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Whether on that August morning after death he saw a more glorious sun rise with unimaginable splendor above a celestial horizon, or whether his apathetic and unconscious ashes still sleep in cold obstruction and insensible oblivion - we do not know.

Whether his strong and subtle energies found instant exercise in another forum; whether his dexterous and disciplined faculties are now contending in a higher Senate than ours for supremacy; or whether his powers were dissipated and dispersed with his parting breath we do not know.

Whether his passions, ambitions, and affections still sway, attract, and impel; whether he yet remembers us as we remember him we do not know.

These are the unsolved, the insoluble problems of mortal life and human destiny, which prompted the troubled patriarch to ask that momentous question for which the centuries have given no answer: "If a man die, shall he live again?"

Every man is the center of a circle whose fatal circumference he cannot pass. Within its narrow confines he is potential, beyond it he perishes; and if immortality be a splendid but delusive dream, if the incompleteness of every career, even the longest and most fortunate, be not supplemented and perfected after its termination here,

then he who dreads to die should fear to live, for life is a tragedy more desolate and inexplicable than death.

These principles were reiterated by Ingalls less than four months before his death in his article "The Immortality of the Soul". That he died immovable in their truth there can be no doubt.

II.

Of Jesus of Nazareth, Ingalls said, "He is the central character of human destiny, the one colossal figure of human history." But in this he is not to be understood as subscribing to the plan of redemption of souls said by His followers to have been proclaimed by Him. Rather, His teachings are to more and more prove the germs from which political progress and higher civilization must develop.

The central idea of Christianity, as now promulgated, is the resurrection. "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain," wrote Paul to the Corinthians, and, he continues, "they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are

of all men most miserable," he warns the worldly-minded. "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," wrote the Beloved Disciple. The resurrection of the dead, as held by the Church, rests mainly on the utterances of the great apostle to the Gentiles. But for himself, Ingalls swept this away with a stroke of his pen,-"Saint Paul, the greatest of the teachers of Christianity, could only respond by a misleading analogy. He knew the wheat which is reaped is not that which is sown. The harvest is a succession, not a resurrection."

But even here Ingalls did not lapse into the despair of atheism. Writing to his father of the death of his son Addison, he said: "His sweet soul vanished into the Unknown. Yesterday beneath the clear sky that brooded above us like a covenant of peace, we laid him to sleep beside his sister, to wait the solution of the great mystery of existence when earth and sea shall give up their dead. That I may meet him again in the great Hereafter is a profound aspiration rather than a living faith, but if eternity will

release its treasures, sometime I shall claim my own."

He regarded the question of Job, "If a man die, shall he live again?" the everlasting interrogatory.

A Supreme Being, Ingalls seemed to admit, but of what order, nature, degree, glory, he did not affirm. "Faith in a Supreme Being," he said, "in immortality and the compensations of eternity conduces powerfully to social order by enabling men to endure with composure the injustice of this world in the hope of reparation in that which is to come."

The position finally assumed by Ingalls was due somewhat to a revulsion from the harsh theology of Calvin, at one time so deeply rooted in New England. He was to some extent a disciple of Carlyle, though he could never have been prevailed upon to admit it, and life became a matter of wonder and increasing mystery. "After all," he wrote his father, "whether well or ill, the longest life is but a brief pulsation, like the momentary flash of a firefly in a garden at night: and whether its transitory torch is to be extinguished forever or to be relighted and burn eternally, we hope and dream, but know not."

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III.

In the contemplation of immortality and the inscrutable mystery of human life Ingalls said that:

Our appearance here is not voluntary. We are sent to this planet on some mysterious errand without being consulted in advance. Many of us would not have come had the opportunity to decline, with thanks, been presented.

To multitudes life is an inconceivable insult and injury, an intolerable affront; torture and wretchedness indescribable from poverty, disease, grief, Fortune's slings and arrows; wrongs deliberately inflicted by some unknown malignant power, as Job was tormented by the devil, with the consent of God, just to try him, till at last the troubled patriarch cursed the day he was born.

Worst of all, we are sent here under sentence of death. The most grievous and humiliating punishment man can inflict upon the criminal is death.

Human tribunals give the malefactor a chance. His crime must be proved. He can put in his defense. He can appear by attorney and plead and take appeal. But we are all condemned to death beforehand. The accusation and the acAn inexorable verdict has

cuser are unknown.

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