prejudices, to make people accept their dogma because frightened at the seeming consequences of rejecting it. It is necessary to expose the fearful fallacies which have been employed in this way, and which are yet extensively used for the same purpose. “Even a Christian writer usually so judicious as Andrews Norton has said: ‘Without the belief in personal immortality there can be no religion; for what can any truths of religion concern the feelings and the conduct of beings whose existence is limited to a few years in this world?’ Such a statement from such a quarter is astonishing. Surely the sentiments natural to a person or incumbent upon him do not depend on the _duration_ of his being, but on the character, endowments, and relations of his being. The hypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroy God, does not destroy man’s dependence on God for all his privileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence of the universe, does not alter the native sovereignty of holiness, does not quench our living reason, imagination, or sensibility, while they last. The soul’s gratitude, wonder, love, and worship, are just as right and instinctive as before. If our experience on earth, before the phenomena of the visible creation and in conscious communion with the emblemed attributes of God, does not cause us to kneel in humility and to adore in awe, then it may be doubted if Heaven or hell will ever persuade us to any sincerity in such acts. The simple prolongation of our being does not add to its qualitative contents, cannot increase the kinds of our capacity or the number of our duties. Chalmers utters an injurious error in saying as he does, ‘If there be no future life, the moral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and the Author of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom, and authority and honor.’ The creative Sovereign of fifty million firmaments of worlds, ‘stripped of his wisdom and authority and honor,’ because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal! Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial of immortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relations and ingredients of our nature and experience. If religion is fitted for us on the former supposition, it is also on the latter. To any dependent intelligence blessed with our human susceptibilities, reverential love and submission are as obligatory, natural and becoming on the brink of annihilation as on the verge of immortality. Rebellious egotism makes all the difference. Truth is truth, whatever it be. Religion is the meek submission of self-will to God’s will. That is a duty not to be escaped, no matter what the future reserves or excludes for us.