"I answer, that Mr. Newman too often speaks as if his individual impressions were to be taken for demonstration. That the Old Testament is unpervaded by any distinct traces of expectations of a future life is, at all events, not the opinion of the majority of men, many of them at least as capable of judging as Mr. Newman. It is not the opinion of the writers of the New Testament, that the Old Testament worthies were in this deplorable darkness; nor of the majority of the Jewish interpreters of their ancestors' writings; nor is it the impression of the great majority of those who now read them. How it can be the opinion of any one who has not some hypothesis to serve, is to me a mystery. Meanwhile Mr. Newman himself at least gives some notable passages to the contrary, though he chooses to call them only personal aspirations. Think of the absurdity, my good friend, of supposing that Job, David, Isaiah, failed to realize a doctrine (imperfectly it may be) which, as you truly affirm, has, in some shape or other, animated all forms of religion! that these brightest specimens of 'spiritual religion' in the ancient world somehow missed what many of the lowest savages have managed to stumble upon!" "Well," he replied, "but, after all, he who loves God without any thought of heaven must surely be more unselfish than he who hopes for it." I laughed,--for I could not help it. "Unhappy Paul!" interjected Harrington, who had again entered the library; "unhappy Paul! Burdened with the hopes of immortality; what an impediment he must have found it in his Christian course! I wonder he did not throw aside 'this weight, which so easily beset him.' Pity that when he became a Christian, and ceased to be a Pharisee, he did not, like so many 'spiritual' Christians of our day, know that, when he became a Christian, he might still remain in one of the Jewish sects, and turn Sadducee." "Be it so," said Fellowes, "a Christian Sadducee, caeteris partibus, might perhaps be a more virtuous man having no hopes of heaven by which he can possibly be bribed."