to act nobly, not because he is to live forever, but because he is a man. And, though all the summer hopes of escaping the grave were taken from human life, choicest and tenderest virtues might still flourish, as it is said the German cross-bill pairs and broods in the dead of winter. The martyr’s sacrifice and the voluptuary’s indulgence are very different things to-day, if they do both cease to-morrow. No speed of advancing destruction can equalize Agamemnon and Thersites, Mansfield and Jeffries, or hustle together justice and fraud, cowardice and valor, purity and corruption, so that they will interchange qualities. There is an eternal and immutable morality, as whiteness is white, and blackness is black, and triangularity is triangular. And no severance of temporal ties or compression of spatial limits can ever cut the condign bonds of duty and annihilate the essential distinctions of good and evil, magnanimity and meanness, faithfulness and treachery. “Reducing our destiny from endless to definite cannot alter the inherent rightfulness and superiority of the claims of virtue. The most it can do is to lessen the strength of the motive, to give the great motor-nerve of our moral life a perceptible stroke of palsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a moral law? Richter reasons as follows: ‘Suppose a statue besouled for two days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus rob it of one day’s life, would you be guilty of murder? One can injure only an immortal.’ The sophistry appears when we rectify the conclusion thus: one can inflict an _immortal_ injury only on an immortal being. In fact, it would appear to be a greater wrong and injury, for the time, to destroy one day’s life of a man whose entire existence was confined to two days, than it would be to take away the same period from the bodily existence of one who immediately thereupon passes into a more exalted and eternal life. To the sufferer, the former would seem an immitigable calamity, the latter a benign furtherance; while, in the agent, the overt act is the same. This general moral problem has been more accurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is as follows: ‘The creatures of a summer’s day might be imagined, when they stand upon the threshold of their term of existence, to make inquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules of his government; for these are to be the law of their season of life and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortality would put the same questions with an intensity the greater from the greater stake.’