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 his nature without mutilating his own soul: and if this soul of man be immortal, its punishment is thus eternal also, and can be cancelled only by the act of divine mercy which we shall still call man's redemption. We begin to know something of the mind's independence of the body where (in phenomena of which evidence seems to be accumulating) mind can speak to mind by other means than the senses: and everything which points that way cuts fresh ground from under the notion that bodily death is the end of us. Although the philosophical theory of immortality does not need this evidence, faith is assisted by it. On the great ideas which are the support and justification of religion there seems no reason to suppose that the discoveries of the next hundred years are likely to throw discredit.

To sum up, then, I believe that the effect of improved education will be to conserve rather than to destroy religion; but I do not believe that religion will be a historical so much as a philosophical conception. The present great obstacle to religious feeling in non-Catholic countries, namely the pretence of the State to "teach religion" as if it were a science or an art, will have been removed some while before this time next century, and individual effort will be cultivated in this, as in certain other respects, instead of being repressed. The Bible will be read for its morals, its poetry, its