me nothing to die in order to save Raphael.
How is it possible that we can hold death to be a means of increasing the
sum of our enjoyments? How can the cessation of my being be reconciled
with the enriching of my being?

The assumption of immortality removes this contradiction; but it also
displaces the supreme gracefulness of this act of sacrifice. The
consideration of a future reward excludes love. There must be a virtue
which even without the belief in immortality, even at the peril of
annihilation, suffices to carry out this sacrifice.

I grant it is ennobling to the human soul to sacrifice present enjoyment
for a future eternal good; it is the noblest degree of egotism; but
egotism and love separate humanity into two very unlike races, whose
limits are never confounded.

Egotism erects its centre in itself; love places it out of itself in the
axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude.
Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot
in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the
ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the
throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the
following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent
whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

Think, O Raphael, of a truth that benefits the whole human race to remote
ages; add that this truth condemns its confessor to death; that this
truth can only be proved and believed if he dies. Conceive this man
gifted with the clear all-embracing and illumining eye of genius, with
the flaming torch of enthusiasm, with all the sublime adaptations for
love; let the grand ideal of this great effect be presented to his soul;
let him have only an obscure anticipation of all the happy beings he will
make; let the present and future crowd at the same time into his soul;
and then answer me,--does this man require to be referred to a future
life?

The sum of all these emotions will become confounded with his
personality; will flow together in his personal identity, his I or Ego.
The human race he is thinking of is himself. It is a body, in which his
life swims forgotten like a blood-drop, forgotten, but essential to the
welfare of the economy; and how quickly and readily he will shed it to
secure his health.

GOD.

All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are
two magnitudes which are quite al