(4) There may be an honorable and candid God.  He may have implanted in us the desire of perfect happiness.  It may be—­it is—­impossible to gratify that desire in this life.  Still, another life is not implied, for God may not have intended us to draw the inference that he is going to gratify it.  If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have intended whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion’s illustration, and it may be that God’s knowledge and power are limited, or that one of them is limited.

M. Flammarion is a learned, if somewhat theatrical, astronomer.  He has a tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home in the marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar phenomena.  To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is the master of the show and sets off the fireworks.  But he knows nothing of logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views of things have therefore no value; they are nebulous.

Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know.  Of after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony, in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it—­if it is enjoyable.  Whether this testimony has actually been given—­and it is the only testimony worth a moment’s consideration—­is a disputed point.  Many persons living this life profess to have received it.  But nobody professes, or ever has professed, to have received a communication of any kind from one in actual experience of the fore-life.  “The souls as yet ungarmented,” if such there are, are dumb to question.  The Land beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously described:  if not explored and surveyed, yet carefully charted.  From among so many accounts of it that we have, he must be fastidious indeed who cannot be suited.  But of the Fatherland that spreads before the cradle—­the great Heretofore, wherein we all dwelt if we are to dwell in the Hereafter, we have no account.  Nobody professes knowledge of that.  No testimony reaches our ears of flesh concerning its topographical or other features; no one has been so enterprising as to wrest from its actual inhabitants any particulars of their character and appearance.  And among educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be there is a general denial of its existence.

I am of their way of thinking about that.  The fact that we have no recollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter.  To have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable, for there would be nothing to connect the new life with the old—­no thread of continuity—­nothing that persisted from the one life to the other.  The later birth would be that of another person, an altogether different being, unrelated to the first—­a new John Smith succeeding to the late Tom Jones.