the brilliant circles of Weimar,
will at last meet the same fate in the dusty grasp of death; yet,
while they live, one is an ape, the other is a man. And the
differences of capacity and of duty are numberless and immense.
The statement is enough: argument would be ridiculous. The words
of an audacious French preacher are yet more shocking than those
of the English nobleman. It is hard to believe they could be
uttered in good faith. Says Massillon, in his famous declamation
on immortality, "If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of
charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are
but empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty.

5 Genie du Christianisme, partie ii. livre vi. chap. 3.

6 Ch. ix. sect. 10.

If retribution terminate with the grave, morality is a mere
chimera, a bugbear of human invention." 7 What debauched
unbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? Its
utter barelessness, as a single illustration may show, is obvious
at a glance. As the sciences of algebra and geometry, the
relations of numbers and bodies, are true for the material world
although they may be lost sight of when time and space are
transcended in some higher state, so the science of ethics, the
relations of nobler and baser, of right and wrong, the manifold
grades and qualities of actions and motives, are true for human
nature and experience in this life even if men perish in the
grave. However soon certain facts are to end, while they endure
they are as they are. In a moment of carelessness, by some strange
slip of the mind, showing, perhaps, how tenaciously rooted are the
common prejudice and falsehood on this subject, even so bold and
fresh a thinker as Theodore Parker has contradicted his own
philosophy by declaring, "If to morrow I perish utterly, then my
fathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my bread
corn is grown. I shall care nothing for the generations of
mankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality will
vanish." 8 Ah, man reveres his fathers and loves to act nobly, not
because he is to live forever, but because he is a man. And,
though all the summer hopes of escaping the grave were taken from
human life, choicest and tenderest virtues might still flourish,
as it is said the German crossbill pairs and broods in the dead of
winter. The martyr's sacrifice and the voluptuary's indulgence are
very different things to day, if they do both cease to mo