bodily distress. No matter how tireless our vigilance or how profound our sympathy, we could not give them oblivion from pain. If our selfish wish was responded to, and we had them again by our side, we could only stand by as before, and witness a suffering we should be powerless to relieve.

I. It is surely wrong to mourn for the dead, when our mourning takes the form of bitter upbraiding or stubborn despair. We are sometimes so blinded with grief that we do not stop to consider that sooner or later death comes to us all, and that, when the parting from earth is once over, it is over forever. There would be far less despair in the world and a great deal more of happiness in human hearts if we could only hold rational views of death instead of always associating it with crape and sombre faces and open graves. The saddest thing about it is the temporary separation it involves. It is impossible to keep the tears back when we frequent familiar baunts alone, which once we frequented with congenial companions, and every heart must experience a sense of loneliness and depression when some beloved presence is removed from the range of our natural vision; but there is a difference between a resigned grief and a blind and demonstrative despair. Hopeless and obstinate mourning for the dead is sinful. We shall go to them when we receive our summons, but no pleading or prayer can ever bring them back to us except as they come in those moments of transfiguration when we are the closest to them in thought. Nothing could be more unkind than to wish them back to physical limitations they have escaped from forever. Their vision has been clarified, their understanding enlightened, their passions subdued. Disease no longer wastes their bodily tissues. For them the mystery of the grave has been solved, and the tearful parting from kindred and friends has been gone through with for the last time. To us their absence is a deprivation, but to them the change is infinite gain. We wrong them by our refusal to be reconciled.

We are not only unreasonable, but cruel, when we ask Deity to interpose by some miraculous agency, and bring them back from the sepulchre to our waiting embrace. They have done forever with bodily conditions. Whatever form the spirit will as

sume hereafter, we are sure it will not be the same form it assumes while here. It may be something constructed exactly in the likeness of our present form, but its constituents will not be of the earth, earthy. Dust will return to dust, but the spirit will ascend to the God who gave it. Let us be content to be bereaved when our bereavement means to the dead freedom from bodily restraints. Instead of sitting idly down to mourn, we should stand at the outposts of duty until announced to join them in other conditions of being beyond the grave, and no sense of loneliness or depression should ever tempt us to demand their recall. When once the obligations of the present are fulfilled, and the obligations of the future assumed, tears are often a happy relief for our grief, but passionate wailing is indicative of selfish despair.

II. Mourning for the dead, too, must, to a certain extent, react upon the spiritual temperament by which we are everywhere surrounded. The spirit land is not so far away but our friends may pity our grief, and be sorry that we are not wiser in our expression of it.

I believe that we grieve them when we abandon ourselves to stubborn despair. Loving us so well, they cannot but be affected by what affects us, and, although we cannot sense their presence in any objective way, I believe they can read our thought as we read an open book. We are accustomed to think of them as remote. So differently have we been taught from childhood that we do not find it easy to believe that heaven has no artificial boundaries, but is as much in one place as another, and may be summoned or dismissed at the instigation of our own volition. Do we ever stop and ask ourselves what course our departed friends would have us pursue if they could make their wishes known? Would they not point out the folly of a rebellious sorrow? Would they not protest with tender earnestness against the grief that sits and mourns and neglects important duties, and will not be consoled either by the conclusions of reason or the ministrations of religion? If our dead could speak, they would beseech us to lay aside our crape, and try to coax a little sunshine into our countenances. If the dead could speak, they would revoke that con

stant brooding over our disappointments which unfits us for the obligations of life, and makes everybody we come in contact with as uncomfortable as ourselves. It would seem as if some people actually make a show of their deprivation. They hold it up for everybody to sympathize with, just as the beggar sits by the wayside, and holds out a palsied hand to excite the compassion of the passer-by. We respect the dead more by bowing to the inevitable than by yielding ourselves to excessive grief.

No other thought will satisfy me than the thought that my dead are here. I do not miss them as I would if I believed them remote. I do not grieve for them as I would if I thought they could not come to me or I go to them. Invisible, they are still personal existences, capable of recognition if only our spiritual vision could transcend sense-perception, and we could see them as they see us, and as tender and caretaking as when they walked with us the ways of earth. They cannot help grieving when they see us absorbed in our selfish sorrow, thinking not of their gain, but our loss, and making everybody else miserable as well as ourselves by our disfigured faces and frequent sighs. It is far better that we conserve our energies for good than that we waste them in idle grieving. Our very dejection stands between us and the mature visions that any rational mind can ask for or desire,-visions of transfigured faces, radiant with blessing and full of tender love and longing, vision of a reunion and peace beyond the grave, when the days of our sojourn upon earth are fulfilled, and we are summoned to experience the surprises and surpassing delights of the spirit world. If we could only realize it, our dear departed are nearer to us when our thought of them is open and cheery than when we close the blinds and shut out the sunshine, and sit down within to weep and despair. Happiness is impossible without hope; and there can be no throb of sympathy between us and the unseen, when we repulse the spiritual presence which is the one thing we can reasonably expect, and demand the material presence which we know can never return. We ask for a perishable thing when we ask for the body. It subserves certain uses, and then decays. If the friend we love so well did not die to-day and leave us, perhaps

to-morrow we would die and leave him. If we could call him back, we might not stay very long ourselves to enjoy his companionship. The time we have to walk together here is brief at best. It matters little to whom first the summons comes. Death changes our environment, but not our destiny. We have the same nature, the same affectionate clinging to each other, and the same individuality.

Putting on immortality is not getting away from ourselves or each other; but we as truly fulfil a law of our being when we die as when we use our limbs for the purpose for which they were intended, and breathe in the constituents of the atmosphere which surround on every side. To grieve without hope is to rebel against nature, and to merit the censure of every rational mind.

III. To antagonize the results of death, too, is to wilfully ignore the law of evolution. Progress is by successive steps, from the lowest types of breathing organism to the ideals of the most transcendent thought. Nature never repeats anything. Having arrived at one condition of being to-day, she does not return to that of yesterday, but passes on to the conditions of to-morrow. To recall the dead would be to arrest development. A little reflection ought to satisfy us that the earth is not our final home, but only a temporary abode. While we are subject to the conditions of the flesh, there must of necessity be a limit to growth. Death is only the open door to infinite expansion. To die is to gain wider opportunities, to broaden our thought, and to know as we are known. If we will only stop to think, we shall be willing to accept death from the hands of Deity as gratefully as we accept life. There must be purpose in it as there is purpose in everything ordained by God. Death is often poetically pictured as the cro-sing of a river, with some grim boatman by our side, whose muffled features and speechless lips fill us with apprehension and dread. Such conceptions are distressingly pessimistic. They are part and parcel of those old calvinistic methods of thought which liked darkness better than light, and believed no view of the hereafter could be consistent and Scriptural unless the element of fear predominated in them, and wrath outbalanced love.

I fancy we shall experience no more of a shock when we come to die than we experience when we drop into a peaceful slumber. Bryant tells each one of us to

"So live that, when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch about him,

And lies down to pleasant dreams."

Nothing in nature is stationary. There is movement everywhere toward higher development, and death is as truly a step onward as the matured thought of manhood is a step onward from the crude conception of the little child. To rebel against it is not only to protest against nature, but to impede progress. When the body reaches a certain point of maturity, it begins to lose vigor, and at once tends toward decay; but the spirit passes on from power to higher power, from the likeness of one exalted ideal to the likeness of one still more exalted, from the widening outlook of the recently disembodied to infinite expansion and development. We never go forth unattended. Love is the magnet which draws us to invisible 'companionships; and we need only to rise above the pessimistic views of death, and the hereafter we have received from mediæval methods of thought, to be conscious of the presence of the beatified friends who long for us as truly as we long for them. We can have no message from the unseen while we obstinately mourn. We simply shut our hearts and will not receive it, and then upbraid God for not having made intercourse possible between us and the dead. Dejection drives them away, but hope brings them near. Flesh and bone they have parted with forever, and we need not expect to see them as we see each other, and to touch them as we can touch material things; but our love for them holds them close to our throbbing hearts, and we have only to bring ourselves into harmony with them to enrich our every solitude with visions of the life beyond. The natural presence we lose is transformed,

but the spiritual presence we gain is eternal. Nothing is more common than to go into some homes where the blinds are closely drawn and the sunshine shut out, and find persons there sitting with idle hands, mourning the dead. They are wasting precious energies, for which God will surely call them to account. Duty lasts as long as life lasts, and their deprivation would lose half its bitterness if they would go out into the sunshine and carry a message of sympathy to others worse off than themselves. As long as we dwell upon our misfortune, and pity ourselves for it, we are miserable; but the moment we think we are not utterly crushed, and that the duties and responsibilities of life go right on regardless of our grief, that moment the clouds disperse, and we begin to see light. Man was not made to mourn. The dead are as much under the protection of the Eternal Goodness as when we walk with them side by side; and, instead of doing either them or ourselves a service by indulging in open rebellion against the inevitable decree of nature, we thereby repulse those spiritual visions through which alone living communion can be established between them and ourselves.

Oneonta, N. Y.

EDWARD FOSTER TEMPLE.

THE CONGRESS OF EVOLUTIONISTS AT THE WORLD'S FAIR.*

At the close of one of the brightest papers read before the Congress, that of Rev. Mr. Simmons of Minneapolis, a lady turned to me in great perplexity, and asked, "Is he a Christian?" "Yes," I replied, "a doubledistilled one, first through the alembic of history, and then through that of evolution." She looked at me sharply through her glasses, and, detecting nothing but sanity in my eyes and soberness in my breath, asked again, "But what does he do with the first chapter of Genesis?" "Well, he puts that with the other things into his evolution, and it comes out in its proper order all right," I replied, "and a great deal more lovely than it was as history." There

This article was prepared for our last month's issue. The delay, however, does not destroy its interest.-EDITOR.

was a pause, and then the final question, "What denomination is he?" "A Unitarian," I said. Her only comment was a prolonged "Oh-h-h-h!" But that "Oh-h-h-h!" -Weismann himself never packed more hereditary molecules into the little germinal vesicle which transmits from generation to generation the form and qualities of each animal species than she did meanings into the unwritable quirks and twirls with which she pronounced its two letters. It expressed first the fact of an outside evangelical mind which had had some contact with Unitarianism; second, that a man's being of that faith accounted to her for any number of strange beliefs that he might be guilty of in other directions; third, though the exclamation is one of astonishment, she managed to indicate through it that she was not a particle astonished at the views in question, seeing they had come from such a source; fourthly, the existence in her mind of a great bundle of permanent astonishments gathered up through years that people who indulged in all the heresies and unbeliefs of the rankest infidelity could have at the same time so many of the more attractive virtues and excellencies of the Christian character and be such interesting and likable companions; and, lastly, a slowly diminishing series of admirations, respects, and envies for a class of thinkers who had solved the problem of how to hold on to something vital in the dear old faith of their childhood, and yet accept in full this charming new philosophy of the world's maturity.

Her "Oh-h-h-h!" if it could only be repeated as she gave it, would be, perhaps, the best possible condensed report of the whole Congress. Its meetings, to be sure, were not arranged for or participated in by Unitarians exclusively, for some of its most active friends were of other connections and of none at all, nor given intentionally a religious character, for many of the subjects treated were in themselves wholly secular; but it became of itself spontaneously the expression of that large and hopeful faith, rooted in the past, yet unfolding evermore in the present, which is the best characteristic of all liberal religion. It was fittingly a part of the World's Fair exhibits; for, among all the collections of fruits, manufactures, inventions, arts, sciences, charities,

reforms, and religions which the Fair has brought together, none is richer, more ingenious, more beautiful as a work of art, more distinctive of the nineteenth century, and more truly a matter of world-wide interest than its great fundamental truths. And its three days' sessions followed appropriately the Parliament of Religions; for it dealt inevitably with not a few of the problems which that body failed to handle, and, in its doctrine of integration as the final step after differentiation it gave, better than the Parliament] itself did, the true principle on which alone unity anywhere can be brought about.

In harmony with the purpose of the Fair as an exhibition of the world's work, the papers read did not aim to be the presentation of new and original investigations and discoveries by the acknowledged masters in science and philosophy, any more than the displays in the Electricity and Transportation Buildings did of freshly invented contrivances by Edison and Herreshof, but were a review of the history of evolution, a tribute to its heroic originators, a survey of the progress it has made in popular acceptance, a discussion of its bearings on the great problems of our time, and a glance at its promise for the future as a helper in the world's work. Spencer, Wallace, Huxley, and Haeckel lent it dignity by sending papers expressive of their sympathy with its objects and aiding somewhat in its discussions; but most of its work was done by amateurs who have taken the ore dug by others from the original mines of truth, and furnaced and hammered it out into new forms and new purity, and applied it to fresh uses; and it is not too much to say that their essays suffered nothing as to value and a clear understanding of the subject in comparison with those of its worldfamed authorities. The two things are distinct needs, requiring often distinct orders of mind; and the use of the two was in harmony with the principle acted upon in the Parliament of Religions, and through all the congresses, where not only the theologians and original thinkers, but the preachers and practical workers, were recognized and used.

Biology and what may be called the roots of the evolution tree down in the soil of matter and of animal life were not neglected; but its higher branches, psychology,

sociology, economics, philosophy, ethics, reform, and religion, got the larger share of attention, even the papers, on its other themes, all of them, running up into these more ethereal departments. Every participant was thorough-going in his acceptance and application of the evolution philosophy. No disposition was manifested, such as some timid, half-way students have shown a tendency towards, to adopt it as explaining the origin from an animal ancestry of only the lower phenomena of life and mind, and then to fall back on the old creation theory as the necessary way of accounting for consciousness, conscience, and the spiritual nature: But, on the other hand, there was no making duty a thing of dust, or spirit a phenomenon of matter,-no "moukeying" with the mysteries of soul, or implication that because man had come from a beast once he is justified in making a beast of himself again. The feet were planted on the soil, but the eyes were turned to the sky, the beginning recognized as nebulous mist, but the outcome as spiritual sunshine. Even Mr. Haeckel, who now, more than Huxley or Tyndall, is supposed to stand for materialism, claimed for his atoms most emphatically a soul, and was as pronounced in his recognition of actual ethics as ever was any intuitional philosopher.

It was noticeable, also, that the audience as regards this upward look was thoroughly in sympathy with the speakers. It was not a large gathering, the Parliament of Relig. ions immediately preceding it having received and exhausted the crowd; and the place of the meetings, the Art Palace up in the city of Chicago, was a building where the addresses were continually punctured and blotted and crossed out, as the religious ones held in the same place were, by the shrieks and pawings and gaspings of the Illinois railroad's steam-engines, yet in their megalosaurian state. But it was composed of intelligent representative people, some, to be sure, of the "Oh" exclaiming order, but all serious and earnest men and women. And not only the good speaking and the bright and witty points got applauded, but everything which showed the openings of the subject up into a larger ethics, humanitarianism, and religion received from them a doubly emphasized indorsement.

The Congress, while limited and unfilled

in some of its departments, especially that of economics, was significant, most of all, as being the first of its kind, and as showing the effect of the new philosophy on its dis. ciples and advocates. It dispelled utterly the fear once felt by so many persons, that it was to result, even at the best, in a transition state of materialism and moral confusion, and equally the idea that it is a faroff, nebulous speculation, with no bearing at all on actual affairs. It is to be, beyond question, an uplifting, strengthening, and intensely practical philosophy, the most so of any the world has ever seen. The recogni. tion at the meetings was clear and distinct that it is not only an account of how the universe, material and spiritual, has thus far come about, but a statement of the great natural laws and principles by which its work is still everywhere being carried on, and in obedience to which alone success can anywhere be reached. There is not a field of human effort to which it does not apply, not a charity or reform in which its use would not save human beings uncountable wastes of money and toil, without discouraging at all man's rational intervention. It it is the best conceivable antidote to wild schemes of social regeneration, whether legal or revolutionary, as showing alike their needlessness and their impossibility. And the conclusion was wisely reached at its final meeting that, while as distinct organized means, it has no mission at all, yet as nature's method, taught through every possible channel, it has one as wide as the world. JOHN C. KIMBALL.