of the consciousness which can enjoy happiness.” Why should looking to the permanence of consciousness and happiness make a man care less for the activities “which give others happiness”? Does A care less for B’s welfare because he would like to be alive to see it, or even alive at the antipodes at the same time? Moralists and divines of all ages have not overlooked the remoter consequences of our actions in rehearsing the motives in favor of virtue. But it is idle to attach to it, as applied to the bulk of mankind, more practical force than it possesses. In the first place, when such an observer of things as Shakspere could say that “The evil which men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones,” it is open to us all to doubt whether some of the very noblest achievements of human virtue have left any other mark than on the virtuous souls themselves, which (as we Theists think) enjoy even now in a higher existence their blessed inward consequences. The martyrs who perished unseen and unknown in the loathsome dungeons and amid the protracted tortures of the Inquisition in Spain, where the Reformation they would have established was absolutely extinguished and left no ray of light behind,--could these men cheer themselves under the awful strain of their agonies by a motive of such tenuity as the prospect of their “posthumous activities”? But admitting, for argument’s sake, that the motive would serve always to support the heroic order of virtues, would it likewise aid the still more important ones of every-day conduct? His own illustrations ought surely to have made Mr. Harrison pause before he assumed it. He speaks of Newton as “no longer destroying his great name by feeble theology or querulous pettiness,” of Shakspere as “the boon companion and retired playwright of Stratford,” of Dante as the “querulous refugee from Florence,” and of Milton as “the blind and stern old malignant of Bunhill Fields.” Now these are his chosen exemplars of the enormous “posthumous activity” which a man may exert, and certainly nobody now living can hope that he shall ever exercise one-tenth as much. But _their_ “pettiness” and “querulousness” and “boon companionship” and “sternness” in their lifetimes did not hinder, or even essentially detract from, their stupendous “posthumous activity.” Why, then, should lesser people have any scruple in being petty, querulous, or stern, or indulging in pot-companionship, or any other faults of temper or habit, on account of their little posthumous activities, whatever they may hope that these may prove?