e destruction of faith in immortality, so that man,
having nothing left but this world, will set himself to improve
and enjoy it. The monkish severity of a morbid and erroneous
theology, darkening the present and prescribing pain in it to
brighten the future and increase its pleasures, legitimates an
earnest reaction. But that reaction should be wise, measured by
truth. It should rectify, not demolish, the prevailing faith. For
the desired end is most likely to be reached by perceiving, not
that all terminates in the grave, but that the greatest enjoyment
flows from a self controlling devotedness to noble ends, that the
claims of another life are in perfect unison with the interests of
this life, that the lawful fruition of every function of human
nature, each lower faculty being subordinated to each higher one,
and the highest always reigning, at once yields the most immediate
pleasure and makes the completest preparation for the hereafter.
In the absence of the all irradiating sun of immortality, these
disbelievers, exulting over the pale taper of sensual pleasure,
remind us of a parcel of apes gathered around a cold glow worm and
rejoicing that they have found a fire in the damp, chilly night.

Besides the freethinkers, who will not yield to authority, but
insist upon standing apart from the crowd, and the satirists, who
level their shafts undiscriminatingly against what they perceive
associated with absurdity, and the worldlings, who prefer the
pleasures of time to the imaginarily contrasted goods of eternity,
there is a fourth class of men who oppose the doctrine of a
personal immortality as a protest against the burdensome miseries
of individuality. The Gipseys exclaimed to Borrow, "What! is it
not enough to have borne the wretchedness of this life, that we
must also endure another?" 8 A feeling of the necessary
limitations and suffering exposures of a finite form of being has
for untold ages harassed the great nations of the East with
painful unrest and wondrous longing. Pantheistic absorption to
lose all imprisoning bounds, and blend in that ecstatic flood of
Deity which, forever full, never ebbs on any coast has been
equally the metaphysical speculation, the imaginative dream, and
the passionate desire, of the Hindu mind. It is the basis and
motive of the most extensive disbelief of individual immortality
the world has known. "The violence of fruition in these foul
puddles of flesh and blood presently glutte