finds not a covert, but a better
trail. Yet the saintliness of the intellect is to be purged from
prejudice and self will. With God we are not to prescribe
conditions. The thought that all high virtue and piety must die
with the abandonment of belief in immortality is as pernicious and
dangerous as it is shallow, vulgar, and unchristian. The view is
obviously gaining prevalence among scientific and philosophical
thinkers, that life is the specialization of the universal in the
individual, death the restoration of the individual to the whole.
This doubt as to a personal future life will unquestionably
increase. Let traditional teachers beware how they venture to
shift the moral law from its immutable basis in the will of God to
a precarious poise on the selfish hope and fear of man. The sole
safety, the ultimate desideratum, is perception of law with
disinterested conformity.

The influence of the doctrine of reward and punishment in a future
state, as a working motive for the observance of the moral law, is
enormously overestimated. The influence, as such a motive, of the
public opinion of mankind, with the legal and social sanctions, is
enormously underestimated. And the authority of a personal
perception of right is also most unbecomingly depreciated.
UNIVERSAL ORDER is the expression of the purposes of God, not as
arbitrarily chosen by his will and capriciously revealed in a
book, but as necessitated by his nature and embodied in his works.
The true basis of morality is universal order. The true end of
morality is life, the sum of moral laws being identical with the
sum of the conditions in accordance with which the fruition of the
functions of life can be secured with nearest approach to
perfectness, perpetuity, and universality. The true sanctions of
morality are the manifold forms in which consciousness of life is
heightened by harmony with universal order or lowered by discord
with it. The true law of moral sacrifice or resistance to
temptation is misrepresented by the common doctrine of heaven and
hell, which makes it consist in the renunciation of a present good
for the clutching of a future good, the voluntary suffering of a
small present evil to avoid the involuntary suffering of an
immense future evil. The true law of moral sacrifice is deeper,
purer, more comprehensive, than that. It expresses our duty, in
accordance with the requirements of universal order, to
subordinate the gratification of any part o