and go—­some loth, some willing, like myself of old—­and listen to their talk in the coffee-room; or sometimes in a private parlour, where, though they speak low and gravely, their converse is still unrestrained, because, you see, I am the landlord.

Sometimes they speak of Death and the Hereafter, of which the child they buried yesterday knows more than the wisest of them, and more than Shakespeare knew.  The being totally ignorant of the subject does not indeed (as you may perhaps have observed in other matters) deter some of them from speaking of it with great confidence; but the views of a minority would quite surprise you, and this minority is growing—­coming to a majority.  Every day I see an increase of the doubters.  It is not a question of the Orthodox and the Infidel, you must understand, at all, though that is assuming great proportions; but there is every day more uncertainty among them, and, what is much more noteworthy, more dissatisfaction.

Years ago, when a hardy Cambridge scholar dared to publish his doubts of an eternal punishment overtaking the wicked, an orthodox professor of the same college took him (theologically) by the throat.  ‘You are destroying,’ he cried, ’the hope of the Christian.’  But this is not the hope I speak of, as loosing, and losing, its hold upon men’s minds; I mean the real hope, the hope of heaven.

When I used to go to church—­for my inn is too far removed from it to admit of my attendance there nowadays—­matters were very different.  Heaven and Hell were, in the eyes not only of our congregation, but of those who hung about the doors in the summer sun, or even played leap-frog over the grave-stones, as distinct alternatives as the east and west highways on each side of my inn.  If you did not go one way, you must go the other; and not only so, but an immense desire was felt by very many to go in the right direction.  Now I perceive it is not so.  A considerable number of highway passengers, though even they are less numerous than of old, are still studious—­that is in their aspirations—­to avoid taking (shall I say delicately) the lower road; but only a few, comparatively, are solicitous to reach the goal of the upper.

Let me once more observe that I am speaking of the ordinary passengers—­those who travel by the mail.  Of the persons who are convinced that there never was an Architect of the Universe, and that Man sprang from the Mollusc, I know little or nothing:  they mostly travel two and two, in gigs, and have quarrelled so dreadfully on the way, that, at the Inn, they don’t speak to one another.  The commonalty, I repeat, are losing their hopes of heaven, just as the grown-up schoolboy finds his paradise no more in home.  I can remember when divines were never tired of painting the lily, of indulging in the most glowing descriptions of the Elysian Fields.  A popular artist once drew a picture of them:  ’The Plains of Heaven’