the marvellous contrivance and adaptation of this material world to
require or believe in anything spiritual? How wonderful it is to see it
all alive on this spring day, all growing, budding! Do we exhaust it in
our little life? Not so; not in a hundred or a thousand lives. The whole
race of man, living from the beginning of time, have not, in all their
number and multiplicity and in all their duration, come in the least to
know the world they live in! And how is this rich world thrown away upon
us, because we live in it such a moment! What mortal work has ever been
done since the world began! Because we have no time. No lesson is taught.
We are snatched away from our study before we have learned the alphabet.
As the world now exists, I confess it to you frankly, my dear pastor and
instructor, it seems to me all a failure, because we do not live long
enough."

"But the lesson is carried on in another state of being!"

"Not the lesson that we begin here," said Septimius. "We might as well
train a child in a primeval forest, to teach him how to live in a European
court. No, the fall of man, which Scripture tells us of, seems to me to
have its operation in this grievous shortening of earthly existence, so
that our life here at all is grown ridiculous."

"Well, Septimius," replied the minister, sadly, yet not as one shocked by
what he had never heard before, "I must leave you to struggle through this
form of unbelief as best you may, knowing that it is by your own efforts
that you must come to the other side of this slough. We will talk further
another time. You are getting worn out, my young friend, with much study
and anxiety. It were well for you to live more, for the present, in this
earthly life that you prize so highly. Cannot you interest yourself in the
state of this country, in this coming strife, the voice of which now