By JOHN BLOUNDELLE-BURTON

The answer to the question is impossible. To state, however, what we hope, perhaps more than what we believe, is far easier, presuming that we are fully prepared to base our belief on the statements of the Bible, of which no one would desire to speak with doubt. We may say, in a word, that our universal belief - the belief we wish to hold - is the old assertion that those who have done well shall have "everlasting life," and that those who have done evil shall go into "everlasting fire." The last two words, however, are calculated to shake the belief of those who are most desirous to believe.

Let us regard this point, since it creates extreme difficulties. Whence came the belief that fire will be the punishment of those who, being dead, can feel nothing, or, being dead for myriads of years, can have left behind no grain capable of destruction ? Consider the style of writing of those who may have promulgated such doctrines, and also whence they deduced them. Recent years, nay, recent days, have proved to us by discoveries made that human beings lived at the time the world was undergoing strange changes; there was the glacial period, the fire period, and others.

Those human beings may have heard of both through early legends. Fire may have appeared to them the most awful of the two calamities; so would not fire have seemed to their crude, un-instructed, almost animal minds the most appalling horror that could fall on them ? Might not hell, as we speak of it, viz., "everlasting fire," have struck them as the most terrible punishment that could befall the guilty? On the other hand, "everlasting life," to the Eastern mind, would depict - it does so to this day - calm and placid joys. It does so to the most devout of us, and depicts happiness such as we ourselves imagine Heaven to be, viz., the everlasting life in which we shall all share if we are of those who have done well.

Yet on this point, on which the most saintly as well as the most evil are still embarrassed, no information is forthcoming. No visitation of those we have loved dearly, of those who have been our friends, is ever vouchsafed; yet all of us aspire to learn something, to receive one word, one token that shall make things clear to us. We want absolute proof, tangible signs of what will happen when we have left this world, but no one comes back to tell us. We try to believe - the veriest atheist would believe and respect if all could be made clear, made sure. There would be no sinners on this earth if they who are inclined to sin knew what their deserts would be; if they who now lead good and pure lives could know that their reward was certain.

The latter merit that knowledge because even the good would desire to be sure; the former would at once reform and indulge no more in scoffing and deriding a future life as that of a monk's or an old wife's tale. But no one comes back to tell us, and so, be we either good or bad, there lingers ever with us all the dread reflection that we have no actual knowledge of what happens to us when we die.