But, whatever may be its results as a system of moral training, Atheism, in its ultimate aspect, must be, to every religious man and woman who is driven to adopt it in later life, the setting of the sun which has warmed and brightened existence. We may _live_ in the twilight; but that which gave to prosperity its joy, to grief its comfort, to duty its delight, to love its sweetness, to solitude its charm, to all life its meaning and purpose, and to death its perfect consolation and support, is lost forever. There are no words to tell what that loss must be,--worst of all to those who are least conscious of it, and who have therefore lost with their faith in God those spiritual faculties in the exercise of which man has his higher being, and of which the pains are better worth than all the pleasures of earth. Atheism involves a far _worse_ loss to humanity than the exclusion of the belief in a Life after Death; but we can form no fair estimate of the deduction which our complacent Agnostics are prepared to make from the sum of human virtue and happiness, if we do not thoroughly realize what it is they are talking of when they tell us so cheerfully to abandon the hope of Immortality, as well as the belief in God, and that they are quite satisfied to do both. As far as each individual is personally concerned, such Hope is of course a very variable sentiment. There are those who say (as Miss Martineau mentions Mr. W. E. Forster saying to her), “I would rather be damned than annihilated.” And there are others who say, as she does herself, “I have had a very noble share of life, and I do not ask any more.” With the latter feeling _per se_, no one has a right to quarrel. To many, no doubt, especially persons of feeble bodily health or overstrained conscientiousness, the notion of final repose is more grateful than that of an immortality of activity. They feel in our day, as it would seem almost everybody did in more trying times, that it was the “rest which remaineth for the people of God,” beyond the storms of the world,--the “everlasting beds of rest” on which the weary may lie,--rather than our more modern notion of a Heaven of Progress, to which they aspire. There are Buddhists of the West as of the East, to whom, by some natural or acquired habit of mind, existence itself seems a burden; and they extend the _taedium vitae_ which they feel here by anticipation to any future state to which they could be transferred. With such persons as these, as I have just said, we have no claim to contend, even though we may think, with Tennyson, that, if they knew themselves better, they would recognize that, even in uttermost lassitude, “’Tis _life_ of which our veins are scant; O Life, not Death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, _that_ we want.”