through so much, which made them treasure and preserve those matchless sayings themselves. For my part I do not think that their courage was born of illusion. I believe that Jesus after his death was able so to manifest himself to his poor bereft disciples as to fill them with a sense of the reality of his appearing, and to give them the strength to go on with the work he had begun. It was a tremendous responsibility to take. Such rending of the veil between the two worlds should never be made, save for gravest cause; but Christendom has justified the deed. Millions on millions of wounded hearts have been consoled and strengthened. Such strength of conviction in the reality of the life after death has been engendered that it will carry mankind over the dead-point of doubt which was sure to come when once the logical understanding began to awake.

Meanwhile, let the logical understanding work bravely on. In the end its truth will be seen to be in accord with all other truth. But for a season yet mankind must in this great matter still live by faith, -faith in God, faith in all the God-given faculties of man, faith in the divine revelations which come through these faculties. Thank God, to us our beloved dead are not asleep, but broad awake in the full day of heaven, their feet forever busied in running on blessed errands, their eyes not resting with closed and weary lids, but beaming love on all that

crave and need that love. When a grand pulse of recognition comes to our hearts in the hour of vision, let us lift up those hearts to that vast human heaven where the good and wise and true and tender dwell,— "And trust

With faith that comes of self-control

The truths that never can be proved,
Until we close with all we loved

And all we flow from, soul in soul."

APPENDIX.

NOTE ON VORTEX ATOMS.

THE vortex theory is not shaken in the least, if, as some imagine, all our earth elements are proved to be composed of innumerable "electrons." In that case the "electrons " would be the true vortices, or primal atoms.

The discovery of "electrons," of their wonderful speed and their inconceivable minuteness, is a memorable triumph of scientific investigation. Certain hastily formed theories about them, however, may be cheap enough. When Graham analyzed a portion of the great mass of meteoric iron now in the British Museum, he found that two volumes of hydrogen were occluded in each volume of iron. No one then imagined that a portion of the iron had been changed into hydrogen. And yet some scientists really seem to imagine that, because the gas helium is found after a time in a tube containing radium, therefore the element radium has been converted into the element helium! Surely, it is better to try first the familiar hypothesis that the helium was occluded in the radium. If this turn out to be the fact, why should not the "electrons" be occluded in the hydrogen?

Any one who has ever seen the spectrum of Sirius or Vega must have been deeply impressed by the extreme

density and thickness of the hydrogen bands which seem to cut the vivid spectrum into separate pieces. If all the fiery energy of Sirius or Vega cannot separate the molecules of hydrogen into "electrons," is it very probable that any earthly laboratory can develop enough power to do this? I venture to conjecture that many of our well-known "elements" will finally vindicate their right to the name; and I think, also, that innumerable electrons are occluded in every earthly substance.