ed of his wisdom and
authority and honor." 4 The creative Sovereign of fifty million
firmaments of worlds "stripped of his wisdom and authority and
honor" because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal!
Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial of
immortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relations
and ingredients of our nature and experience. If religion is
fitted for us on the former supposition, it is also on the latter.
To any dependent intelligence blessed with our human susceptibilities,
reverential love and submission are as obligatory, natural, and
becoming on the brink of annihilation as on the verge of immortality.

Rebellious egotism makes all the difference. Truth is truth,
whatever it be. Religion is the meek submission of self will to
God's will. That is a duty not to be escaped, no matter what the
future reserves or excludes for us.

Another sophism almost universally accepted needs to be shown.
Man, it is said, has no interest in a future life if not conscious
in it of the past. If, on exchange of worlds, man loses his
memory, he virtually ceases to exist, and might just as well be
annihilated. A future life with perfect oblivion of the present is
no life at all for us. Is not this style of thought the most
provincial egotism, the utter absence of all generous thought and
sympathy unselfishly grasping the absolute boons of being? It is a
shallow error, too, even on the grounds of selfishness itself. In
any point of view the difference is diametric and immense between
a happy being in an eternal present, unconscious of the past, and
no being at all. Suppose a man thirty years of age were offered
his choice to die this moment, or to live fifty years longer of
unalloyed success and happiness, only with a complete
forgetfulness of all that has happened up to this moment. He would
not hesitate to grasp the gift, however much he regretted the
condition.

3 Tracts concerning Christianity, p. 307.

4 Bridgewater Treatise, part ii. ch. 10, sect. 15.

It has often been argued that with the denial of a retributive
life beyond the grave all restraints are taken off from the
passions, free course given to every impulse. Chateaubriand says,
bluntly, "There can be no morality if there be no future state." 5
With displeasing coarseness, and with most reprehensible
recklessness of reasoning, Luther says, in contradiction to the
essential nobleness of his loving, heroi