Comte and Humboldt were thinkers too profound to be caught by the facile fallacy that the rapid changes in religious thought betoken the early abrogation of all creeds. Lessing, the philosophers of the French revolution, James Mill, Schopenhauer and others fell into this error. They were not wiser than the clown of Horace, who seated himself by the rushing stream, thinking it must soon run itself out-- Expectat rusticus dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum. Vain is the dream that man will ever reach the point when he will think no more of the gods. Dogmas may disappear, but religion will flourish; destroy the temple and sow it with salt, in a few days it rises again built for aye on the solid ground of man’s nature. So long as the race is upon earth, just so long will the religious sentiment continue to crave its appropriate food, and this at last is recognized even by those who estimate it at the lowest. “To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction,” observes Professor Tyndall in one of his best known addresses, “is the problem of problems at the present hour. It is vain to oppose it with a view to its extirpation.” The “general thaw of theological creeds,” which Spencer remarks upon, is no sign of the loss of interest in religious subjects, but the reverse. Coldness and languor are the premonitions of death, not strife and defence. But as the two moments of religious thought which I have now discussed have both reached their culmination in a substantial repudiation of religion, that which stimulates the religious sentiment to-day must be something different from either. This I take to be the _idea of personal survival_ after physical death, or, as it is generally called, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. This is the main dogma in the leading religions of the world to-day. “A God,” remarks Sir William Hamilton, speaking for the enlightened Christians of his generation, “is to us of practical interest, only inasmuch as he is the condition of our immortality.”[256-1] In his attractive work, _La Vie Eternelle_, whose large popularity shows it to express the prevailing views of modern Protestant thought, Ernest Naville takes pains to distinguish that Christianity is not a means of living a holy life so much as one of gaining a blessed hereafter. The promises of a life after death are numerous and distinct in the New Testament. Most of the recommendations of action and suffering in this world are based on the doctrine of compensation in the world to come.