“That’s an ugly word for a beautiful thing,” he said.  “But this love of life, this impulse to live, to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves alive, must surely mean that we have always lived and shall always live.  Some people think that dreadful.  They think it is taking liberties with them.  If they are rich and comfortable and dignified, they cannot bear to think that they may have to begin again, perhaps as a baby in a slum—­or they grow tired, and think they want rest; but we can’t rest—­we must live again, we must be back at work; and of course the real hope in it all is that, when we do anything to make the world happier, it is our own future that we are working for.  Who could care about the future of the world, if he was to be banished from it for ever?  I was reading a book the other day, in which a wise and a good man said that he felt about the future progress of the world as Moses did about the promised land, ’not as of something we want to have for ourselves, but as of something which we want to exist, whether we exist or no,’ I can’t take so impersonal a view!  If one really believed that one was going to be extinguished in death, one would care no more about the world’s future than one cares where the passengers in a train are going to, when we get out at a station.  Who, on arriving at home, can lose himself in wondering where his fellow-travellers have got to?  We have better things to do than that!  That is the sham altruism.  It is as if a boy at school, instead of learning his own lesson, spent his time in imploring the other boys to learn theirs.  That is what we are whipped for—­for not learning our own lesson.”

“But if all this is so,” I said, “why don’t we know that we shall live again?  Why is the one thing which is important for us to know hidden from us?”

“I think we do know it,” said Father Payne, “deep down in ourselves.  It is why it is worth while to go on living.  If we believed our reason, which tells us that we come to an end and sink into silence, we could not care to live, to suffer, to form passionate ties which must all be severed, only to sink into nothingness ourselves.  If we will listen to our instincts, they assure us that it is all worth doing, because it all has a significance for us in the life that comes next.”

“But if we are to go on living,” I said, “are we to forget all the love and interest and delight of life?  There seems no continuance of identity without memory.”

“Oh,” said Father Payne, “that is another delusion of reason.  Our qualities remain—­our power of being interested, of loving, of caring, of suffering.  We practise them a little in one life, we practise them again in the next—­that is why we improve.  I forget who it was who said it, but it is quite true, that there are numberless people now alive, who, because of their orderliness, their patience, their kindness, their sweetness, would have been adored as saints if they had lived in mediaeval