that there are some minds so illogically constituted that when they discover the method and means by which a thing is done, they leap at once to the conclusion that no one has done it. The remark was originally aimed at the scientific atheism which dismisses God from the creation. But it is hardly less applicable to that very superlative sort of Christian faith that is ever "seeking after a sign," that cannot see God in common things, in clear and customary and intelligible sequences of visible cause and effect, and that conceives that nothing can be really divine unless it is queer.

LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.

IS LONGEVITY WORTH ITS PRICE?

WHEN Sir Emerson Tennent established his residence in Colombo, Ceylon, one of his neighbors lost a Cingalese cook under circumstances justifying the theory that the old woman had appropriated a dose of monkey-poison. The predatory habits of the Macacus monkeys, infesting the park of his bungalow, had induced the proprietor to treat them to a mixture of strychnine and rice-pudding, and the success of the experiment seemed to have suggested the idea of applying the same remedy to the evils of life in general, for only a week before a young herder had poisoned himself to avoid the trouble of hunting up a horse that had strayed from the stubble-pasture of his employer. At all events, the husband of the departed cook could have proved an undoubted alibi, but, having been subpoenaed as a witness, he obviated further complications by committing suicide. "Is there anything in the climate of this coast-land that depreciates the value of longevity?" asks Sir Emerson; "for up to a certain age the natives seem as lively as their fellow-monkeys in the treetops, but the noon of life appears to beget a desire for a siesta in the shade of a Upas tree. Their pseudo-civilization, though, may have something to do with it, for suicide is almost unknown among the wild Veddahs of the hill-country."

Similar reflections might often suggest themselves in studying the tendencies of that rather composite civilization which sums up the maxims of its philosophy in the motto, "a short life and a merry one." Tenets of that sort sometimes undergo a curious kind of metempsychosis. With the exception of the primitive Veddahs, the natives of Ceylon are votaries of Buddhism, and the founder of that irremediable creed made the vanity of earthly existence the corner-stone of his ethics, and does not even seem to have sweetened the acerbity of that doctrine with any hopes of a compensating Elysium; for the peace of Nirvana, as defined

by the first disciples of the Nepaulese prophet, was only a dispensation from the doom of re-birth, and had to be earned by a systematic suppression of the instinct which a French translator of the "Tripitaka " calls le vitalisme-the propensity to pursue the phantoms of life, or even the love of life itself. The westward spread of that dogma undoubtedly tinged the creed of the Syrian anchorites and their successors, the world-renouncing monks and hermits of the Middle Ages; but our mediæval self-deniers were adversaries of nature, rather than of the vital principle. "Whatever is natural is wrong," was the shibboleth of their creed, but their Nirvana was a considerable modification of the Oriental prototype, and they contrived to reconcile the unworldliness of their tenets not only with the hope of an indefinitely protracted life in a pleasant hereafter, but with a temporal indulgence in all sorts of spiritual and spirituous luxuries.

A surfeit of those luxuries has since produced a reaction, involving a still further departure from the standards of the Nepaulese world-despiser. The mistrust in the value of life and its terrestrial purposes still clouds our moral atmosphere like the trail of a poison vapor, and our modern anti-naturalists still vaguely admit the expediency of renouncing the blessings of secular existence, but they prefer to facilitate that renunciation by previous. experiments, pushed to the verge of that familiarity supposed to beget contempt. The earth of their ethical theories is still a vale of tears, a scene of delusive joys and preordained disappointment, but they withal hope to outwit the spite of life by crowding its sweets into the shortest possible span of time. In other words, they still deplore the illusiveness of temporal existence, but. prefer to shorten that illusion by a course of health-destroying pleasures, rather than of health-destroying penances. They would drown in wine, rather than in tears.

Buddha Sakyamuni would have protested that the goal of final emancipation can be reached only by the thorny path of a desire-killing askesis: but science might add a more cogent objection by questioning the possibility of combining even temporal happiness with the practice of life-shortening habits. The epidemic of the poison-vice seems somehow to have begot the idea. that by the use of abnormal stimulants our capacity for enjoyment.

could be abnormally increased, thus, as it were, tricking nature out of an amount of happiness not otherwise attainable. The immature libertine, the spice-loving gourmand, the wine-bibber, all delude themselves with the hope of stealing a march on fortune; of anticipating her favors by enhancing the blessings of the certain present at the expense of an uncertain future. "The excesses of youth," says a British moralist, "are drafts on the health of old age, payable with heavy interest some twenty or thirty years after." But the truth is, that such mortgages are not only apt to be foreclosed, but that the extortion of the grievous interest is rarely postponed beyond the end of each day. For nature never fails to resent the insult by a depressing reaction, far more protracted than the abnormal exaltation, thus making the net result of the experiment a decrease, rather than an increase, of our normal share of happiness. Life, therefore, cannot be made worth living by devouring the seed-corn of its harvest; nay, the "draft on old age" robs the present as well as the future, after a fashion which might, indeed, justify a doubt whether the preponderance of pain over pleasure is not aggravated by the delusion of the life-shortening Sybarite more than by the infatuation. of the life-shortening ascetic. For habit, which dulls the pungency of debauching stimulants, also blunts the sting of selfdenial-of a self-denial perhaps compensated by moments of mental ecstasy, while the surfeits of the pleasure-seeker avenge themselves by the misery of moral and physical indigestion. The pursuit of a "short and merry " life is apt to miss its main purpose.

And moreover, to the highest attainable degree of earthly happiness, longevity, or its promise, is a condition, as well as an addition. The end of individual existence may come suddenly, in unavoidable and incalculable accidents; but premature death, in that form, does not darken life with its premonitory shadows. The ravages of a gnawing worm may for years blight the life of a tree with the doom of a lingering death; while the stout young oak, felled by lightning, may to the last have enjoyed all the advantages of potential longevity. Longevity is worth deserving.

Yet thousands, even of those who have learned to admit that life repays the pursuit of its secular blessings, have as yet not

recognized the truth that unabridged life is still more decidedly worth its price. The apparently redundant longevity of the ancients concealed a specific adaptation to the physical and moral constitution of the universe. The children of a younger world had time to prepare the soil of life for its seed; they had time to enjoy the matured fruit of their labor, and the best fruit ripens slowly. The products of the tropics grow stunted in the higher latitudes, not from any difference in the fertility of the soil or the skill of its cultivators, but because of the insufficient length of the harvest season. The harvest of our latter-day lives is too often blighted in the same way. Our evening-stars herald an untimely sunset; before their day's work is done our laborers are overtaken by the night, when no man can work; our monuments mark the sorrows of unfinished enterprises. It is true that, in the course of a perfectly happy life, the work of each day should bring its own reward; but anticipating hope plays a large part in that adjustment of labor and recompense, and the promises of May would fail to cheer the eye that could not hope to see the fruit of the flowering tree.

When Firdusi was dismissed from the court of the Shah, says a Persian tradition of almost allegorical suggestiveness, the poet retired to his birthplace, the poor mountain hamlet of Thuss, and tried to forget the ingratitude of the world in the solitude of the hills that had witnessed the sports of his childhood. But as years passed, the fame of his poems spread beyond the boundaries of his native land, and one day the inquiries of a foreign embassy shamed the court into an act of justice too long deferred, for the caravan, encumbered with royal presents and escorts of dancers and musicians, did not reach the mountains before the end of winter, and when the vanguard entered the south gate of Thuss, the mourners of the great poet followed his hearse through the north gate. Firdusi died in the peace of a life-weary resignation, but how many of his fellow-exiles from the promised land of their hopes have perished almost in sight of a belated succor, and died, cursing the dust-cloud of the approaching caravan and the clashing cymbals of the outrider. Can there be a doubt that Burns and Keats foresaw the issue of their struggle against bigotry, or that Cervantes, in the gloom of his misery, could read the