of the dead, our prayers
to meet them again, our unfathomed yearnings to know that they
still live and are happy, be stigmatized as mean and evil? Regard
for others as much as for ourselves prompts the eternal sigh. Nor
will Divinity ever condemn the feeling himself has awakened. It is
said that Xerxes, gazing once upon his gorgeous army of a million
men spread out below hire, sheathed in golden armor, white plumes
nodding, purple standards waving, martial horns blowing, wept as
he thought that in thirty years the entire host composing that
magnificent spectacle would be dead. To have gazed thoughtfully
upon such a sight with unmoved sensibilities would imply a much
more selfish and hard hearted egotist. So when a lonely
philanthropist from some meditative eminence looks down on the
human race, if, as the contemplation of their pathetic fading and
decay wounds his saddened heart, he heals and cheers it with the
faith of a glorious immortality for them all, who shall call him
selfish and sinful? To rest contented with the speedy night and
the infinite oblivion, wiping off all the unsolved sums from the
slate of existence with annihilation's remorseless sponge, that
would be the selfishness and the cruelty.

When that sweet asp, death, fastens on our vein of earthly life,
we all feel, like the dying queen of Egypt, that we have "immortal
longings" in us. Since the soul thus holds by a pertinacious
instinct to the eternity of her own existence, it is more rational
to conclude that this is a pledge of her indestructible
personality, God's impregnable defence reared around the citadel
of her being, than to consider it the artificial rampart flung up
by an insurgent egotism. In like manner, it is a misrepresentation
of the facts to assert the culpable selfishness of the faith in a
future life as a demanded reward for fidelity and merit here. No
one demands immortality as pay for acquired desert. It is modestly
looked for as a free boon from the God who freely gave the present
and who has by a thousand symbolic prophecies promised it. Richter
says, with great insight, "We desire immortality not as the reward
of virtue, but as its continuance. Virtue can no more be rewarded
than joy can: it is its own reward." Kant says, "Immortality has
been left so uncertain in order that pure freedom of choice, and
no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations." "But," Jean Paul
keenly replies, "as we have now discovered this intention, i