ks commands upon
them to turn from dallying ease and luxury, to sacrifice the
meaner inclinations, to gird themselves for an arduous race
through difficulties, to labor and aspire evermore towards the
highest and the best. They prefer to install in her stead
Aphrodite crowned with Paphian roses, her eyes aglow with the
light of misleading stars, her charms bewitching them with fatal
enchantments and melting them in softest joys. The pale face of
Death, with mournful eyes, lurks at the bottom of every winecup
and looks out from behind every garland; therefore brim the purple
beaker higher and hide the unwelcome intruder under more flowers.
We are a cunning mixture of sense and dust, and life is a fair but
swift opportunity. Make haste to get the utmost pleasure out of it
ere it has gone, scorning every pretended bond by which sour
ascetics would restrain you and turn your days into penitential
scourges. This gospel of the senses had a swarm of apostles in the
last century in France, when the chief gates of the cemetery in
Paris bore the inscription, "Death is an eternal sleep." It has
had more in Germany in this century; and voices of enervating
music are not wanting in our own literature to swell its siren
chorus.7 Perhaps the greatest prophet it has had was Heine, whose
pages reek with a fragrance of pleasure through which sighs, like
a fading wail from the solitary string of a deserted harp struck
by a lonesome breeze, the perpetual refrain of death! death!
death! His motto seems to be, "Quick! let me

7 Pierer, Universal Lexikon, dritte Auflage, Deutsche Literatur,
sect. 42. Schmidt, Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur im
neuntzehnten Jahrhundert, band iii: kap. i.: Das junge
Deutschland.

enjoy what there is; for I must die. Oh, the gusty relish of life!
Oh, the speechless mystery, the infinite reality, of death!" He
says himself, comparing the degradation of his later experience
with the soaring enthusiasm of his youth, "It is as if a star had
fallen from heaven upon a hillock of muck, and swine were gnawing
at it!"

These men think that the doctrine of a future life, like a great
magnet, has drawn the needle of human activity out of its true
direction; that the dominant tendency of the present age is, and
of right ought to be, towards the attainment of material well
being, in a total forgetfulness to lay up treasures in heaven. The
end is enjoyment; the obstacle, asceticism; the means to secure
the end, th