Life Is Education The Heart's Desires Have a Cause Behind Them E VERYTHING is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma. And I think that the naturalist works not for himself, but for the believing mind, which turns his discoveries to revelations and receives them as private tokens of the grand good-will of the Creator. NOW Immortality. OW there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in steady and supported advances. The implanting of a desire indicates that the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature that feels it; the wish for food, the wish for motion, the wish for sleep, for society, for knowledge, are not random whims, but grounded in the structure of the creature, and meant to be satisfied by food, by motion, by sleep, by society, by knowledge. If there is the desire to live and in larger sphere, with more knowledge, and power, it is because knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural depositories of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate like all our other experiences, a conviction of immense resources and possibilities proper to us, on which we have never drawn. Immortality. ALL LL I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which the great Providence prepares for us, it must be something large and generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to the style of our faculties, of memory, of hope, of imagination, of Immortality. reason. A VERY really able man, in whatever direction he work-a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter-if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator? The the Past Man Loves the Un attainable Life is We believe in immortality by instinctthe soul sees it. I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in immortality, that we can give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's "Ode" is the best modern essay on the subject. Immortality. WITHIN every man's thought is a higher thought, within the character he exhibits to-day, a higher character. The youth puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts off the ignorance and tumultuous passions of youth; proceeding thence puts off the egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and universal soul. He is rising to greater heights, but also rising to realities; the outer relations and circumstances dying out, he entering deeper into God, God into him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with Godshares the will and the immensity of the First Cause. Immortality. NATURE, BEAUTY, TRAVEL Yet spoke yon purple mountain, That Night or Day, that Love or Crime, The Park |