renewed in far greater perfection and carried on into far higher joys than can be even imagined here. All this is beautiful and full of fascination: why should we deny it? Candor compels us to admit that in giving it up with the other illusions of our younger days we are resigning a balm for the wounded spirit for which it would be hard to find an equivalent in all the repertories in Science, and in all the treasures of philosophy. Yet it must be borne in mind that every step from a lower to a higher creed involves a precisely similar loss. How much more beautiful was nature (as Schiller has shown us in his poem on the gods of Greece) when every fountain, tree and river had its presiding genius, when the Sun was driven by a divine charioteer, when the deities of Olympus intervened in the affairs of men to prevent injustice and to maintain the right. How cold and lifeless, nay, how profoundly irreligious, would our modern conception of the earth and the solar system have appeared to the worshiper of Poseidon and Apollon. And if the loss of the Christian as compared to the Pagan is thus great, how great also is the loss of the enlightened Protestant as compared to the ignorant Catholic peasant. What comfort must be found in the immediate intervention of the Virgin in answer to prayer, what security afforded by the protection of the local saint. Or again, how great the pleasure of contributing by our piety to the release of a friend from purgatorial torment, and of knowing that our friends will do us the same kindly service.
Even without contrasting such broad and conspicuous divisions of Christianity as these, we shall find enough of the same kind of difference within the limits of Protestantism itself. What mere intellectual conviction of a future state can vie with the consoling certainty offered by the Spiritualistic belief, that those whom we have lost on earth still hover around us in our daily course; sometimes even appear to us in bodily form, and converse with us in human speech. No mere hope of meeting them again can for a moment equal the delight of seeing their well-known shapes and hearing their familiar tones. Hence the Spiritualist has undoubtedly a source of comfort in his faith which more rational creeds can offer nothing to supply. But who that does not share it can envy them so baseless a conviction, so illusory a joy?
