on moral duty. A learned English judge was trying a case
one day, when there seemed some doubt about the religious condition of
one of the witnesses. The clerk of the court retired with him to
ascertain what it really was, and returned radiant almost immediately,
saying, 'All right, my lord. Knows he'll be damned--competent
witness--knows he'll be damned.' That is really the whole of the matter.
If a man is convinced that if he does wrong he will infallibly be
punished for it he has then 'a saving faith.' This, unfortunately, is
precisely the conviction which modern forms of religion produce hardly
anywhere. The Cubans are Catholics, and hear mass and go to confession;
but confession and the mass between them are enough for the consciences
of most of them, and those who think are under the influence of the
modern spirit, to which all things are doubtful. Some find comfort in
Mr. Herbert Spencer. Some regard Christianity as a myth or poem, which
had passed in unconscious good faith into the mind of mankind, and there
might have remained undisturbed as a beneficent superstition had not
Protestantism sprung up and insisted on flinging away everything which
was not literal and historical fact. Historical fact had really no more
to do with it than with the stories of Prometheus or the siege of Troy.
The end was that no bottom of fact could be found, and we were all set
drifting.

Notably too I observed among serious people there, what I have observed
in other places, the visible relief with which they begin to look
forward to extinction after death. When the authority is shaken on which
the belief in a future life rests, the question inevitably recurs. Men
used to pretend that the idea of annihilation was horrible to them; now
they regard the probability of it with calmness, if not with actual
satisfaction. One very interesting Cuban gentleman said to me that life
would be very tolerable if one was certain that death would be the end
of it. The theological alternatives were equally unattractive; Tartarus
was an eternity of misery, and the Elysian Fields an eternity of ennui.

There is affectation in the talk of men, and one never knows from what
they say exactly what is in their mind. I have often thought that the
real character of a people shows itself nowhere with more unconscious
completeness than in their cemeteries. Philosophise as we may, few of us
are deliberately insincere in the presence of death; and in the
arran