nd virtue will
be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper feeling either of
joy or sorrow, of desire or of repulsion, will lose its vigour, and
cease any more to be resonant.

It may be said indeed, and very truly, that under favourable
circumstances there must always remain a joy in the mere act of living,
in the exercising of the bodily functions, and in the exciting and
appeasing of the bodily appetites. Will anything, it may be asked, for
instance, rob the sunshine of its gladness, or deaden the vital
influence of a spring morning?--when the sky is a cloudless blue, and
the sea is like a wild hyacinth, when the pouring brooks seem to live as
they sparkle, and the early air amongst the woodlands has the breath in
it of unseen violets? All this, it is quite true, will be left to us;
this and a great deal more. This, however, is but one side of the
picture. If life has its own natural gladness which is expressed by
spring, it has also its own natural sadness which is expressed by
winter; and the worth of life, if this is all we trust to, will be as
various and as changing as the weather is. But this is not all. Even
this worth, such as it is, depends for us at present, in a large
measure, upon religion--not directly indeed, but indirectly. This life
of air, and nerve, and muscle, this buoyant consciousness of joyous and
abounding health, which seems so little to have connection with faiths
or theories, is for us impregnated with a life that is impregnated with
these, and thus their subtle influence pervades it everywhere. There is
no impulse from without which stirs or excites the senses, that does not
either bring to us, or send us on to, a something beyond itself. In each
of these pleasures that seems to us so simple, floats a swarm of hopes
and memories, like the gnats in a summer twilight. There is not a sight,
a sound, a smell, not a breath from sea or garden, that is not full of
them, and on which, busy and numberless, they are not wafted into us.
And each of these volatile presences brings the notions of right and
wrong with it; and it is these that make sensuous life tingle with so
strange and so elaborate an excitement. Indirectly then, though not
directly, the mere joy in the act of living will suffer from the loss of
religion, in the same manner, though perhaps not in the same degree, as
the other joys will. It will not lose its existence, but it will lose
zest. The fabric of its pleasures will of