THE FUTURE LIFE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Slim,—I fear my paper on the Great Enigma was not as clear as I fancied I had made it, since both your last week's corre- spondents appear to assume that I " object to a future life," or disbelieve in it. I intended entirely to abstain from expressing any conviction on the question, nor indeed could I. express a conviction which I certainly have not arrived at. My only intention in what I wrote was to point out that, as grounds for believing that we shall live again, the Spectator's arguments were utterly untenable and inadequate ; and my hope was that my representations might perhaps bring forth some stronger pleas for accepting that consolatory faith, which never seems to me in such peril as when I hear it "proved,"—or when its most able and confident votaries explain their reasons for holding it.
Miss Cobbo's dream, like everything she writes, as a sarcasm is effective and vivacious ; but ft scarcely strikes me, regarded as argument, enough to build a creed upon. Still it is a contribu- tion to the controversy.
I have heard from a relative of my own a suggestion which appears to me weightier by far, but unfortunately its strength will be recognised only by minds whose fundamental assump- tions make them need it least. Those who feel and are con- vinced that God " enters into personal relations " with His human creatures—who hold, or think they hold, communion with the Father of Spirits, whose natures, however undogmatic, are profoundly religious—urge that such relations, such communion, are inconceivable between a God and an Ephemeris, that they imply a union, an intimacy, if we may so speak, and a love on the part of the Creator, which would render the severance of such a tie at the expiration of seventy years (a mere moment in His sight) too exquisitely painful to be the design of the one Being, or the destiny of the other. This consideration, no doubt, must be decisive to all to whose spirits communion with their Father is the most absolute of verities, the most certain fact in their consciousness,—but alas l to those only.
Miss Cobbe fancies me to have been " an old schoolfellow of Harriet Martineau." Unfortunately our intimacy began a third of a century ago, when school-days were matters of history for us
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