of
Immortality seems to me to follow from it as a sort of corollary. If
any one on a calm review of the actual facts of the world's history can
suppose that such a world as ours could be the expression of the will
of a rational and moral Being without the assumption of a future life
for which this is a discipline or education or preparatory stage,
argument would be useless with him. Inveterate Optimism, like
inveterate Scepticism, admits of no refutation, but in most minds
produces no conviction. For those who are convinced that the world has
a rational end, and yet that life as we see it (taken by itself) cannot
be that end, the hypothesis {78} of Immortality becomes a necessary
deduction from their belief in God.

I would not disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future
life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward
and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral
level at which the belief--not in a vindictive, retributive, unending
torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls
prolonged after death--is without its value. At the same time it is a
mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious
motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of
personal reward, even of the least sensuous or material kind. Love of
goodness for its own sake is for the Theist identical with the love of
God. Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion to an idea;
and an ethical conception of God carries with it the idea of
Immortality.

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm
and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky;
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.[4]

Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, the postulate
without which most of us cannot {79} believe in God. Even for its own
sake it is of the highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality
gives a meaning to life even when it has lost all other meaning. 'It
is rather,' in the noble words of the late Professor Sidgwick, 'from a
disinterested aversion to an universe 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. And that