By the Rev. A. J. WALDRON

This is the eternal question, as old as death. It is, and ever will be, the problem of religion, science, and philosophy. The borderland between "the living" and "the not living" is the Waterloo of science.

The great question is: What proof have we of life beyond the grave? I dare assert that the proof is so clear as almost to amount to mathematical certainty.

Take, for instance, the enormous amount of evidence furnished by the phenomena of psychical research; read what Sir Oliver Lodge has written in "The Destiny of Man"; weigh over the names of men like Dr. Barrett, F. W. Myers, Prof. Sidgwick, Dr. Hodgson, Camille Flammarion, A. J. Balfour, and a host of others. I am quite aware that the history of spiritualism contains innumerable stories of fraud, illusion, delusion, etc., but when you have finished your criticism you are still left with a residuum of fact, which baffles solution except you admit that there is striking evidence of communication between what we call "the living and the dead."

I have studied spiritualism for twenty years; I do not think there is a book worth reading on the subject which I have not carefully studied. I have debated with some of the most eminent mediums, and I have studied the question in seance, and I have been forced to the conclusion that there is a residuum of fact which can only be explained on the spiritualistic hypothesis.

But when the person is dead and you bury the body, what becomes of the life, the human ego, this atom of force, that used the body, that played its divine harmony in the brain cells?

If it goes into space or a spiritual sphere, how can it act without a medium, for we know that on this plane the phenomenon of human life depends on a physical organism? Not so fast, please. The old chemistry, it is true, said the line of communication between the tips of the finger and the brain was a chain of atoms, atom conveying impression to atom and on and on to the brain, and there read off by that mysterious thing called consciousness. That chemistry is out of date. We know now by established fact the medium of communication is not gross matter, but ether. We send messages without wires - wireless telegraphy - it passes through oceans, mountains; nothing can stop it.

What is the medium? Ether. What is ether? It is not matter; it fills stellar space, it fills molecular space, it is not subject to gravitation. It is a third something, neither matter nor force.

Don't you remember that an old sage called Paul wrote, "You will be buried with a corruptible body, and you will rise with an incorruptible body. There is a natural body and a spiritual body"? It seems to me that Paul anticipated modern science in that inspired passage. At least, ether shows us we have two bodies; one, the gross material fit for this planet, and another which no closed doors or windows can shut in. You have got the spiritual body now, and that body which, at last, science has put its finger on, is to my mind the spiritual body which will be used by the ego in that spiritual world for personal manifestation.

The verdict of history? Look where you will see the phenomena of religion, religion that spells three things - God, the soul, and immortality. The doctrine of immortality is at the back of all Egyptian history; it built the Pyramids, decorated the tombs, wrote the "Book of the Dead," founded Thebes, and gave the first poets their songs, and runs its golden weft through all its literature.

It is the same everywhere; unlock the mysterious cuneiform reading on the clay tablets of Assyria, Babylon, and Chaldea, and there is practically only one message - life beyond the grave.

Is there anything to match this? Tell me this instinct for immortality is a nightmare, an excrescence bred of ignorance. I reply that here is a greater miracle than the one you displace. The law of correspondence is broken. No; when I find a fossil, and on it I find fossil fins, I rightly infer that the fossil was once a fish, and there must have been water to match it, correspond with it. The eye, with its coats, humours, lens, and retina, is impossible without light to match it; the bird, with its wings beautifully formed, must have air with buoyancy to match it. So when I find this instinct for immortality as universal as language, as old as human thought, as real as consciousness, as deep as human needs, and as high as human aspiration, I reply it seems to me it must have life beyond to match it, to equalise it, to make the music plain, and fill the earth with law, and the universe with justice.

We believe in justice; we believe in hope; but if there is no future life, there can be no justice in the universe. The girl dies outraged in the gutter, the betrayer goes free, the scales are never adjusted.

I believe in God, because I believe in justice, in love, and in hope. I believe there is something in the universe which must match alien, vapid, the immortality of which can have no more meaning and interest for our conscious Ego than the indestructibility of the atoms composing our mortal body. What value, what interest can an immortality have for me in which I should no longer love what I have loved, no longer hate what I have hated, no longer remember my past life, my small and great adventures, my moments of joy and my days of sorrow, my sweet and my bitter emotions, my ambitions, my yearnings, my disappointments, my pains, and my consolations - in one word, all that composed that personality the preservation of which seemed so hugely important to me? In this case it is not me that survives, the immortality of this alien soul is not my immortality and does not concern me in any way.

But the first alternative is still far worse. Suppose my immortal soul would really be my conscious Ego, all the essentials of my personality surviving the death of my body. It would remain connected with everything that was dear to me, it would preserve all my feelings. Now, think of this: Reduced to the state of a soul without organs, without means for exercising the slightest action on the material world, I would see my child weep and would be unable to comfort it; I would accompany her life, watch it in every moment, witness her distress, her pains, her dangers, her despair, and I would be incapable of aiding her, helping her, protecting her, defending her, encouraging her. Why, this would be a fiendish torture, worse than all the torments attributed to hell! Why, annihilation would be an inestimable blessing compared with this existence of a feeling but paralytic soul, impotent witness of all sufferings, a prisoner, fettered and gagged, shut in in its eternity and deprived of all possibility to communicate with all that it loves more than itself.

Let us go one step farther.

My Ego is composed of certain definite notions or conceptions. The contents of its consciousness are the world which it knows, are the beings which have always surrounded it. Now eternity means a rather long time. All that I know, all that I love, all that concerns or interests me in any way, will have disappeared, say, in a couple of centuries. In two thousand years, perhaps, not even my nation will exist any longer. What interest, this globe of ours, shall it then offer to me? What will be the contents of that immortality which is so fervently wished for? The soul will have to fill itself with other, new interests which I cannot guess. But in this case again the soul will not be my soul, mine Ego.

No. The immortality of the personality is neither conceivable nor desirable. Nothingness is more consoling. And all one ought to desire is a death which does not come prematurely, but at the precise hour when one has accomplished all one's tasks and completed the circle of the vital obligations. Such a death - this is my innermost conviction - can have no terror for anybody.