ends that are not of self has got into our human fiber, and we cannot live without obeying that loyalty to the ideal even though it cost all we have and all we are.

CHAPTER V

THE GREAT VENTURE

I

CONCERNING IMMORTALITY

We have heard very much of the problems concerning prayer during these years - how long they seem! since the war broke in upon our old arrangements, and another problem has become perhaps still more pressing - that of immortality.

The awed spirit holds its breath

Blown over by a wind of death.

We have been living face to face with staggering conditions, and we have been closer neighbors to death than has ever been the case before since there were men. We have been forced to ask over again the immemorial questions of the human race and more urgently than ever the question which sooner or later every man asks of himself, "Do my loved and lost still live in another sphere; shall we find each other again, and will there be a real fulfillment and consummation of this incom

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plete and fragmentary earthly career?' No absolute answer can yet be given to that palpitating human question, though some genuine illumination relieves the otherwise appalling darkness. For many in fact, for multitudes the Easter message of the gospel is all that is needed. It is a pillar of hope and a ground of faith. It closes the issue and settles all doubt.

But in a world which has proved to be in the main rationally ordered and marvelously susceptible to scientific treatment, we should expect to find in the natural order of things some sort of rational evidence that the highest moral and spiritual values of life are conserved. Those of us who have been accustomed to knock at the doors of the universe for answers to our earnest questions can hardly help expecting nature to respond in some adequate way to this most urgent quest of It is this rational quest of which I propose saying a few words.

ours.

There have been in the past, and there still are, two quite different ways of approaching the question of survival on rational grounds. We can pursue the method which is usually called empirical, or we can follow out the implications of the ethical life. The first method deals with the observable facts on which belief in survival rests.

In the primitive and rudimentary stage of the race dream experiences had important influence on the formation of man's ideas about the unseen world. In his sleep he saw again those who had vanished from his sight. His dead father appeared to him, talked with him, and even joined him in the chase. It was, however, a world quite different from the world of his waking senses. It was not a world which he could show to his neighbor, nor did it have the same rigid, solid, verifiable characteristics as did his outer world. It was a ghostly world with shadelike inhabitants. It was not a radiant and sunlit realm; it was dull and unlovely. But in any case most races reacting on dreams, and probably on even more impressive psychic experiences, arrived at a settled conviction that life of some sort went on in some kind of other world. The mythologies of the poetic races are full of pictures and stories expanded out of racial experiences. These psychic experiences have continued through all human history, and a large body of facts has slowly accumulated. In recent years the automatic writing and the automatic speaking of psychically endowed persons have furnished a mass of interesting material which can be dealt with systematically and scientifically.

It is too soon, however, to build any definite hopes on this empirical evidence. There can be no question that some of the reports which come from these "sensitives "- these psychically endowed persons appear, to an unskeptically minded reader of them, to be real communications from persons in another world or, at least, in another part of our world. This is nevertheless a hasty conclusion. It may be true, but it is not the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from the facts. It is a mistake at this stage of our knowledge to talk of "scientific " evidence of survival. All that we are warranted in saying is that there are many cumulative facts which may eventually furnish solid empirical evidence that what we call death does not end personal life. But at its best the empirical approach seems to me an unsatisfactory way to deal with this problem. I should feel the same way about empirical tests of prayer. They do not meet the case. The real issue reaches deeper. We shall, of course, welcome everything which adds to our assurance, but I, for one, prefer to rest my faith on other grounds than these empirical ones.

Far back in the history of the race prophets appeared who inaugurated a new way of solving human problems. They discovered that man's