And finally, at the end of the most fortunate life, comes death.

If, then, we are to conclude that there is no possibility of life for us beyond the body, that physical death means the extinction not merely of our bodies but of ourselves, then certainly mankind are the sport of a very cruel and ghastly injustice; and we may reasonably ask by what strange and not to be looked for stroke of unreason, in a universe which we perceive on every hand to be the harmonious creature of laws, men have been endowed with faculties doomed to be wasted, with intelligent desires foreordained only to disappointment? How comes this huge and inexplicable incongruity in a system which, in every part of it, save this highest, is evidently based on purpose, and carried on upon an intelligent plan?

IV.

YOU ARE AN INDIVIDUAL.

Suci, however, is your life, and you are to live it upon such a plan as you may choose to form.

You are at liberty to plan for yourself; and not only this, you must do so. You are an individual, a distinct personality. For a time, during your immature life you lived under the guidance of father and mother; but the most tender and the wisest parents even can, as a very wide experience teaches, far more easily spoil than make the lives of their children. It is your own effort, your own will alone which can make you a man or a woman in any true

sense.

You can, at any time, share this individuality— yourself—with others only to an extremely limited extent. Live as intimately as you may with another, you never become wholly one with him.

Your mother mourns in her heart that, though you are her own, she knows you not.

At bottom each one of us is solitary-alone with God.

1

Each one of us must choose for himself what he will make of this life, which has come to him without his asking, and in which he finds himself not only free but forced to choose.

Now, in making up your mind what to do with your life, your first reasonable inquiry will be this one: How long is it to last? and in what conditions is it to be passed? If your conscious and personal existence is to have only a little longer duration than the life of a cow, and a little shorter than that of a crow, or an elephant, that fact, if it is a fact, must very greatly control your plans. If, on the other hand, you find reason to believe that this life in the body is to be but a very small and insignificant fraction of your whole existence, and that your personality will continue unimpaired beyond the grave, and in a condition where you will act without reference to your present physical part (your body), that fact, if it is a fact, can scarcely fail, if it impresses itself on your mind, to make all your plans for this life very greatly and essentially different.

You will easily see that this must be so, if you will reflect that an event which would be of the greatest moment to you if this life were all you had to live, might assume an entirely different aspect and significance if this is but a small part of your existence, and if, in fact, the few years you are to pass

here in the company of your body are, compared with the total duration of your life, far less than the few brief years you pass at school would appear, if compared with the full span of human life of threeand ten.

score years

A cow, being hungry and unable to find food otherwise, leaps a fence and eats her fill in a strange field. Nor do we blame her. Only a beating-the dread of a severer pain than hunger-will keep her within her master's bounds. But a man, a reasoning being, suffers hunger and refuses to steal-not from fear of the constable and the jail, but because he will not taint his soul, his immortal part, with wrong to gratify his body.

If it were an immemorial custom of our colleges to lead the members of the graduating class to the public square or campus as soon as they had received their diplomas, and there and then cut off their heads, it is not absolutely impossible that young men would still be sent to college-for the power of fashion is very great. But, being placed there, they certainly would not give themselves to the fulfilment of disagreeable duties, nor deny themselves any pleasures within their reach. If any studied, it would be because the acquisition of knowledge was, on the whole, more agreeable to them than some other form of dissipation; and, with extinction only four

years ahead, each would follow his own impulses. To talk of duty or of self-denial to men so placed would seem to them ridiculous, and would, in fact, be so.

But a boy who is reasonably persuaded that the object of attending school, or learning a trade, is to fit him for the duties and enjoyments of manhood, reconciles himself to the disagreeables, the self-denial and submission which his student or apprentice life imposes, because he believes that there is a higher life beyond the school or the apprentice's term, a life of greater activity, greater independence, and wider enjoyments, for which he is laboriously and perhaps even painfully fitting himself, and into which he justly believes he could not enter without such preliminary training.

You will see, I think, out of all this that what your plans in life shall be, what you will make the object of your hopes and aims, and by what means you will prosecute these objects—what manner of man or woman you are to be, in short-must depend absolutely upon what you conceive life to be, what you believe to be the bearings of this life; what is to be the duration of your whole existence.

But, if you reflect a little, you will perceive something further, namely, that patience, self-sacrifice, cheerful submission to disappointments and discomforts, courage, endurance, all that we call manly and