The Dominion. SATURDAY, MAY 21, 1910. KING EDWARD'S FUNERAL.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 821, 21 May 1910, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, MAY 21, 1910. KING EDWARD'S FUNERAL.

The Royal funeral which took place yesterday amid tho mourning of a mighty nation, and with all tho pomp and circumstance that befits the burial of the ruler of a great Empire, was the final scene in the short but inspiring reign of Edwaed the Seventh. ,It now remains for the historian of the future, who will bo able impartially to estimate the full results of the late monarch's policy at home and abroad, to allot him his proper place in the nation's history. The imposing procession, the solemn funeral pageantry, and the impressive religious ceremonial gave due expression to the people's sorrow; but it was not a hopeless cry of despair, for through it all there runs the suppressed note of triumph representing the unquenchable feeling that death is not the final end of life. These great national rites are sometimes lightly spoken of as artificial survivals of the past which have but little real meaning for commonsense people in these practical modern days. Such a view, however, is a very limited and superficial one, for in its deep elemental feelings of joy and sorrow humaji nature is fundamentally the same in all ages, and nothing else can give such adequate expression to our emotions as dramatic representation and symbolic ceremonial. Their meaning is instinctively understood by rich and poor, learned and unlearned, old and young; for they speak straight to the heart with a force aad directness which far outstrip the capacity of more words. Symbolism and ceremony have always played_ a wonderfully important part in human affairs, and bear witness to the continuity of a nation's life. Words change their meanings, but appropriate ceremonial appeals to those unchangeable elements in humanity which firmly link past, present, and future. In view of these things it is idle to talk of the solemn rites and ceremonies which were so much in evidence in the Motherland yesterday as "mere externals." A recent writer truly states:

There are no such things as "mere externals." Every external implies and has reference to something internal, and mast bo estimated accordingly, . Ceremonial is an external because it is an expression of an inner Teality; this reality is often of such a sort aa to baffle expression by any other means.

Ycsterday'e great funeral ceremony was the most natural and most adequate means tho nation could find of giving expression to its sense of loss in the death of one who had been at once a wise ruler and a selfsacrificing servant of his people; who had throughout his reign worked for the good of hie Empire and the betterment of humanity; and whoso njne years of sovereignty had been a splendid example of devotion to duty. He died in harness, at his post, doing his duty. This is indeed high praise, but it is also simple" truth. We are often told that in the ehiff ing ot intellectual and moral moorings which is characteristic of a period of transition like the present the word "duty" and all that it stands for arc becoming oldfashioned, if not actually obsolete. The traditional morality is regarded by some a« the enemy to be destroyed because, so they tell us, it is an obstacle to progress, the foe of freedom, and a bar to tho full enjoyment of life. Such people argue that it is futile to strive by precept and example, and direct social and moral effort U> improve tho nice. Thfty tell us that frco ula_y

should be given to the forces of destruction bo that the jveaker may go to the wall, and the future may helong to those who prove themselves in the struggle for existence most fitted to survive. In addition to Pilate's question "What is truth?" men are asking on all hands "What is right or wrong?" "What is duty 1" The very foundations of civilised society would begin to totter if the average man and woman were seriously to call in question the objective validity of our moral judgments. If, as some people say, morality is simply a matter of individual feeling, actions would not be objectively right or wfong, but merely right to some people and wrong to others. Dr. Hastings Rashdall, of Oxford, one of tho most distinguished representatives of tho modern- school of philosophers, puts this aspect of the question very clearly. He writes: This objective validity is tho very core and centre of the idea of duty or moral obligation. That ie why it ie so important to assert that moral judgments are the work of reason, not of a eupposed moral sense or any other kind of leeling. Feelings may vary in different men without any of them being in the wrong; red really ie 'he same as green to a colour-blind person. "What wo mean when we talk about tho existenco of diity is that things are right or wrong, no matter what you or I think about them—that the laws of morality are quite as much independent of my personal likings and dislikings as the physical laws of nature. That is what is "meant by the objectivity of tho moral law.

In seeking for the ultimate source of this moral law, Dβ. Rashdall confesses that he can find no place for it in'a purely materialistic universe. The fact that things are right or wrong whether we-as individuals think them so or not proves that the moral law has an independent existence outside of human, minds. Wiure and how, then, does it exist 1 Physical laws may be supposed by the Materialist to exist in matter; but the moral law, which expresses not any matter of physical fact, but what to be thought of acts, is quite a different thing. An "ought" can only exist in and for a miad, and so the ideas of duty and objective morality when analysed imply the existence of a Supreme Mind. The moral law has thus its source in the Source of all Eeality. The tendency of naturalistic ethics is to make public opinion in some shape or form tba ultimate standard of right and wrong, and yet, aa Dr. Rashdall states, the strongest temptation to most of us is this very temptation to follow a debased public opinion—the.opinion of our age, our class, our party. In such circumstances the fine examples which both Queen Victoria and Kino Edwabd have given to tho world in placing duty before ease, or pleasure, or personal comfort must have had a steadying influence on the moral character of the nation in a critical time in its history. These thoughts on duty, and the underlying note of hope and triumph which characterise the moving ceremonies connected with the late King's death and burial, carry the mind on to that momentous question which has been reiterated in overy age since the idea of a "beyond" first entered the human mind: Does death really end all 1 Duty for duty's own sake, apart from fear of punishment or hope of reward, is of course the highest ideal; but in such moments as the present many a thoughtful mind will ask, in'the spirit if not the actual words of one of the greatest poets of the Victorian age—

If tho wages of virtue be dust, Would she havo the heart to endure for the life of the worm or the fly? Sho desires no isles of the blest, no quiet

seats of tho just, To rest in a golden grove, ot to bask in a summer sky: Give her tho wages of going on, and

not to dio. Whether true or a delusion, it is certainly ennobling to feel with a recent writer, who is a keen critic of some popular belief on the subject, that our personal life has a meaning and a value that are eternal; and most people will sympathise with PeoiUssob Sedqwick's statement that "it is rather from a disinterested aversion to a nniverse so irrationally constituted that >!the wages of virtue should be dust than from any private reckoning about his own wages" that the good man clings to the idea of immortality. It is folly ,to ask for logical demonstration in connection with a question of this nature. It is very doubtful whether by any strictly logical process a man; can prove his own existence or, tho existence of a world external to bis own mind, and the tendency of modern thought is to place more reliance on the instinctive beliefs of mankind and less on mere logical reasoning. The new school of philosophers tell us that what works is true, and they would argue that belief in- immortality is useful, if not irreplaceable, for the development of somo very important and persistent human faculties. What more, they would ask, do we need in order to call it true? If truth is, in the last analysis (as one writer puts it), that which is, that which continues, and that -which engenders; then belief in a future life is quite as true as belief in natural beings and forces. -Or if, as Buckle argues, the deep conviction that all is not really over at death, that something remains behind which the eye of reason cannot see, but on which the eye of affection is fixed— if this is a delusion, we must believe that the 'purest and noblest elements of our nature conspire to deceive us. Such considerations may not satisfy the intellectual faculties, but the instinctive belief of a man's whole personality is often more convincing than any formal argument, and modern thought is getting back to the point of view so finely expressed by Pascal in the memorable words: "The heart has its reasons, which the reason does not know. . . . We know the

truth not only by the reason, but also by the heart."