ough my union and fellowship with the men and women I _have_ seen, I
feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have _not_ seen; and
I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that
their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labor for ends
which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. It is possible that
you may prefer to 'live the brute,' to sell your country, or to slay your
father, if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from the
criminal laws of another world; but even if I could conceive no motive
but my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desire, I
have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide are the
direct way to happiness and comfort on earth. And I should say, that if
you feel no motive to common morality but your fear of a criminal bar in
heaven, you are decidedly a man for the police on earth to keep their eye
upon, since it is matter of world-old experience that fear of distant
consequences is a very insufficient barrier against the rush of immediate
desire. Fear of consequences is only one form of egoism, which will
hardly stand against half a dozen other forms of egoism bearing down upon
it. And in opposition to your theory that a belief in immortality is the
only source of virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is
dependent on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not
truly moral--is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained
the higher development of sympathy. In proportion as a man would care
less for the rights and welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a
future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of
justice and benevolence; as the musician who would care less to play a
sonata of Beethoven's finely in solitude than in public, where he was to
be paid for it, is wanting in genuine enthusiasm for music."

Thus far might answer the man who "denies himself immortal;" and,
allowing for that deficient recognition of the finer and more indirect
influences exercised by the idea of immortality which might be expected
from one who took up a dogmatic position on such a subject, we think he
would have given a sufficient reply to Young and other theological
advocates who, like him, pique themselves on the loftiness of their
doctrine when they maintain that "virtue with immortality expires." We
may admit, indeed, that if the better part of