Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/102

88 Catholic Church? As to the others, these were merely vulgar fractions of a fraction. He respected them all with the wide tolerance of a Roman philosopher, but they neither kindled his enthusiasm nor commanded his devotion. The old faiths were dying out. If his life were to have a worthy goal, it must be among the living, not among the dead, with the future rather than the past.

So he went on digging for diamonds, and musing, as he digged, on the eternal verities, the truth which underlies all phenomena. He was a Darwinian; he believed in evolution. But was it reasonable to believe that the chain of sentient existences which stretched unbroken from the marine Ascidean to man, stopped abruptly with the human race? ‘‘Was it not at least thinkable that there are Intelligences in the universe as much my superior in intellect as I am superior to the dog?” “Why should man be the terminus of the process of evolution?” So he reasoned, as all serious souls have reasoned long before Darwin was heard of.

Reincarnation, the possibility of an existence prior to this mortal life, did not interest him. “Life is too short, after all,” he used to say, “to worry about previous lives. From the cradle to the grave—what is it? Three days at the seaside. Just that and nothing more. But although it is only three days, we must be doing something. I cannot spend my time throwing stones into the water. But what is worth while doing?” Then upon him there grew more and more palpably real, at least as a possibility, that the teachings of all the seers, of all the religions, were based on solid fact, and that after all there was a God who reigned over all the children of men, and who, moreover, would exact a strict account for all the deeds which they did in the body. He combated the notion; but the balance of authority was against him. All religions, in all times—surely the universal instinct of the race had something to justify it!

Mr. Rhodes argued the matter out in his cool, practical way, and decided the question for himself once for all. He