finally (and engrossing our thought to a greater degree than any other), the foundation in moral experience and the practical relation it bears to the ethics of personal life.

FAITH IN A FUTURE LIFE

I

THREE MINOR FOUNDATIONS

We begin our series of studies in foundations for the faith in a future life by examining a group of three which, for convenience, we shall call minor foundations.

1. The alleged universality of the belief in a life beyond death. Man has always looked upon death as a way station rather than as a terminus. Yet his conception of the hereafter has not always been tantamount to personal immortality, i. e., conscious, active, joyous existence. Consequently we cannot support the faith in such a future on the basis of its universality. The truth is that this conception of the hereafter is not and never was universal. Read the Old Testament with reference to this subject and see how persistently the Hebrew held to the belief in Sheol, that "land of thick darkness, without any order and where the