When we find a number of educated gentlemen seriously enquiring as to the conditions of existence in the next world, we feel that they are sharing Boswell's_ naivete _without his excuse.

What can any human being outside a pulpit say upon such a subject which does not amount to a confession of his own ignorance, coupled, it may be, with more or less suggestion of shadowy hopes and fears?
Have the secrets of the prison-house really been revealed to Canon Farrar or Mr.Beresford Hope ?...

When men search into the unknowable, they naturally arrive at very different results._' And Mr.Stephen argues with perfect justice that if we are to judge Christianity from such discussions as these, its doctrines of a future life are all visibly receding into a vague '_dreamland_;' and we shall be quite ready to admit, as he says, in words I have already quoted, '_that the impertinent young curate who tells [him he] will be burnt everlastingly for not sharing such superstitions, is just as ignorant as [Mr.Stephen himself], and that [Mr.Stephen] knows as much as [his] dog_.' The critic, in the foregoing passages, draws his conclusion from the condition of but one Protestant doctrine.

But he might draw the same conclusion from all; for the condition of all of them is the same.

The divinity of Christ, the nature of his atonement, the constitution of the Trinity, the efficacy of the sacraments, the inspiration of the Bible--there is not one of these points on which the doctrines, once so fiercely fought for, are not now, among the Protestants, getting as vague and varying, as weak and as compliant to the caprice of each individual thinker, as the doctrine of eternal punishment.