“But if the attainment of Heaven be no true motive for the pursuit of Virtue, surely I may be held excused from denouncing that practice of holding out the fear of Hell wherewith many fill up the measure of moral degradation? Here it is vain to suppose that the fear is that of the immortality of sin and banishment from God; as we are sometimes told the hope of Heaven is that of an immortality of Virtue and union with Him. The mind which sinks to the debasement of any Fear is already below the level at which sin and estrangement are terrors. It is his weakness of will which alone hinders the Prodigal from saying, ‘I will arise and go to my Father,’ and unless we can strengthen that Will by some different motive, it is idle to threaten him with its own persistence.
“Returning from the contemplation of the lowness of aim common to all the forms of Eudaimonism, how magnificent seems the grand and holy doctrine of true Intuitive Morality? Do Right for the Right’s own sake: Love God and Goodness because they are Good! The soul seems to awake from death at such archangel’s call as this, and mortal man puts on his rightful immortality. The prodigal grovels no longer, seeking for Happiness amid the husks of pleasure; but, ‘coming to himself,’ he arises and goes to his Father, heedless if it be but as the lowest of His servants he may yet dwell beneath that Father’s smile. Hope and fear for this life or the next, mercenary bargainings, and labour of eye-service, all are at end. He is a Freeman, and free shall be the oblation of his soul and body, the reasonable, holy, and acceptable sacrifice.
“O Living Soul! wilt thou follow that mighty hand, and obey that summons of the trumpet? Perchance thou hast reached life’s solemn noon, and with the bright hues of thy morning have faded away the beautiful aspirations of thy youth. Doubtless thou hast often struggled for the Right; but, weary with frequent overthrows, thou criest, ‘This also is vanity.’ But think again, O Soul, whose sun shall never set! Have no poor and selfish ambitions mingled with those struggles and made them vanity? Have no theologic dogmas from which thy maturer reason revolts, been blended with thy purer principle? Hast thou nourished no extravagant hope of becoming suddenly sinless, or of heaping up with an hour’s labour a mountain of benefits on thy race? Surely some mistake like these lies at the root of all moral discouragement. But mark:—
“Pure morals forbid all base and selfish motives—all happiness-seeking, fame-seeking, love-seeking—in this world or the next, as motives of Virtue. Pure Morals rest not on any traditional dogma, not on history, on philology, on criticism, but on those intuitions, clear as the axioms of geometry, which thine own soul finds in its depths, and knows to be necessary truths, which, short of madness, it cannot disbelieve.
“Pure Morals offer no panacea to cure in a moment all the diseases of the human heart, and transform the sinner into the saint. They teach that the passions, which are the machinery of our moral life, are not to be miraculously annihilated, but by slow and unwearying endeavour to be brought into obedience to the Holy Will; while to fall and rise again many a time in the path of virtue is the inevitable lot of every pilgrim therein.... Our hearts burn within us when for a moment the vision rises before our sight of what we might make our life even here upon earth. Faintly can any words picture that vision!
“A life of Benevolence, in which every word of our lips, every work of our hands, had been a contribution to human virtue or human happiness; a life in which, ever wider and warmer through its three score years and ten had grown our pure, unwavering, Godlike Love, till we had spread the same philanthropy through a thousand hearts ere we passed away from earth to love yet better still our brethren in the sky.
“A life of Personal Virtue, in which every evil disposition had been trampled down, every noble sentiment called forth and strengthened; a life in which, leaving day by day further behind us the pollutions of sin, we had also ascended daily to fresh heights of purity, till self-conquest, unceasingly achieved, became continually more secure and more complete, and at last—
‘The lordly Will o’er its subject powers
Like a thronèd God prevailed,’