Why do people desire health? Certainly not for any postmortem rewards. The health of the body is cultivated for its own beautiful sake. Health is joy, it is power, it is beauty, it is strength. Are not these enough to make it sacred to all men? But if the health of the body does not need the prop of future rewards to commend itself to us, what good reason have we to think that morality, which is the health of the mind, is a wretched investment if there be no other life? Morality is temperance. How can our ideas about the unseen world change the nature of temperance so that instead of being a virtue it would become a stupid and irksome restraint? If it is good to be temperate in the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, or in the gratification of desire, why should our speculations about the hereafter alter our attitude toward the value of temperance and self-control in everything? God or no God, a future life or no future life, is not temperance better than intemperance? To ask why a man should practice temperance even if it be granted that it is better than intemperance is to go back to the terrible charge that man is by nature a monster, and that he will not behave well unless he is promised enormous returns in the shape of eternal rewards--palaces, mansions, crowns, thrones, in the next world. Well, if the preachers are right it is a serious question whether so depraved a creature as man deserves to be saved at all. To have created so contemptible a creature was a great enough blunder, but think of perpetuating his race forever and ever! Let us see how much truth there is in the preacher's estimate of human nature. Take the example of a father who is devoted to his little motherless girl. He lives for her, cares for her, protects her, and provides for her future that she may feel his blessing long after he has passed away. Will this father be less a father without the belief in future rewards? But to love and care for one's child is only natural morality, replies the clergyman. Of course it is. And that is why it is genuine, sweet, spontaneous, and untainted with expectations of a reward. It never enters his mind that he is going to be paid big wages for being good to his motherless child. He loved her, and that was heaven enough for him. It is artificial morality that pines for rewards and sickens and dies when the expected reward is questioned. If there is no future glory, who will abstain from meat on Friday, or sprinkle his children, or read the Bible or listen to sermons? But the natural virtues will spring up like flowers in the human soil. Men and women will love, will sacrifice, will perform heroic deeds of devotion, whatever may be their theories concerning the hereafter.