virtue consists, as Young
appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in "meditation of our own
decease," and in "applause" of God in the style of a congratulatory
address to Her Majesty--all which has small relation to the well-being of
mankind on this earth--the motive to it must be gathered from something
that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But, for certain
other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to
untheological minds--a delicate sense of our neighbor's rights, an active
participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous
acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the
condition of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification
of our sympathetic nature--we think it of some importance to contend that
they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than
the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds.
Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in
the thought of human mortality--that we are here for a little while and
then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our
loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men--lies nearer the
fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence.
And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of _mortality_,
as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons
and religious novels prefer that men should be vicious in order that
there may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed
sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are
theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can
imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of
common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too great
a security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us it
is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful
life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is insured
in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of
science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into
them with undefinable limits.

To return to Young. We can often detect a man's deficiencies in what he
admires more clearly than in what he contemns--in the sentiments he
presents as laudable rather than in those he decries. And in Yo