The Sunchild also spoke to us a parable about the unwisdom of the
   children yet unborn, who though they know so much, yet do not know as
   much as they think they do.

   He said:-

“The unborn have knowledge of one another so long as they are unborn, and this without impediment from walls or material obstacles.  The unborn children in any city form a population apart, who talk with one another and tell each other about their developmental progress.

“They have no knowledge, and cannot even conceive the existence of anything that is not such as they are themselves.  Those who have been born are to them what the dead are to us.  They can see no life in them, and know no more about them than they do of any stage in their own past development other than the one through which they are passing at the moment.  They do not even know that their mothers are alive—­much less that their mothers were once as they now are.  To an embryo, its mother is simply the environment, and is looked upon much as our inorganic surroundings are by ourselves.

   “The great terror of their lives is the fear of birth,—­that they
   shall have to leave the only thing that they can think of as life, and
   enter upon a dark unknown which is to them tantamount to annihilation.

“Some, indeed, among them have maintained that birth is not the death which they commonly deem it, but that there is a life beyond the womb of which they as yet know nothing, and which is a million fold more truly life than anything they have yet been able even to imagine.  But the greater number shake their yet unfashioned heads and say they have no evidence for this that will stand a moment’s examination.

   “‘Nay,’ answer the others, ’so much work, so elaborate, so wondrous as
   that whereon we are now so busily engaged must have a purpose, though
   the purpose is beyond our grasp.’

“‘Never,’ reply the first speakers; ’our pleasure in the work is sufficient justification for it.  Who has ever partaken of this life you speak of, and re-entered into the womb to tell us of it?  Granted that some few have pretended to have done this, but how completely have their stories broken down when subjected to the tests of sober criticism.  No.  When we are born we are born, and there is an end of us.’

   “But in the hour of birth, when they can no longer re-enter the womb
   and tell the others, Behold! they find that it is not so.”

Here the reader again closed his book and resumed his place in the apse.

CHAPTER XVI:  PROFESSOR HANKY PREACHES A SERMON, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH MY FATHER DECLARES HIMSELF TO BE THE SUNCHILD

Professor Hanky then went up into the pulpit, richly but soberly robed in vestments the exact nature of which I cannot determine.  His carriage was dignified, and the harsh lines on his face gave it a strong individuality, which, though it did not attract, conveyed an impression of power that could not fail to interest.  As soon as he had given attention time to fix itself upon him, he began his sermon without text or preliminary matter of any kind, and apparently without notes.