r has been excluded--and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal
voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man,
when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and
sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out
of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere
selfish terror--it is not the dread of punishment only that appals
him--for, on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he
knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be
inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the
consciousness of offence that is unendurable--not the fear of consequent
suffering; it is the degradation of sin that his soul deplores--it is
the guilt which he would expiate, if possible, in torments; it is the
united sense of wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and remorse, that
renders a moment's pang of the conscience more terrible to the good than
years of any other punishment--and it thus is the power of the human
soul to render its whole life miserable by its very love of that virtue
which it has fatally violated. This is a passion which the soul could
not suffer--unless it were immortal. Reason, so powerful in the highest
minds, would escape from the vain delusion; but it is in the highest
minds where reason is most subjected to this awful power--they would
seek reconcilement with offended Heaven by the loss of all the happiness
that earth ever yielded--and would rejoice to pour out their heart's
blood if it could wipe away from the conscience the stain of one deep
transgression! These are not the high-wrought and delusive states of
mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of
the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's
sons--and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or
found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and
of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of
the wise and virtuous, without the obliteration from the tablets of
memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded.

It is melancholy to think that even in our own day, a philosopher, and
one of high name too, should have spoken slightingly of the universal
desire of immortality, as no argument at all in proof of it, because
arising inevitably from the regret with which all men must regard the
relinquishm