said he.

"Do you think that the happiness so derived and expected from day to
day has any sinister influence on the spiritual life of him who
feels it?"

"Of course, none."

"The contrary, perhaps?"

"I think so."

"Then neither need the expectation of an eternity of such blessedness
be any impediment. Again; let us come to facts; are not the declarations
of those whom Mr. Newman, however oddly, is willing to admit have been
the best specimens yet afforded of his true 'spiritual' man,--the
Doddridges, the Fletchers, the Baxters, and Paul especially,--full of
this sentiment? 'I desire to depart,' says Paul, 'and to be with Christ,
which is far better'; and similar selfish hopes inspired those excellent
men whose names still rise spontaneously to Mr. Newman's memory when
he would remind us of examples of his 'spiritual religion! Tell me, do
you not think Paul a 'spiritual' man?"

"Yes; with all his blunders," said Fellowes, "I do; and Mr. Newman's
writings are full of that admission."

"Very true. But then Paul is so selfish, you know, as to say, not merely
that the immortality of man is true, and that the 'light afflictions
which are but for a moment' are to be despised, because unworthy 'to be
compared with the glory to be revealed'; but that, if immortality be not
true, Christians, as deluded in such hopes, are of all men most miserable.
All this shows how powerfully the 'spiritual' Paul thought that the
doctrine of a future state operated and ought to operate on the mind of
a Christian; he never supposed that it could possibly have a negative,
still less a sinister influence.'

"But then, surely, what Mr. Newman says is true, that many of the saints
of the Old Testament exemplified all the heroism of a true faith, and
kindled with the ardors of a true devotion, in an ignorance of any such
state, and the absence of all such expectations."

"I answer, that Mr. Newman too often speaks as if his individual
impressions were to be taken for demonstration. That the Old Testament
is unpervaded by any distinct traces of expectations of a future life is,
at all events, not the opinion of the majority of men, many of them at
least as capable of judging as Mr. Newman. It is not the opinion of
the writers of the New Testament, that the Old Testament worthies were
in this deplorable darkness; nor of the majority of the Jewish
interpreters of their ancestors' writings; nor is it the impression of
the great majority of