“What though Decay’s shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor degrade us into beasts.

“The future life, outside of the realm of faith, to an earnest and independent inquirer, and considered as a scientific question, lies in a painted mist of uncertainty. There is room for hope, and there is room for doubt. The wavering evidences in some moods preponderate on that side, in other moods, on this side. Meanwhile it is clear that, while he lives here, the best thing he can do is to cherish a devout spirit, cultivate a noble character, lead a pure and useful life in the service of wisdom, humanity, and God, and finally, when the appointed time arrives, meet the issue with reverential and affectionate conformity, without dictating terms. Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert’s dying flower, ‘Thanks to-day for all the favors I have received from sun and stream and earth and sky,--for all the gifts from men and God which have made my little life an ornament and a bliss. Heaven, stretch out thine azure tent while my faded one is sinking here. Joyous spring-tide, roll on through ages yet to come, in which fresh generations shall rise and be glad. Farewell all! Content to have had my turn, I now fall asleep, without a murmur or a sigh.’ Surely the mournful nobility of such a strain of sentiment is preferable by much to the selfish terror of that unquestioning belief which in the Middle Age depicted the chase of the soul by Satan, on the columns and doors of the churches, under the symbol of a deer pursued by a hunter and hounds; and which has in later times produced in thousands the feeling thus terribly expressed by Bunyan, ‘I blessed the condition of the dog and toad because they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of hell!’

“Sight of truth, with devout and loving submission to it, is an achievement whose nobleness outweighs its sorrow, even if the gazer foresee his own destruction.

“It is not our intention in these words to cast doubt on the immortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief in it. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from the unwitting attacks made on them by many self-styled Christian writers in their exaggeration of the practical importance of such a faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing to do with its quantitative contents: our duties rest not on the length, but on the faculties and relations, of our existence. Make the life of a dog endless, he has only the capacity of a dog; make the life of a man finite, still, within its limits, he has the psychological functions of humanity. Faith in immortality may enlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and noble conduct; it does not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale and contract those motives; it does not take them away.

“Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith--not knowledge--that the spirit is without terminus or rest. The faithful truth-hunter, in dying, finds not a covert, but a better trail. Yet the saintliness of the intellect is to be purged from prejudice and self-will. With God we are not to prescribe conditions. The thought that all high virtue and piety must die with the abandonment of belief in immortality is as pernicious and dangerous as it is shallow, vulgar, and unchristian. The view is obviously gaining prevalence among scientific and philosophical thinkers, that life is the specialization of the universal in the individual, death the restoration of the individual to the whole. This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionably increase. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture to shift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of God to a precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The sole safety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of law with disinterested conformity.”--Doctrine of a Future Life, pp. 652-661.

INDEX OF AUTHORS QUOTED.