seek to build a cathedral, and ask for the laws of architecture to be altered in order to suit his gnat-like capacity.  The Law is the Law; and if broken, brings punishment.  The Law makes for good,—­and if we pull back for evil, destroys us in its outward course.  Vice breeds corruption in body and in soul; and history furnishes us with more than sufficient examples of that festering disease.  It is plainly demanded of us that we should assist God’s universe in its way towards perfection; if we refuse, and set a drag on the majestic Wheel, we are ourselves crushed in its progress.  Here is where our Church errs in the present generation.  It is setting itself as a drag on the Wheel.  Meanwhile, Truth advances every day, and with no uncertain voice proclaims the majesty of God.  Heaven’s gates are thrown open;—­the secrets of the stars are declared,—­the mysteries of light and sound are discovered; and we are approaching possibly to the time when the very graves shall give up their dead, and the secrets of all men’s hearts shall be made manifest.  Yet we go on lying, deceiving, cajoling, humbugging each other and ourselves;—­living a daily life of fraud and hypocrisy, with a sort of smug conviction in our souls that we shall never be found out.  We make a virtue of animalism, and declare the Beast-Philosophy to be in strict keeping with the order of nature.  We gloat over our secret sins, and face the world with a brazen front of assumed honour.  Oh, we are excellent liars all!  But somehow we never seem to think we are fools as well!  We never remember that all we do and all we say, is merely the adding of figures to a sum which in the end must be made up to the grand total, and paid!  Every figure tells;—­the figure ‘nought’ especially, puts an extra thousand on the whole quantity!  But the light in us being darkness, how great is that darkness!  So great that we refuse to look an inch before us!  We will not see, we will not understand,—­we utterly decline to accept any teaching or advice which might inflict some slight inconvenience on our own Ego.  And so we go on day after day, till all at once a reckoning is called and death stares us in the face.  What!  So soon finished?  All over?  Must we go at once, and no delay?  Must we really and truly drop all our ridiculous lies and conventions and be sent away naked-souled into the Living Unknown?  Not the Dead Unknown remember!—­for nothing is actually dead!  The whole universe palpitates and burns with ever re-created life.  What have we done with the past life?—­and what shall we do with this other life?  Oh, but there is no time to ask questions now,—­we should have asked them before; the hour of departure is come, and there is not a moment’s breathing time!  Our dear friends (if we have any), and our paid doctors and servants stand around us awe-struck,—­they watch out last convulsive shudder--and weep—­not so much for sorrow sometimes as terror,—­and then when all is over, they say we are ‘gone’.