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Show WORLD'S BLANK WALL. Mr. Arthur Brisbane of the Washington Wash-ington Times, being a philosopher, loves to step aside from the ghastly paths of the world war, to dream on things to come. God and the poets and the whence, why and whither of humanity absorb his attention amid the explosion of aerial bombs and the waves of lethal gas. With his shrapnel helmet and gas mask on ho propounds the following: "What would be the circulation of tho Herald tomorrow if the following announcement were made in the Herald Her-ald today: " 'James Gordon Bennett, editor of this newspaper, died yesterday. Tomorrow Tomor-row he will tell very simply, without exaggeration, just exactly what bap-pens bap-pens when what you call yourself leaves your body and goes somewhere else.' " What a strange proposition! we exclaim; ex-claim; but stranger still is the impas-sablo impas-sablo wall that divides us from the hereafter. The atheist points to the blank wall and sneers at our belief in immortulity, and yet, despite the wall, virtually all men believe in God and immortality. Through that wall they detect dimly the X-rays of the other world. Part of the divine purpose is the exclusion ex-clusion of the other world from this. Some tell us that tho spirits occasionally occasion-ally pass the wall and communicate with humans, but, even admitting that they do, they never tell anything that adds to tlio sum of human knowledge. Not ono of them ever told man how to make an airplane, how to send wireless messages through the air or how to cure cancer or consumption. Man must work out these problems for himself.' And so far as we are aware he must always continue to work out his destiny without with-out communications from the spirit world. Granting that there are revelations from time to time, they do not change the course of human events except, perhaps, per-haps, at long intervals. The war has recalled the most conspicuous case of communication in medieval times the case of Joan of Arc. Tho communications communica-tions she received and the skeptical maintain that she received none radically radi-cally changed the course of history. Mayhap, before this war ends, we shall hear of similar providential intervention. interven-tion. But on the whole the blank wall shuts us in and the ordinary course of human life must be within that strange in-closui'c. in-closui'c. Men believe in the music of the spheres, but they know that "whilst this muddy vesture of decay doth close us in we cannot hear it." James Gordon Bennett will not give us his impressions of the world beyond be-yond the grave and ydt few there are who will doubt that he could give them but for that blank wall. |