Let us remember St. Paul's injunction, "Bear ye one another's burdens."
It is a thought to make one ponder, that by far the finest Life of Christ was written by an agnostic, Renan.
When prehistoric man took up a flint and laboriously beat it into a shape that his brain told him would be of use to him, he laid the foundations of all civilisation. Man's progress is the story of brute force laid low by Thought--which is the one really irresistible influence in the Universe:
"In the world there is nothing great but Man; In Man there is nothing great but Mind."
It is a perplexing reflection that there is no absolute moral standard. The moral law appears to vary with environment and according to conditions of time and place. I am reminded of Pope's lines:
"Where the extreme of vice was ne'er agreed. Ask where's the North? At York 'tis on the Tweed; In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where."
The greater a man is in one direction, the more prone he usually is to weakness in another: that is why we must never condemn indiscriminately.
The laws governing the Universe, so far from being mechanical and dead, are elements filled with Truth and Beauty.
Materialism is fatal to the higher instincts, because it introduces that most sordid element--earthly pomp, circumstance and recompense.
The Universe, History, Life are before us. Why should they not be investigated? It is not true that science leads to Atheism or Fatalism. What science does is to destroy that fabric of _Aberglaube_ or superstition which chokes and asphyxiates the best parts of religion. What science does is to set up a new, purer creed based on certainty and truth.
Of French writers Paul liked most Taine, Sainte-Beuve, and Victor Hugo. His love of reading he took with him into the War. A box of books returned to us with his other effects from France included "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," Macaulay's "Essays," Saint-Simon's "Memoirs," Sainte-Beuve's "Causeries," "The Imitation of Christ," Lecky's "History of European Morals," and works by Goethe, Victor Hugo, Dumas the elder, Flaubert, Maurice Barrès, and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
_History is philosophy teaching by examples._