“This vicarious life (on which I have insisted, I fear at unnecessary length, for it is so obvious that none can have failed to realise it) is lived by every one of us before death as well as after it, and is little less important to us than that of which we are to some extent conscious in our own persons.  A man, we will say, has written a book which delights or displeases thousands of whom he knows nothing, and who know nothing of him.  The book, we will suppose, has considerable, or at any rate some influence on the action of these people.  Let us suppose the writer fast asleep while others are enjoying his work, and acting in consequence of it, perhaps at long distances from him.  Which is his truest life—­the one he is leading in them, or that equally unconscious life residing in his own sleeping body?  Can there be a doubt that the vicarious life is the more efficient?

“Or when we are waking, how powerfully does not the life we are living in others pain or delight us, according as others think ill or well of us?  How truly do we not recognise it as part of our own existence, and how great an influence does not the fear of a present hell in men’s bad thoughts, and the hope of a present heaven in their good ones, influence our own conduct?  Have we not here a true heaven and a true hell, as compared with the efficiency of which these gross material ones so falsely engrafted on to the Sunchild’s teaching are but as the flint implements of a prehistoric race?  ‘If a man,’ said the Sunchild, ’fear not man, whom he hath seen, neither will he fear God, whom he hath not seen.’”

My father again assures me that he never said this.  Returning to Dr. Gurgoyle, he continued:—­“It may be urged that on a man’s death one of the great factors of his life is so annihilated that no kind of true life can be any further conceded to him.  For to live is to be influenced, as well as to influence; and when a man is dead how can he be influenced?  He can haunt, but he cannot any more be haunted.  He can come to us, but we cannot go to him.  On ceasing, therefore, to be impressionable, so great a part of that wherein his life consisted is removed, that no true life can be conceded to him.

“I do not pretend that a man is as fully alive after his so-called death as before it.  He is not.  All I contend for is, that a considerable amount of efficient life still remains to some of us, and that a little life remains to all of us, after what we commonly regard as the complete cessation of life.  In answer, then, to those who have just urged that the destruction of one of the two great factors of life destroys life altogether, I reply that the same must hold good as regards death.

“If to live is to be influenced and to influence, and if a man cannot be held as living when he can no longer be influenced, surely to die is to be no longer able either to influence or be influenced, and a man cannot be held dead until both these two factors of death are present.  If failure of the power to be influenced vitiates life, presence of the power to influence vitiates death.  And no one will deny that a man can influence for many a long year after he is vulgarly reputed as dead.