He must be the basest of men who would decline to do any sublime act of virtue because he did not expect to enjoy the consequences of it eternally. Is there no motive for the preservation of health because it cannot be an everlasting possession? Since we cannot eat sweet and wholesome food forever, shall we therefore at once saturate our stomachs with nauseating poisons? “If all experienced good and evil wholly terminate for us when we die, still, every intrinsic reason which, on the supposition of immortality, makes wisdom better than folly, industry better than sloth, righteousness better than iniquity, benevolence and purity better than hatred and corruption, also makes them equally preferable while they last. Even if the philosopher and the idiot, the religious philanthropist and the brutal pirate, did die alike, who would not rather live like the sage and the saint than like the fool and the felon? Shall Heaven be held before man simply as a piece of meat before a hungry dog to make him jump well? It is a shocking perversion of the grandest doctrine of faith. Let the theory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, our perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly to every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving abyss. But some one may say, ‘If I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?’ It advantageth you everything _until you are dead_, although there be nothing afterwards. As long as you live is it not glory and reward enough _to have conquered_ the beasts at Ephesus? This is sufficient reply to the unbelieving flouters at the moral law. And, as an unanswerable refutation of the feeble whine of sentimentality that without immortal endurance nothing is worthy our affection, let great Shakespeare advance, with his matchless depth of bold insight reversing the conclusion, and pronouncing, in tones of cordial solidity,-- ‘This, thou perceivest, will make thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’ “What though Decay’s shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor degrade us into beasts.