IN the "Geständisse" of Heinrich Heine occurs a pregnant passage concerning Hegel. "Generally," writes the bitter humourist, "Hegel's conversation was a sort of monologue, breathed forth noiselessly by fits and starts; the daily quaintness of his words often impressed me, insomuch that many of them still cling to my memory. One fine starlight evening, as we stood looking out from the window, I, a young man of twenty-five, having just dined well and drunk my coffee, spoke enthusiastically concerning the stars, and called them the homes of departed spirits. 'The stars, hum! hum!' muttered Hegel. 'The stars are only a brilliant leprosy in heaven's face.' 'In God's name, then, I exclaimed, 'is there no

place of bliss above, where virtue meets with its reward after death?' But he, the master, glaring at me with his pale eyes, said sharply, 'So! you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and refrained from poisoning your worthy brother!'" It is in no profane spirit that I select this grim and terrible passage for a brief comment. The words in italics touch on the profound mystery, but only make it more hopeless.

Feeble religion, clinging with slight hands of flesh to every straw of counsel, may gain help and comfort from the prospect of rewards, may cross herself and groan at the brimstone jaws of the pit of punishments; but out of the clear white air of theology, this doctrine of the bonus drops like a falling tear. There, at least, in that serene atmosphere, we cease to regard the Master merely as an Almighty Pedagogue, dealing out prizes to the good and whippings to the naughty, or as a splendid Sentimentalist, making of widows' tears and bairns' blood the rainbow of a heaven of melancholy beauty. Humbly, as in a glass, dimly, mystically, we behold something infinitely more— a Spirit abiding by the wondrous fitness of life

itself, and stooping to no prevarications with the wicked or the unhappy. Life once given, the rest is easy. We are to play our little comedy or tragedy in our own fashion, and so effloresce into beauty at once, or retreat again into the phases of decay. But as for that new Jerusalem, perhaps it is not yet built, and if it indeed be fashioned, be sure that the foundation-stone of the city is not to be laid in hell. Now and henceforth,

perfect bliss is a blank business, the point where man and monkey shade off into the elements. If I assassinate my father, it needs no hades to adjust the matter; and, here and elsewhere, heaven will never go by mere finite merit.

It is natural for very pious people to be afraid of theology-white light blinds quickest. But a little more theology would do our religion no harm. We find that even the tender-hearted, who will by no means believe in the Pit, are quite ready to pin their hopes on the Paradise. It is very sad. Men who, like myself, believe in the Redeemer, find it hard to follow Him beyond a beautiful halting-place. We long so wearily for sleep; yet is it not barely possible that the sleep

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wherewith our life is rounded may refresh us amply, so that we shall awake ready to go on and on? Waking and sleep, sleep and waking. The tired dews of one life wiped away, the pilgrim shall push forward till he is tired again. Another sleep, another waking. At every stage, the wonder deepening; at every life, the faculty for living intensifying. But eternal halt, no! God is exhaustless, and the soul thirsts everlastingly, and the path ever winds onward. Who would exchange this activity for howsoever sweet a symposium?

To the purpose, though with a far different drift, wrote Moses Mendelssohn, in his new Phoedo. "We may then," said Socrates, "with good grounds assume that this struggle towards completeness, this progress, this increase in inward excellence, is the destination of rational beings, and consequently, is the highest purpose of creation. We may say that this immense structure of the world was brought into being that there may be rational beings which advance from stage to stage, gradually increase in perfection, and find their happiness in their progress; that

all these should be stopped in the middle of their course, not only stopped, but at once pushed back into the abyss of nothingness, and all the fruits of their efforts lost, is what the Highest Being cannot have accepted and adopted into the plan of the universe."

If

This world, with its infinite gulfs of sorrow and horror, its piteous lights, its ghostly sounds, merely a prelude to a Paradise beyond the sunset? How stale, flat, and unprofitable a business. that be all, a still small voice asks how easy for Him to have abolished the preliminary agony and given us the bliss at once. What is He? The giver of a bonus. What are we? Strugglers after a bonus. Something more? Then surely that something more implies disinterestedness— contentedness to suffer a little for God's sake, when diligently assured that suffering is in the scheme. It may need these tears to give a zest to living; for I, at least, can conceive no life all tears, or quite without them. By all tokens around us, by the eyes of heaven over us, by the wail of the earth under us, by life, by love, by sorrow, all signs seem to imply that God by no means believes