So is your sort of search; you'll find
What you desire, and that's to be
A Christian,
said Robert Browning in Christmas Eve and Easter Day.
In his Inferno Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without movement, without life (Inferno, x., 10-15).
What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could not desire? In the sixth book of his Æneid (426-429) the gentle Virgil makes us hear the plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep upon the threshold of Hades,
Continuo àuditæ voces, vagitus et ingens,
Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo,
unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' breasts, a dark day had cut off and drowned in bitter death—
Quos dulcis vitæ exsortes et at ubere raptos