onformity, without dictating terms.
Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert's dying flower, "Thanks to
day for all the favors I have received from sun and stream and
earth and sky, for all the gifts from men and God which have made
my little life an ornament and a bliss. Heaven, stretch out thine
azure tent while my faded one is sinking here. Joyous spring tide,
roll on through ages yet to come, in which fresh generations shall
rise and be glad. Farewell all! Content to have had my turn, I now
fall asleep, without a murmur or a sigh." Surely the mournful
nobility of such a strain of sentiment is preferable by much to
the selfish terror of that unquestioning belief which in the
Middle Age depicted the chase of the soul by Satan, on the columns
and doors of the churches, under the symbol of a deer pursued by a
hunter and hounds; and which has in later times produced in
thousands the feeling thus terribly expressed by Bunyan, "I
blessed the condition of the dog and toad because they had no soul
to perish under the everlasting weight of hell!"

Sight of truth, with devout and loving submission to it, is an
achievement whose nobleness outweighs its sorrow, even if the
gazer foresee his own destruction.

It is not our intention in these words to cast doubt on the
immortality of the soul, or to depreciate the value of a belief in
it. We desire to vindicate morality and religion from the
unwitting attacks made on them by many self styled Christian
writers in their exaggeration of the practical importance of such
a faith. The qualitative contents of human nature have nothing to
do with its quantitative contents: our duties rest not on the
length, but on the faculties and relations, of our existence. Make
the life of a dog endless, he has only the capacity of a dog; make
the life of a man finite, still, within its limits, he has the
psychological functions of humanity. Faith in immortality may
enlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and noble conduct; it
does not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale and
contract those motives; it does not take them away.

Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude
over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a
word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who
weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith not
knowledge that the spirit is without terminus or rest. The
faithful truth hunter, in dying,