could of itself be of any great moment to us, was considered as much a puerility unworthy of a man of the world, as a disloyalty to God.  Experience of life, and meditation on life, seemed to teach nothing but the same lesson, seemed to preach a sermon de contemptu mundi.  The view the eager monk began with, the sated monarch ended with.  But matters did not end here.  There was something more to come, by which this view was altogether transmuted, and which made the wilderness and the waste place at once blossom as the rose.  Judged of by itself, this life would indeed be vanity; but it was not to be judged of by itself.  All its ways seemed to break short aimlessly into precipices, or to be lost hopelessly in deserts.  They led to no visible end.  True; but they led to ends that were invisible—­to spiritual and eternal destinies, to triumphs beyond all hope, and portentous failures beyond all fear.  This all men might see, if they would only choose to see.  The most trivial of our daily actions became thus invested with an immeasurable meaning.  Life was thus evidently not vanity, not an idiot’s tale, not unprofitable; those who affected to think it was, were naturally disregarded as either insane or insincere:  and we may thus admit that hitherto, for the progressive nations of the world, the worth of life has been capable of demonstration, and safe beyond the reach of any rational questioning.

But now, under the influence of positive thought, all this is changing.  Life, as we have all of us inherited it, is coloured with the intense colours of Christianity; let us ourselves be personally Christians or not, we are instinct with feelings with regard to it that were applicable to it in its Christian state:  and these feelings it is that we are still resolved to retain.  As the most popular English exponent of the new school says:  ’All positive methods of treating man, of a comprehensive kind, adopt to the full all that has ever been said about the dignity of man’s moral and spiritual life.’ But here comes the difficulty.  This adoption we speak of must be justified upon quite new reasons.  Indeed it is practically the boast of its advocates that it must be.  An extreme value, as we see, they are resolved to give to life; they will not tolerate those who deny its existence.  But they are obliged to find it in the very place where hitherto it has been thought to be conspicuous by its absence.  It is to be found in no better or wider future, where injustice shall be turned to justice, trouble into rest, and blindness into clear sight; for no such future awaits us.  It is to be found in life itself, in this earthly life, this life between the cradle and the grave; and though imagination and sympathy may enlarge and extend this for the individual, yet the limits of its extension are very soon arrived at.  It is limited by the time the human race can exist, by the space in the universe that the human race occupies, and the capacities