altar of holy passion. "Self,"
exclaims the fervid William Law, "is both atheist and idolater; atheist,
because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol." Even when
this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the
height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in martyrdom. "All
for love, or the world well lost," has been the motto of too many
tragedies to be doubted now. By the side of the ancient Roman or the
soldier of the French revolution, who through mere love of country
marched joyously to certain death from which he expected no waking, does
not the martyr compare unfavorably, who meets the same death, but does
so because he believes that thereby he secures endless and joyous life?
Is his love as real, as noble, as unselfish?

Even the resistless physical energy which the clear faith in the life
hereafter has so often imparted, becomes something uncongenial to the
ripened religious meditation. Such faith brings about mighty effects in
the arena of man's struggles, but it does so through a sort of
mechanical action. An ulterior purpose is ahead, to wit, the salvation
of the soul, and it may be regarded as one of the best established
principles of human effort that every business is better done, when it
is done for its own sake, out of liking for it, than for results
expected from it.

Of nothing is this more just than religion. Those blossoms of spiritual
perfection, the purified reason, the submissive will, the sanctifying
grace of abstract ideas, find no propitious airs amid the violent toil
for personal survival, whether that is to be among the mead jugs of
Valhalla, the dark-eyed houris of Paradise, or the "solemn troops and
sweet society" of Christian dreams. Unmindful of these, the saintly
psyche looks to nothing beyond truth; it asks no definite, still less
personal, end to which this truth is to be applied; to find it is to
love it, and to love it is enough.

The doctrine I here broach, is no strange one to Christian thought. To
be sure the exhortation, "Save your soul from Hell," was almost the sole
incentive to religion in the middle ages, and is still the burden of
most sermons. But St. Paul was quickened with a holier fire, that
consumed and swept away such a personal motive, when he wrote: "Yea, I
could wish that I myself were cast out from Christ as accursed, for the
sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh."[274-1] St.
Augustine reveals the touc