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afraid of evil tidings. They look upon the fortuitous as something that, at least, can not harm them, as embracing nothing that is not ordained or permitted by the providence of God. As Jeremy Taylor says: "We are in the world like men playing at tables: the choice is not in our power, but to play it is ; and when it is fallen, we must manage it as we can, and let nothing trouble us; but when we do a base action, or speak like a fool, or think wickedly-these things God hath put into our powers; but concerning those things which are wholly in the choice of another, they can not fall under our deliberation, and, therefore, neither are they fit for our passions." And as he again says: "Let us choose God, and let God choose for us." And so in our Collect, we pray, "that among all the changes and chances of this mortal life our hearts may there be fixed where alone true joys are to be found."

That our nature should instinctively desire a future life is in itself no mean proof that there is a future life in store for us. This is the argument for immortality drawn from the constitution of man. The present faculties which we possess, the . emotions, intelligence, will, of the human soul, seem to argue that these faculties shall have a full scope hereafter. The love of truth now will be the love of truth evermore. Those who love and those who know will be ever as the angels that know and the angels that burn. We may believe that the mental and the moral habits of this life adumbrate in some kind of way the faculties of a future life. The habit of thoughtfulness, of exact observation, of the wise employment of time, of feeling and affection, will, under altered conditions, as we may well believe, continue with us hereafter. Possibly the wider and ampler a man's experience may be in this world, the richer and more varied the fruitage in another state of existence.

CHAPTER XVIII.

That Life is a School of Faculties to be Trained.

So, after glancing at so many departments of human life, we come back to that thought that underlies so many of our sketches, as to what is the value and the meaning of life. We have seen that there is such a thing as a theory of human life to be established, and a certain philosophy in ordering it in all its details in accordance with the theory. There is something to be added supplemental to these considerations, the view that flows naturally from what we have said: That life is a school of faculties to be trained. It is such a thought as this which is full of comfort and meaning, which gives some kind of coherency to the multitudinous details of life, imparting simplicity to what is complex, and unity to what is manifold. If there were not some such thought as this, there would be an insufferable weariness and satiety in human life. I have heard of the case of a man who committed suicide, and left in a letter his reason for the act that he was perfectly tired of dressing and undressing day after day. There was a great surgeon who made his fortune and retired to a beautiful estate which he had purchased. As he looked upon his glorious trees, he murmured that one day he would assuredly hang himself from the branches of one of them. There was a great duke who had the most charming of villas on the shore of the Thames. As he looked on the living stream brimming the green turf, he could only say, "Oh! that wearisome river, will it never cease flowing?"

Without indorsing any of those views which one might call

anthropomorphic respecting a future state, I might venture to put broadly the propositions that the things of this world are closely related to the things that shall be hereafter; that the other world finds us much as this world leaves us; that the stock of experience, knowledge, and ideas which we accumulate here has a direct connection with that knowledge upon knowledge, that glory upon glory, to which we look hereafter. Ordinarily a Christian man comprehends the sphere of duty and belief; he understands and discharges what he calls his religious duties. Perhaps he is able to take a wide and wise view of his duties, and to see that his religion ought to have an hourly influence upon the details of his life. But he might advance a stage beyond that, and see that there is a divine meaning, a divine training, even in the most secular and trivial of his daily engagements. Of course, much more is this apparent in those higher aspects of human life which of themselves assert their solemn meaning. In a vast number of instances a man leaves human life exactly at the time when he might consider himself best fitted to make the most of it. Often it is, when a man has accumulated his greatest experience, when passion and prejudice have passed away, when character is exalted and refined, when splendid possibilities appear within the grasp, that some casual incident, a mere stumbling footfall, or chance infection, or some mechanical derangement of our marvelous organization, superinduces death. We undertake to say, as death approaches more nearly, the soul seems more vehemently to assert its energies, and all spiritual faculties appear keener, fresher, and brighter. And so we can easily understand how one poet looks forward to a higher destiny beyond life for the loved, lost friend of his youth, and believes

"Whate'er thy hands are set to do,
Is wrought with tumult of acclaim."

Very often amid the discipline and cares of life it becomes the impatient desire of the soul to be relieved from the struggle, and the mind's eye dwells on imaged scenes of quietude and repose. We grow impatient of our burden, and we long to be rid of it. But if we consider human life to be a discipline and a school of our faculties, we shall not dare to avoid the lessons or to abridge the time that is granted us for learning them. There is a drill of our faculties, painful, monotonous, and perpetual, which nevertheless is necessary in making us good soldiers and servants. It is only practice that makes perfect. Every one who has attended to the culture of the moral nature knows what repeated efforts are necessary to extirpate the evil instincts and tendencies of our nature, and to implant the habits which are for the health of mind and body. We are told of afflictions, that they yield the peaceable fruits of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby. Now most of us, as we have before said, when we feel the slightest touch of affliction, immediately make it the most earnest desire that we may be relieved from it altogether. But this relief, we have seen, would exclude the notion of a man's being exercised by his trouble. Life is the development of man's intellectual nature. That is too limited a definition by far. That object might be defined as the balanced, harmonious development of all the various factors of man's nature. It would include the growth of natural feeling in the various relationships of life. It would imply some experience in the conflicts, sorrows, and repentances of the soul. It would indicate the exercise of a skilled and disciplined moral sense. That would indeed be a dwarfed and stunted nature that is developed on the intellectual side alone to the cost of the feeling and the conscience. There is greater equality probably than we imagine in human life. Those who are stationary or

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slow in mental growth may receive an ample compensation in the advancement of other faculties.

We believe, then, that the world is one great school in which the scholars of time learn lessons for eternity. Mr. Thackeray, in one of the happiest and most pathetic of his touches, makes Thomas Newcome in his last wanderings recall his Carthusian days, and answer, "Adsum,” as he stood in the presence of The Master. Mr. Kingsley says that the great reward of having done work well is having more work to do; "this is the true and heroical rest which only is worthy of gentlemen and sons of God." The laureate, in his poem of "Wages," asks for Virtue, "Give her the glory of going on and not to die." This is simply the human imaginative way of putting the divine truth that those who have wrought well here shall be the possessors of many talents, and the rulers over many cities. It implies that work done here bears a relation to more glorious work hereafter, and that all the powers of the soul will find limitless scope in the æons of eternity.

Such an estimate surely lends an ennobling and attractive aspect to human life. It transfigures and glorifies the whole course of it. It lends "the consecration and the poet's dream" to the hard, dry facts of human life. The merchant, amid the multiplicity of his engagements and avocations, may think that he is forming and disciplining some special faculty which it has been given him to cultivate, and which may be developed hereafter. The humblest laborer who tills the soil may, in the same way, cultivate the garden of his own soul, and may believe that he is sowing seed that will yield fruit a hundredfold. Such a theory shows that, not in retirement and separation from the world, but in the energies and activities of life are the true means of man's highest culture to be found. It will not deprive life of its happiness or its innocent gayety, but

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