those who now read them. How it can be the opinion
of any one who has not some hypothesis to serve, is to me a mystery.
Meanwhile Mr. Newman himself at least gives some notable passages to
the contrary, though he chooses to call them only personal aspirations.
Think of the absurdity, my good friend, of supposing that Job, David,
Isaiah, failed to realize a doctrine (imperfectly it may be) which, as
you truly affirm, has, in some shape or other, animated all forms of
religion! that these brightest specimens of 'spiritual religion' in
the ancient world somehow missed what many of the lowest savages have
managed to stumble upon!"

"Well," he replied, "but, after all, he who loves God without any
thought of heaven must surely be more unselfish than he who hopes
for it."

I laughed,--for I could not help it.

"Unhappy Paul!" interjected Harrington, who had again entered the
library; "unhappy Paul! Burdened with the hopes of immortality; what an
impediment he must have found it in his Christian course! I wonder he
did not throw aside 'this weight, which so easily beset him.' Pity
that when he became a Christian, and ceased to be a Pharisee, he did
not, like so many 'spiritual' Christians of our day, know that, when
he became a Christian, he might still remain in one of the Jewish
sects, and turn Sadducee."

"Be it so," said Fellowes, "a Christian Sadducee, caeteris partibus,
might perhaps be a more virtuous man having no hopes of heaven by
which he can possibly be bribed."

"Religious love and hope," said I, "will with difficulty exist in
such an atmosphere as you create. It is a sublime altitude, doubtless,
but no ordinary 'spiritual' beings can breathe that rarefied air. It
is for the honor of Shaftesbury and some few other Deists, that they
aspired to this transcendental virtue! You are imitating them. I fear
you will not be more successful. Once leave a man to conclude, or even
to suspect, that he and his cat end together, and, if a bad man, he
will gladly accept a release from every claim but that of his passions
and appetites (the effects being more or less philosophically calculated
according to his intellectual power); while the best man would be
liable to contemplate God and religion with a depressed and faltering
heart. He would be apt to lose all energy; he would feel it impossible
to repress doubts of the infinite wisdom and benignity of Him (whatever
he might think of His power) who had given him the soul o