lls. Are
there not souls "To whom dishonor's shadow is a substance More
terrible than death here and hereafter"?

He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublime
act of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequences
of it eternally. Is there no motive for the

10 Some discussion of this general subject is to be found in
Schaller, Leib nod Seele. kap. 5: Die Consequentzen des
Materialismus. And in Schopenhauer, Die beiden Grundprobleme der
Ethik.

11 Tuscul. Quast. lib. i. cap. 15.

preservation of health because it cannot be an everlasting
possession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever,
shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseating
poisons?

If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when we
die, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition of
immortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better than
sloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and purity
better than hatred and corruption, also makes them equally
preferable while they last. Even if the philosopher and the idiot,
the religious philanthropist and the brutal pirate, did die alike,
who would not rather live like the sage and the saint than like
the fool and the felon? Shall heaven be held before man simply as
a piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is a
shocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let the
theory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, our
perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our
sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly
to every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving
abyss. But some one may say, "If I have fought with beasts at
Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?" It
advantageth you every thing until you are dead, although there be
nothing afterwards. As long as you live, is it not glory and
reward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? This is
sufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law.
And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine of
sentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worth
our affection, let great Shakspeare advance, with his matchless
depth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and pronouncing,
in tones of cordial solidity,

"This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong, To love
that well which thou must leave ere long."

Wh