c nature, "If you believe
in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God. Do,
then, as you like. For if no God, so no devil, no hell: as with a
fallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into lechery,
rascality, robbery, and murder." What bible of Moloch had he been
studying to form, for the time, so horrid a theory of the happiest
life, and to put so degrading an estimate upon human nature? Is
man's will a starved wolf only held back by the triple chain of
fear of death, Satan, and hell, from tearing forth with ravenous
bounds to flesh the fangs of his desires in bleeding virtue and
innocence? Does the greatest satisfaction man is capable of here,
the highest blessedness he can attain to, consist in drunkenness,
gluttony, dishonesty, violence, and impiety? If he had the
appetite of a tiger or a vulture, then, thus to wallow in the
offal of vice, dive into the carrion of sensuality, abandon
himself to revelling in carnivorous crime, might be his instinct
and his happiness. But by virtue of his humanity man loves his
fellows, enjoys the scenery of nature, takes delight in thought
and art, dilates with grand presentiments of glory and eternity,
mysteriously yearns after the hidden God. To a reasonable man and
no other is to be reasoned with on matters of truth and interest
the assumption of this brief season as all, will be a double
motive not to hasten and embitter its brevity by folly, excess,
and sin. If you are to be dead to morrow, for that very reason, in
God's name, do not, by gormandizing and guzzling, anticipate death
to day! The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not a
crouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying a
chasm of fire, but a high toned conscience of reason and honor,
perceiving that they are wrong and degradation, and spontaneously
loathing them.

Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assert
that unless there be a future life there is not only no check on
passion within, but no moral law without; every man is free to do
what he pleases, without blame or fault. Sir Kenelm Digby says, in
his "Treatise on Man's Soule," that "to predicate mortality in the
soule taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beastes, by
removing the ground of all difference in those thinges which are
to governe our actions." 6 This style of teaching is a very
mischievous absurdity. Admit, for a moment, that Jocko in the
woods of Brazil, and Schiller in