t to the feelings by help
of prodigious assumptions, assumptions hastily adopted, highly
colored, and authoritatively urged. Upon the hypothesis that
annihilation is the fate of man, they are not satisfied merely to
take away from the present all the additional light, incentive,
and comfort imparted by the faith in a future existence, but they
arbitrarily remove all the alleviations and glories intrinsically
belonging to the scene, and paint it in the most horrible hues,
and set it in a frame of midnight. Thus, instead of calmly seeking
to elicit and recommend truth, they strive, by terrifying the
fancy and shocking the prejudices, to make people accept their
dogma because frightened at the seeming consequences of rejecting
it. It is necessary to expose the fearful fallacies which have
been employed in this way, and which are yet extensively used for
the same purpose.

Even a Christian writer usually so judicious as Andrews Norton has
said, "Without the belief in personal immortality there can be no
religion; for what can any truths of religion concern the feelings
and the conduct of beings whose existence is limited to a few
years in this world?" 3 Such a statement from such a quarter is
astonishing. Surely the sentiments natural to a person or
incumbent upon him do not depend on the duration of his being, but
on the character, endowments, and relations of his being. The
hypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroy
God, does not destroy man's dependence on God for all his
privileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence of
the universe, does not alter the native sovereignty of holiness,
does not quench our living reason, imagination, or sensibility,
while they last. The soul's gratitude, wonder, love, and worship
are just as right and instinctive as before. If our experience on
earth, before the phenomena of the visible creation and in
conscious communion with the emblemed attributes of God, does not
cause us to kneel in humility and to adore in awe, then it may be
doubted if heaven or hell will ever persuade us to any sincerity
in such acts. The simple prolongation of our being does not add to
its qualitative contents, cannot increase the kinds of our
capacity or the number of our duties. Chalmers utters an injurious
error in saying, as he does, "If there be no future life, the
moral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and the
Author of that constitution is stripp