healed.

This intenseapathy in all of us is the first great mystery of life;
it stands in the way of every perception, every virtue. There is no

making ourselves feel enough astonishment at it. That the
occupations or pastimes of life should have no motive, is

understandable; but--That life itself should have no motive--that we
neither care to find out what it may lead to, nor to guard against

its being for ever taken away from us--here is a mystery indeed.
For just suppose I were able to call at this moment to any one in

this audience by name, and to tell him positively that I knew a
large estate had been lately left to him on some curious conditions;

but that though I knew it was large, I did not know how large, nor
even where it was--whether in the East Indies or the West, or in

England, or at the Antipodes. I only knew it was a vast estate, and
that there was a chance of his losing it altogether if he did not

soon find out on what terms it had been left to him. Suppose I were
able to say this positively to any single man in this audience, and

he knew that I did not speak without warrant, do you think that he
would rest content with that vague knowledge, if it were anywise

possible to obtain more? Would he not give every energy to find
some trace of the facts, and never rest till he had ascertained

where this place was, and what it was like? And suppose he were a
young man, and all he could discover by his best endeavour was that

the estate was never to be his at all, unless he persevered, during
certain years of probation, in an orderly and industrious life; but

that, according to the rightness of his conduct, the portion of the
estate assigned to him would be greater or less, so that it

literally depended on his behaviour from day to day whether he got
ten thousand a year, or thirty thousand a year, or nothing whatever-

-would you not think it strange if the youth never troubled himself
to satisfy the conditions in any way, nor even to know what was

required of him, but lived exactly as he chose, and never inquired
whether his chances of the estate were increasing or passing away?

Well, you know that this is actually and literally so with the
greater number of the educated persons now living in Christian

countries. Nearly every man and woman in any company such as this,
outwardly professes to believe--and a large number unquestionably

think they believe--much more than this; not only that a quite
unlimited estate is in prospect for them if they please the Holder

of it, but that the infinitecontrary of such a possession--an
estate of perpetual misery--is in store for them if they displease

this great Land-Holder, this great Heaven-Holder. And yet there is
not one in a thousand of these human souls that cares to think, for

ten minutes of the day, where this estate is or how beautiful it is,
or what kind of life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life

they must lead to obtain it.
You fancy that you care to know this: so little do you care that,

probably, at this moment many of you are displeased with me for
talking of the matter! You came to hear about the Art of this

world, not about the Life of the next, and you are provoked with me
for talking of what you can hear any Sunday in church. But do not

be afraid. I will tell you something before you go about pictures,
and carvings, and pottery, and what else you would like better to

hear of than the other world. Nay, perhaps you say, "We want you to
talk of pictures and pottery, because we are sure that you know

something of them, and you know nothing of the other world." Well--
I don't. That is quite true. But the very strangeness and mystery

of which I urge you to take notice, is in this--that I do not;--nor
you either. Can you answer a single bold question unflinchingly

about that other world?--Are you sure there is a heaven? Sure there
is a hell? Sure that men are dropping before your faces through the

pavements of these streets into eternal fire, or sure that they are
not? Sure that at your own death you are going to be delivered from

all sorrow, to be endowed with all virtue, to be gifted with all
felicity, and raised into perpetualcompanionship with a King,

compared to whom the kings of the earth are as grass-hoppers, and
the nations as the dust of His feet? Are you sure of this? or, if

not sure, do any of us so much as care to make it sure? and, if not,
how can anything that we do be right--how can anything we think be

wise? what honour can there be in the arts that amuse us, or what
profit in the possessions that please?

Is not this a mystery of life?
But farther, you may, perhaps, think it a beneficent ordinance for

the generality of men that they do not, with earnestness" target="_blank" title="n.认真，急切；坚定">earnestness or anxiety,
dwell on such questions of the future because the business of the

day could not be done if this kind of thought were taken by all of
us for the morrow. Be it so: but at least we might anticipate that

the greatest and wisest of us, who were evidently the appointed
teachers of the rest, would set themselves apart to seek out

whatever could be surely known of the future destinies of their
race; and to teach this in no rhetorical or ambiguous manner, but in

the plainest and most severelyearnest words.
Now, the highest representatives of men who have thus endeavoured,

during the Christian era, to search out these deep things, and
relate them, are Dante and Milton. There are none who for

earnestness" target="_blank" title="n.认真，急切；坚定">earnestness of thought, for mastery of word, can be classed with
these. I am not at present, mind you, speaking of persons set apart

in any priestly or pastoral office, to deliver creeds to us, or
doctrines; but of men who try to discover and set forth, as far as

by human intellect is possible, the facts of the other world.
Divines may perhaps teach us how to arrive there, but only these two

poets have in any powerful manner striven to discover, or in any
definite words professed to tell, what we shall see and become

there; or how those upper and nether worlds are, and have been,
inhabited.

And what have they told us? Milton's account of the most important
event in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels,

is evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is
wholly founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from,

Hesiod's account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the
Titans. The rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every

artifice of invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a
single fact being, for an instant, conceived as tenable by any

living faith. Dante's conception is far more intense, and, by
himself, for the time, not to be escaped from; it is indeed a

vision, but a vision only, and that one of the wildest that ever
entranced a soul--a dream in which every grotesque type or phantasy

of heathentradition is renewed, and adorned; and the destinies of
the Christian Church, under their most sacred symbols, become

literallysubordinate to the praise, and are only to be understood
by the aid, of one dear Florentine maiden.

I tell you truly that, as I strive more with this strange lethargy
and trance in myself, and awake to the meaning and power of life, it

seems daily more amazing to me that men such as these should dare to
play with the most precious truths, (or the most deadly untruths,)

by which the whole human race listening to them could be informed,
or deceived;--all the world their audiences for ever, with pleased

ear, and passionate" target="_blank" title="a.易动情的；易怒的">passionate heart;--and yet, to this submissive infinitude
of souls, and evermore succeeding and succeeding multitude, hungry

for bread of life, they do but play upon sweetly modulated pipes;
with pompous nomenclature adorn the councils of hell; touch a

troubadour's guitar to the courses of the suns; and fill the
openings of eternity, before which prophets have veiled their faces,

and which angels desire to look into, with idle puppets of their
scholastic imagination, and melancholy lights of frantic faith in

their lost mortal love.
Is not this a mystery of life?

But more. We have to remember that these two great teachers were
both of them warped in their temper, and thwarted in their search

for truth. They were men of intellectual war, unable, through
darkness of controversy, or stress of personal grief, to discern

where their own ambition modified their utterances of the moral law;
or their own agony mingled with their anger at its violation. But

greater men than these have been--innocent-hearted--too great for
contest. Men, like Homer and Shakespeare, of so unrecognised

personality, that it disappears in future ages, and becomes ghostly,
like the tradition of a lost heathen god. Men, therefore, to whose

unoffended, uncondemning sight, the whole of human nature reveals
itself in a patheticweakness, with which they will not strive; or

in mournful and transitory strength, which they dare not praise.
And all Pagan and Christian Civilization thus becomes subject to

them. It does not matter how little, or how much, any of us have