If it is again urged that it matters not to us how much we may be
alive in others, if we are to know nothing about it, I reply that
the common instinct of all who are worth considering gives the lie
to such cynicism. I see here present some who have achieved, and
others who no doubt will achieve, success in literature. Will one
of them hesitate to admit that it is a lively pleasure to her to
feel that on the other side of the world some one may be smiling
happily over her work, and that she is thus living in that person
though she knows nothing about it? Here it seems to me that true
faith comes in. Faith does not consist, as the Sunday School pupil
said, "in the power of believing that which we know to be untrue."
It consists in holding fast that which the healthiest and most
kindly instincts of the best and most sensible men and women are
intuitively possessed of, without caring to require much evidence
further than the fact that such people are so convinced; and for my
own part I find the best men and women I know unanimous in feeling
that life in others, even though we know nothing about it, is
nevertheless a thing to be desired and gratefully accepted if we can
get it either before death or after. I observe also that a large
number of men and women do actually attain to such life, and in some
cases continue so to live, if not for ever, yet to what is
practically much the same thing. Our life then in this world is, to
natural religion as much as to revealed, a period of probation. The
use we make of it is to settle how far we are to enter into another,
and whether that other is to be a heaven of just affection or a hell
of righteous condemnation.

Who, then, are the most likely so to run that they may obtain this
veritable prize of our high calling? Setting aside such lucky