st in religious subjects, but the reverse.
Coldness and languor are the premonitions of death, not strife and
defence.

But as the two moments of religious thought which I have now discussed
have both reached their culmination in a substantial repudiation of
religion, that which stimulates the religious sentiment to-day must be
something different from either. This I take to be the _idea of personal
survival_ after physical death, or, as it is generally called, the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

This is the main dogma in the leading religions of the world to-day. "A
God," remarks Sir William Hamilton, speaking for the enlightened
Christians of his generation, "is to us of practical interest, only
inasmuch as he is the condition of our immortality."[256-1] In his
attractive work, _La Vie Eternelle_, whose large popularity shows it to
express the prevailing views of modern Protestant thought, Ernest
Naville takes pains to distinguish that Christianity is not a means of
living a holy life so much as one of gaining a blessed hereafter. The
promises of a life after death are numerous and distinct in the New
Testament. Most of the recommendations of action and suffering in this
world are based on the doctrine of compensation in the world to come.

Mohammed taught the same tenet with equal or even greater emphasis. In
one sura he says: "To whatever is evil may they be likened who believe
not in a future life;" and elsewhere: "As for the blessed ones--their
place is Paradise. There shall they dwell so long as the heavens and the
earth endure, enjoying the imperishable bounties of God. But as for
those who shall be consigned to misery, their place is the Fire. There
shall they abide so long as the heavens and the earth shall last, unless
God wills it otherwise."[256-2]

In Buddhism, as generally understood, the doctrine of a future life is
just as clear. Not only does the soul wander from one to another animal
body, but when it has completed its peregrinations and reaches its final
abode, it revels in all sorts of bliss. For the condition of Nirvana,
understood by philosophical Buddhists as that of the extinction of
desires even to the desire of life, and of the complete enlightenment of
the mind even to the recognition that existence itself is an illusion,
has no such meaning to the millions who profess themselves the followers
of the sage of Kapilavastu. They take it to be a material Paradise with
pleasures as r