Thus, for four thousand years, the soul of man dashed its wings against the prison-bars of time, peering into the night through the cold, relentless gratings for some fugitive ray of the existence of which it had such strong and sleepless presentiment.  It is a mystery.  It may seem irreverent to approach it even with a conjecture.  Human reason should be humble and silent before it, and close its questioning lips.  It may not, however, transcend its prerogative to say meekly, perhaps.  Perhaps, then, for two-thirds of the duration that the sun has measured off to humanity, that life and immortality which the soul groped after were veiled from its vision, until all its mental and spiritual faculties had been trained and strengthened to the ability to grasp and appropriate the great fact when it should be revealed.  Perhaps it required all the space of forty centuries to put forth feelers and fibres capable of clinging to the revelation with the steady hold of faith.  Perhaps it was to prove, by long, decisive probation, what the unaided human mind could do in constructing its idealisms of immortality.  Perhaps it was permitted to erect a scaffolding of conceptions on which to receive the great revelation at the highest possible level of thought and instinctive sentiment to which man could attain without supernatural light and help.  If this last perhaps is preferable to the others, where was this scaffolding the highest?  Over Confucius, or Socrates, or the Scandinavian seer, or Druid or Aztec priest?  Was it highest at Athens, because there the great apostle to the Gentiles planted his feet upon it, and said, in the ears of the Grecian sophists, “Him whom ye ignorantly worship declare I unto you?” At that brilliant centre of pagan civilization it might have reached its loftiest altitude, measured by a purely intellectual standard; but morally, this scaffolding was on the same low level of human life and character all the world around.  The immortalities erected by Egyptian or Grecian philosophy were no purer, in moral conception and attributes, than the mythological fantasies of the North American Indians.  In them all, human nature was to have the old play of its passions and appetites; in some of them, a wider sweep and sway.  There was not one in the whole set of Grecian deities half so moral and pure, in sentiment and conduct, as Socrates; nor were Jupiter and his subordinate celestials better than the average kings and courts of Greece.  Out of the hay, wood, and stubble of sheer fancy the human mind was left to raise these fantastic structures.  They exercised and entertained the imagination, but brought no light nor strength to the soul; no superior nor additional motives to shape the conduct of life.  But they did this, undoubtedly, with all their delusions; they developed the thought of immortality among the most benighted races of men.  Their most perplexing unrealities kept the mind restless and almost eager