on the doctrine of a
future life; for apart from the small effect the terrors of a hereafter
have on many sinners, as that doctrine is frequently rejected, social
interests suffer. And, finally, it is debasing and hurtful to religion
to make it a substitute for police magistracy.[267-1]

The highest religion would certainly enforce the purest morality; but it
is equally true that such a religion would enjoin much not approved by
the current opinions of the day. The spirit of the reform inaugurated by
Luther was a protest against the subjection of the religious sentiment
to a moral code. With the independence thus achieved, it came to be
recognized that to the full extent that morality is essential to
religion, it can be reached as well or better without a system of
rewards and punishments after death, than with one. Both religion and
morality stand higher, when a conception of an after life for this
purpose is dropped.

(2.) The recognition of the cosmical relations has also modified the
views of personal survival. The expansion of the notions of space and
time by the sciences of geology and astronomy has, as I before remarked,
done away with the ancient belief that the culminating catastrophe of
the universe will be the destruction of this world. An insignificant
satellite of a third rate sun, which, with the far grander suns whose
light we dimly discern at night, may all be swept away in some flurry of
"cosmical weather," that the formation or the dissolution of such a body
would be an event of any beyond the most insignificant importance, is
now known to be almost ridiculous. To assert that at the end of a few or
a few thousand years, on account of events transpiring on the surface of
this planet, the whole relationship of the universe will be altered, a
new heaven and a new earth be formed, and all therein be made
subservient to the joys of man, becomes an indication of an arrogance
which deserves to be called a symptom of insanity. Thus, much of the
teleology both of the individual and the race taught by the primitive
and medieval church undergoes serious alterations. The literal meaning
of the millennium, the New Jerusalem, and the reign of God on earth has
been practically discarded.

With the disappearance of the ancient opinion that the universe was
created for man, the sun to light him by day and the stars by night,
disappeared also the later thesis that the happiness or the education of
man was the aim of