This at least was what he had then said, but I hardly think he would have said it at the time of which I am now writing.  As he continued to sit in the Musical Bank, he took from his valise the pamphlet on “The Physics of Vicarious Existence,” by Dr. Gurgoyle, which he had bought on the preceding evening, doubtless being led to choose this particular work by the tenor of the old lady’s epitaph.

The second title he found to run, “Being Strictures on Certain Heresies concerning a Future State that have been Engrafted on the Sunchild’s Teaching.”

My father shuddered as he read this title.  “How long,” he said to himself, “will it be before they are at one another’s throats?”

On reading the pamphlet, he found it added little to what the epitaph had already conveyed; but it interested him, as showing that, however cataclysmic a change of national opinions may appear to be, people will find means of bringing the new into more or less conformity with the old.

Here it is a mere truism to say that many continue to live a vicarious life long after they have ceased to be aware of living.  This view is as old as the non omnis moriar of Horace, and we may be sure some thousands of years older.  It is only, therefore, with much diffidence that I have decided to give a resume of opinions many of which those whom I alone wish to please will have laid to heart from their youth upwards.  In brief, Dr. Gurgoyle’s contention comes to little more than saying that the quick are more dead, and the dead more quick, than we commonly think.  To be alive, according to him, is only to be unable to understand how dead one is, and to be dead is only to be invincibly ignorant concerning our own livingness—­for the dead would be as living as the living if we could only get them to believe it.

CHAPTER XI:  PRESIDENT GURGOYLE’S PAMPHLET “ON THE PHYSICS OF VICARIOUS EXISTENCE”

Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance, and this path had led Dr. Gurgoyle to the conviction, real or feigned, that my father was son to the sun, probably by the moon, and that his ascent into the sky with an earthly bride was due to the sun’s interference with the laws of nature.  Nevertheless he was looked upon as more or less of a survival, and was deemed lukewarm, if not heretical, by those who seemed to be the pillars of the new system.

My father soon found that not even Panky could manipulate his teaching more freely than the Doctor had done.  My father had taught that when a man was dead there was an end of him, until he should rise again in the flesh at the last day, to enter into eternity either of happiness or misery.  He had, indeed, often talked of the immortality which some achieve even in this world; but he had cheapened this, declaring it to be an unsubstantial mockery, that could give no such comfort in the hour of death as was unquestionably given by belief in heaven and hell.