g to the sappers and
miners in the army of the aliens!"

Another party of disbelievers have repudiated the whole conception
of a future state as a protest against the nonsense and cruelty
associated with it in the prevailing superstitions and dogmatisms
of their time. From the beginning of history in most nations, the
details of another existence and its conditions have been
furnished to the eager credulity of the people by the lawless
fancies of poets, the fine spinning brains of metaphysicians, and
the cold blooded calculations or hot headed zeal of sectarian
leaders. Of course a mass of absurdities would grow up around the
central germ and a multitude of horrors sprout forth. While the
common throng would unquestioningly receive all these ridiculous
and revolting particulars, they could not but provoke doubt,
satire, flat rejection, from the bolder and keener wits. So we
find it was in Greece. The fables about the under world the
ferriage over the Styx, poor Tantalus so torturingly mocked, the
daughters of Danaus drawing water in sieves all were accredited by
the general crowd on one extreme.5 On the other extreme the whole
scheme, root and branch, was flung away with scorn. The following
epitaph on an unbeliever is attributed to Callimachus. "O
Charidas, what are the things below? Vast darkness. And what the
returns to earth? A falsehood. And Pluto? A fable. We have
perished: this is my true speech to you; but, if you want the
flattering style, the Pellaan's great ox is in the shades."6
Meanwhile, a few judicious mediators, neither swallowing the whole
gross draught at a gulp, nor throwing the whole away with utter
disgust, drank through the strainer of a discriminative
interpretation. Because caprice, hatred, and favoritism are
embalmed in some perverse doctrine of future punishment is no
defensible reason for denying a righteous retribution. Because
heaven has been located on a hill top, and its sublime denizens
made to eat ambrosia and sometimes to fall out among themselves,
is no adequate reason for rejecting the idea of a heavenly life.
Puerilities of fancy and monstrosities of passion arbitrarily
connected with principles claiming to be eternal truths should be
carefully separated, and not the whole be despised and trodden on
together. From lack of this analysis and discrimination, in the
presence of abnormal excrescences and offensive secretions dislike
and disbelief have often flourished where, if judicia