Page:The Other Life.djvu/24

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these divine laws, I am assured of eternal life. What form I may have, where I may be, what I shall do, what laws and phenomena exist in the other world, I do not know, nor is it essential that I should inquire."

And so men pass from a temporal to an eternal state of being in a strange apathy respecting subjects of supreme value, as ignorant of the future that awaits them as the unborn babe is of the world into which he will be ushered.

Is this right? Is it necessary? Is it inevitable?

The skeptical philosopher affirms that there are positive limitations to human thought; that no possible scientific development or research can ever lead us to a knowledge of the soul and its destinies; that the existence of a spiritual world is a mere hypothesis, and all theology the offspring of dreamy abstraction and idle speculation.

The Christian concedes the finiteness and feebleness of the human understanding, and correctly infers from it the necessity of revelation. He accepts the Word of God as the revelation of a moral law. Assured of a blessed immortality, he asks for no special unfolding of the life to come. Indeed he persuades himself that God has intentionally and wisely kept us in ignorance of the laws