made one in him who by God’s grace can speak the word.  “I have no doubt it’s true, what you say; but it is different.  I expected it would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and of nature’s being a guide.  Poor Robin, I remember, began with that.”  “There is a sonnet of Arnold’s you know,” I answered, “that tells another tale.  But I did not learn it from him.  And, besides, what else he has to say is not cheerful.  Nothing is wise,” I interjected, “that is not cheerful.”

But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful tones,—­and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,—­I told him, as we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing that is man’s except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of physics.  “I convinced myself,” I said, “that the soul is not a term in the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for immortality, whether immortality come or not.  And I have sometimes thought,” I continued, “that on the spiritual side an explanation of the inequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions an opportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an education of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, at least within Christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than one pagan civilization.  Material success, fame, wealth, and power—­birth even, with all it involves of opportunity and fate—­are insignificant, if the soul’s life is thus secured.  I do not mean that such a thought clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggests another view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigid forms.  This, however, is a wandering thought.  The great reversal of the law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds by the selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least.  Scientific ethics, which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul.  Such a code is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of the secret power that ordained its