We are now prepared to notice the connection of these principles and facts with the facts revealed by Jesus Christ. The great and central fact thus made known is, that this life is only the beginning of an eternal existence, involving liability to dreadful dangers after death, and that, in estimating what is right and wise in character and conduct, we are to take into account these dangers, as regulating all questions of duty to ourselves and to our fellow-men. Of the nature of these dangers, we are informed that those who become righteous in this life will secure perpetuity of that character, and thus perfect and endless happiness; but that some will so fail that they never will attain this character, either in this life or the life to come, and so will forever reap the consequences of perpetuate and voluntary selfishness and sin. Still more momentous is the fact, that the number who are to be saved depends upon the self-denying labors of Christ’s followers, and that so dreadful are the hazards of the life to come, that all consideration of earthly enjoyment should be made subordinate to the great end of escape for ourselves and for our fellow-men, whom we are to love and care for as we do for ourselves. These facts and principles enable us clearly to comprehend the great law of rectitude and happiness given by God through Moses, and then more clearly explained and illustrated by Jesus Christ. All men are conscious of that _instinctive love_ which we share in common with the brutes. This consists in pleasurable emotions in view of certain persons or things which afford us pleasure, attended by a desire to please those who cause such enjoyment to ourselves, or to those we love. Thus the mother, whether human or brute, feels instinctive love to her offspring; and thus all men feel this instinctive love to those who confer pleasure on themselves. But Jesus Christ expressly discriminates, and explains that the great law of love (which, he says, it is the chief end of “the law and the prophets” to inculcate) is the _voluntary love_ which consists in choosing to do right—that is, to make happiness on the best and largest scale. For the law is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor _as thyself_.” Now self-love consists not in pleasurable emotions in our own agreeable qualities, but in an instinctive, an all-controlling desire to make self happy. This is the principle of mind which gives its true meaning to the great law of love, which in this aspect reads thus: Thou shalt choose, for the chief end or controlling purpose, to make happiness on the greatest scale by obeying God’s laws, and as the way to make him and all his creatures happy in the highest degree. And for this end you are to regard and treat the happiness of all in your reach as equal in value to your own. This exposition of the great law of love is verified repeatedly in the New Testament: “This is the love of God, that ye keep his commandments.”