Defect of Over-mastering Ideas.

"The games of the Romans These men

were no games.

could never amuse themselves

with mere semblance; they lacked the requisite joyfulness of soul, and, being of serious nature, they played their games in that same rough, sanguinary spirit of seriousness. The Romans were great through their idea of their eternal Rome. . . . Whenever they stepped down from their hills they were little."

seven

Heine.

Do "Heathen"
Religions
Uplift?

"They tell us a great deal now-a-days about religions being purified and rising from the lowest fetishism to a more spiritual form of worship and conception of the Divine. It may be So. I would like to know where there is an example of it. . . . No;

all modern theories to the contrary notwithstanding, it remains the fact, certified by experience, that no tribe, no nation, has ever been known to lift itself from idolatry to monotheism, except under the impulse of an external power, a revelation from God that has come to lift it up."Dr. Maclaren.

Immortality in
Heredity.

"We know that the dead do not die. We know now that it is not in our churches that they are to be found, but in the houses, the habits, of us all. There is not a gesture, a thought, a sin, a tear, an atom of acquired consciousness that is lost in the depth of the earth; and that at the most insignificant of our acts our ancestors arise, not in their tombs where they move not, but in ourselves,

Self

where they always live." - Maeter

linck.

"A kind of waking trance Escapement. I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life."-Tennyson.

Is Vitality a
Mechanical
Product?

"If solar light and heat can be produced by the impact of

dead matter, and if from the light and heat thus produced we can derive the energies which we have been accustomed to call vital, it indubitably follows that vital energy may have an approximately mechanical origin."-Professor Tyndall.

Natural Selection, not a Modern

Doctrine.

for

"What

Darwin, relying

upon a wide extent of positive knowledge, has achieved our generation, Empedocles [above two thousand years ago] offered to the thinkers of antiquity -the simple and penetrating thought that adaptations preponderate in Nature, just because it is their nature to perpetuate themselves, while what fails has long since perished.”— Lange.

Adaptability of Human Nature.

"In our estimate of the ills

of life we never sufficiently

take into our consideration the wonderful elasticity of our moral frame, the unlooked-for, the startling facility with which the human mind accommodates itself to all change of circumstance, making an object and and even a joy from the hardest and seemingly the least redeemed conditions of life.

So wonderful in equalising all states and all times in the varying tide of life are these two rulers yet levellers of mankind, Hope and Custom, that the very idea of an eternal punishment includes that of an utter alteration of the whole mechanism of the soul in its human state; and no effort of our imagination, assisted by past experience, can conceive a state of torture which Custom can never