for that very reason, in God’s name, do not, by gormandizing and guzzling, anticipate death to-day! The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not a crouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying a chasm of fire, but a high-toned conscience of reason and honor, perceiving that they _are_ wrong and degradation, and spontaneously loathing them. “Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assert that unless there be a future life there is not only no check on passion within, but no moral law without: every man is free to do what he pleases, without blame or fault. Sir Kenelm Digby says, in his ‘Treatise on Man’s Soule,’ that ‘to predicate mortality in the soule taketh away all morality, and changeth men into beastes, by removing the ground of all difference in those thinges which are to governe our actions.’ This style of teaching is a very mischievous absurdity. Admit, for a moment, that Jocko in the woods of Brazil, and Schiller in the brilliant circles of Weimar, will at last meet the same fate in the dusty grasp of death; yet, while they live, one is an ape, the other is a man. And the differences of capacity and of duty are numberless and immense. The statement is enough: argument would be ridiculous. The words of an audacious French preacher are yet more shocking than those of the English nobleman. It is hard to believe they could be uttered in good faith. Says Massillon, in his famous declamation on immortality, ‘If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are but empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty. If retribution terminate with the grave, morality is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention.’ What debauched unbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? Its utter baselessness, as a single illustration may show, is obvious at a glance. As the sciences of algebra and geometry, the relations of numbers and bodies, are true for the material world although they may be lost sight of when time and space are transcended in some higher state, so the science of ethics, the relations of nobler and baser, of right and wrong, the manifold grades and qualities of actions and motives, are true for human nature and experience in this life even if men perish in the grave. However soon certain facts are to end, while they endure they are as they are. In a moment of carelessness, by some strange slip of the mind,--showing, perhaps, how tenaciously rooted are the common prejudice and falsehood on this subject,--even so bold and fresh a thinker as Theodore Parker has contradicted his own philosophy by declaring, ‘If to-morrow I perish utterly, then my fathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my bread-corn is grown. I shall care nothing for the generations of mankind. I shall know no higher law than passion. Morality will vanish.’ Ah, man reveres his fathers, and loves