and no vast calamity come to check mankind in its advance to material contentment, the age of true positivism may arise.  Then it will be the common privilege, “rerum cognoscere causas”; the word supernatural will have no sense; superstition will be a dimly understood trait of the early race; and where now we perceive an appalling Mystery, everything will be lucid and serene as a geometric demonstration.  Such an epoch of Reason might be the happiest the world could know.  Indeed, it would either be that, or it would never come about at all.  For suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count very surely upon the rationalist millennium.

XII.

The free man, says Spinoza, thinks of nothing less often than of death.  Free, in his sense of the word, I may not call myself.  I think of death very often; the thought, indeed, is ever in the background of my mind; yet free in another sense I assuredly am, for death inspires me with no fear.  There was a time when I dreaded it; but that, merely because it meant disaster to others who depended upon my labour; the cessation of being has never in itself had power to afflict me.  Pain I cannot well endure, and I do indeed think with apprehension of being subjected to the trial of long deathbed torments.  It is a sorry thing that the man who has fronted destiny with something of manly calm throughout a life of stress and of striving, may, when he nears the end, be dishonoured by a weakness which is mere disease.  But happily I am not often troubled by that dark anticipation.

I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard; these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery is repugnant.  I read the names upon the stones, and find a deep solace in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.  There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came late or soon?  There is no such gratulation as Hic jacet.  There is no such dignity as that of death.  In the path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved.  I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness.  The dead, amid this leafy silence, seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers:  As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!

XIII.