But now we reach the point where, it is to be presumed, the Atheist finds ground for his claim to superior disinterestedness. The Theist believes not only that goodness and justice are attributes of God, and that God has taught him to be good and just, but that God further holds what the old Schoolmen called the _Justitia Rectoria_ of the universe,--that he so ordains things as that, sooner or later, good will surely befall the good, and evil the evil. So much as this is included in the simplest elements of Theism. In its fuller development, Theism teaches more: namely, that God takes the interest of a Father in the moral welfare of his children; that he has created every human soul (and doubtless thousands of races of other intelligent beings) for the express purpose that each should attain, through the teaching and trials of existence, to virtue, and so enter into the supreme bliss of sympathy and communion with himself. Theism thus understood teaches that God is perpetually training each soul for that sublime end, inspiring it with light, answering its prayers for spiritual aid, punishing it for its errors, hedging up its way with thorns to prevent its wanderings, and finally certainly conducting it, through this life and perhaps many lives to come, to the holiness and blessedness for which it was made. The position of a Theist differs therefore essentially from that of an Atheist as regards the practice of virtue, inasmuch as the Atheist thinks he has no superhuman spectator or sympathizer; that the thoughts and feelings which awaken his conscience and move his heart do not originate in any mind out of his own; that the woes of his life bear with them no moral meaning of retribution or expiation; and finally that, whether he be a hero or a coward, a saint or a sinner, it will be all one, so far as himself is concerned, when the hour of his death has sounded. His actions may and will have important consequences to other men, but as regards his own destiny they can have no consequences at all; for the grave will receive everything that remains of him. The virtues he may have acquired with unutterable struggles will die away into nothingness, like the sound of a broken harp-string. He will neither rejoin his dead friends nor come into any fresh consciousness of God. Neither dead friends nor God have any existence; and a little sooner or later, as he may chance to be a more or less important person, he will be altogether forgotten, and no being in the universe will ever more remember that he once _was_.