Oderit curare, et amara lento
Temperet risu.’[452]
In the absence of religious faith, this is true philosophy. If this life were the limit of our being, its pleasures and pains would be the only objects of our concern. Nothing would be virtuous which tended not to the attainment and communication of those limited and perishing pleasures we might here partake; nothing morally evil, but what lessened our own capacity for enjoying them, or tended to prevent others from sharing them with us. There would be no sphere for the exercise of those powers, no object for those capacities of happiness, that belong to the imperishable part of our nature. There would be nothing to prompt one to great sacrifices or acts of moral heroism; for these have their source in the consciousness of immortality, in a sense of our connexion with the infinite, our look forward to good for ourselves and others beyond the limits of life. Earthly motives afford no soil in which the nobler virtues can strike their roots. It is true that the ancients, particularly the ancient philosophers, were not without the influence of truly religious conceptions; and, under almost any forms of opinion, the better nature of man will of itself occasionally break out into exhibitions of excellence. But the religious sentiment being so weak and perverted among the ancient poets, we find little in their works that can be regarded as morally noble, and scarcely an indistinct recognition of those deep feelings and unearthly virtues which have their source in our spiritual nature. The same remark is almost equally applicable to a large proportion of the modern poets: for true religion has been little understood or felt by them. Where, in any age preceding our own, may we hope to find such expressions of sentiment as in the following verses from Mrs Hemans’ ‘Vaudois Wife?’[453]
‘But calm thee! Let the thought of death
A solemn peace restore;
The voice that must be silent soon,
Would speak to thee once more:
That thou may’st bear its blessing on
Through years of after life,—
A token of consoling love,