"Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
What'er his boast, has told me he's a knave.
His duty 'tis to love himself alone,
Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles."

Her comments on these lines of Young's are full of interest, in view of her
subsequent teachings, and they open an insight into her tendencies of mind
very helpful to those who would understand her fully. Her interest in all
that is human, her craving for a more perfect development of human sympathy
and co-operation, are very clearly to be seen.

We may admit that if the better part of 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 we 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 dre